V-Day | Philstar.com
V-Day, when the vaccines arrive, may not yet be Vaccination Day, unless the shots are transported straight to a COVID referral hospital where the first batch of health frontliners can finally get their jabs.
Thanks to the World Health Organization’s COVAX Facility for developing countries like ours, we’re assured of 44 million doses of vaccines that have already been vetted by the world’s SRAs or stringent regulatory authorities.
Some 9.2 million doses are expected to arrive by March and April, according to WHO country representative Rabindra Abeyasinghe. And the initial batch will be arriving this month, although the figures vary, from the 117,000 doses announced by the Department of Health up to one million. What we’re assured of is that the vaccines are from Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna, although Oxford-AstraZeneca has also been mentioned by the British embassy.
Even a million is a long way from the 10 million Pfizer doses that we were supposed to have received last month, worked out by the Department of Foreign Affairs with the US State Department. But no use crying over spilled milk (or a ball that slipped through butterfingers).
Another piece of good news: the first foreign company to get approval for late-stage clinical trials of its COVID vaccine in the Philippines will be starting the test possibly this week, and it’s Janssen Pharmaceuticals, the Belgian arm of US multinational giant Johnson & Johnson.
Being prone to severe allergies, I am inclined to wait for the Janssen shot to be available here. It requires only a single dose so I risk anaphylaxis only once.
Now that it looks certain that the first vaccines to be rolled out in our country will be the Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna jabs (and possibly AstraZeneca / Oxford), our problem could shift from vaccine hesitancy to jumping the inoculation queue.
There could be a spike in the number of politicians and other public officials offering to take their shots in public (together with their entire household, if possible) to overcome vaccine hesitancy.
They should be reminded that the hesitancy, as manifested in surveys and informal consultations done by local governments and research groups, is specifically toward vaccines made in China.
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We still need role models who will take the Chinese-made vaccines in public once the shots arrive.
And there is no doubt that they will still arrive; our government continues to negotiate with the Chinese vaccine makers, with strict confidentiality of course.
Even if we have been assured of 44 million Western vaccine doses under the COVAX Facility, that’s good for only 22 million people. We need to vaccinate at least 70 million people to achieve herd immunity. So we need 96 million additional doses. I don’t think Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca can supply all of those shots within the first three quarters of the year.
We may source vaccines from Janssen as well as US biotech firm Novavax, whose COVID vaccine has shown 89.3 percent efficacy. But again, supply availability is a problem as the world scrambles for vaccines. Everyone wants to finish vaccination programs ASAP so public health can improve and economic recovery can start.
Pressed for readily available supplies, with less stringent logistics requirements, the government will consider the vaccines made in China.
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Chinese drug makers Sinovac and Clover Biopharmaceuticals are also set to conduct clinical trials in the Philippines, within this month or in March. Filipinos’ aversion to Chinese vaccines, which will be paid for with public funds, could lead to wastage – something we can’t afford.
The government can launch an information campaign on the Chinese jabs. Pinoy resistance to the vaccines, however, runs deeper than insufficient or wrong information.
If the government wants to minimize its headache, it can instead negotiate for a substantial supply of the COVID vaccine made by Russia’s Gamaleya Institute. Unlike the Chinese, the Russians submitted their Sputnik V for peer review. And now the respected medical journal The Lancet has published a peer-reviewed study showing that the Russian vaccine has a high 91.6 percent efficacy.
This is where President Duterte’s admiration for his “idol” Vladimir Putin might com
Covid-19 US: NYC man in 7 s dies 25 minutes after getting vaccine | Daily Mail Online
An elderly man collapsed and died in New York City on Sunday morning shortly after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, officials revealed Monday.
The man, who was in his 70s, fell as he left Manhattan's Jacob Javits Convention Center just 25 minutes after receiving his shot, New York State Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker said in a statement.
On-site security and first responders raced to his side within seconds, but the man, who has not yet been named, was pronounced dead at a local hospital shortly afterward.
Over the weekend, Virginia minister Drene Keyes, 58, died less than a day after receiving a dose of the Pfizer vaccine at a clinic in Warsaw on Friday and falling ill.
Officials said they did not know her cause of death, of any underlying conditions Keyes might have had that could have contributed to it, and said there's no evidence to suggest her passing was tied to the vaccination.
Similarly to Sunday's incident in New York City, Keyes remained at the clinic for 15 minutes after the shot, as recommended, before returning to the clinic later that day.
She was rushed to VCU Health Tappahannock Hospital, where she died Saturday.
'Preliminary findings indicate that the cause of death was not anaphylaxis, but it will take several weeks for additional information to become available,' Warsaw police Chief Joan Kent said.
'We can confirm that the death occurred within hours of having received the vaccine, but that is not evidence of it being related. We are currently investigating and do not yet know the cause of death.'
Dr. Tony Leachon was live.
19 hrs ·
1. Updates on the variants 2. Vaccination of PH healthcare workers 3. Global and DOH updates
1. Updates on the variants 2.... - Dr. Tony Leachon
No serious symptoms means it's working...but the virus being able to still infect is worrying...
Coronavirus digest: German nursing home sees outbreak after vaccines | News | DW | 8. 2.2 21
Fourteen residents at a German nursing home have tested positive despite receiving two vaccine doses. Markus Söder has warned against lifting Germany's lockdown too soon. All the latest COVID news.
The outbreak came despite all of its residents already receiving two doses of the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine, with their last shot on January 25.
None of them showed any serious symptoms associated with COVID-19. It is unclear exactly how and when the residents became infected, officials said.
Naga alcohol pa rin kayo ng pera?
Sent from my SM-N960F using Tapatalk
hindi ba masama sa paper bills yan?
paper bills will fade pag inalcohol
CanSino vaccine... Single dose like the J&J
China’s CanSino Covid Vaccine Shows 65.7% Efficacy
I think copper has the same properties as silver that make it anti bacterial ( not anti virus ha). Kaya some appliances advertise silver nano technology. However, there is indeed a hole at the bottom towards the chin area so it would be easier for you to breath, but then this is where air could also go in.
How mutations are occuring...
Coronavirus Mutations In Boston Patient May Hold Clues To Variant Origins : Goats and Soda : NPR
Back in the spring of last year, a 45-year-old man went to the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston because of a coronavirus infection. Doctors treated him with steroids and discharged him five days later.
But the infection never went away — for 154 days. "He was readmitted to the hospital several times over the subsequent five months for recurrence of his COVID-19 infection and severe pneumonia," says infectious disease doctor Jonathan Li at Harvard Medical School, who helped treat the man.
"So this is an extraordinary individual," Li says.
So extraordinary in fact that this man's case is offering scientists surprising clues about where the new coronavirus variants emerged and why they're causing explosive outbreaks on three continents.
To be clear here, the man wasn't what doctors call a "long hauler," or a person who clears a coronavirus infection and then continues to have health problems for months. This man had living, growing virus in his body for five months, Li says. The same infection lasted for five months.
"That is one of the remarkable aspects of this case," Li says. "In fact, he was highly infectious even five months after the initial diagnosis."
This man had a severe autoimmune disease that required him to take drugs to suppress his immune system. So his body couldn't fight off the coronavirus infection as well as a healthy person could. He would get better for a while, and then the virus would counterattack. He would fall sick again. Eventually, he ended up in the intensive care unit. He passed away five months after the initial diagnosis.
Throughout the man's infection, Li and his colleagues ran an illuminating experiment. Every few weeks, the team extracted coronavirus from the man's body and sequenced the virus's genome.
Li couldn't believe what they found. "I was shocked," he says. "When I saw the virus sequences, I knew that we were dealing with something completely different and potentially very important."
The sequences showed Li and his team that the virus was changing very quickly inside the man's body. The virus wasn't picking up just one or two mutations at a time. But rather, it acquired a whole cluster of more than 20 mutations. Scientists had never seen SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19, mutate so quickly during the whole pandemic.
Furthermore, laboratory experiments have shown that some of those mutations help the virus bypass detection by antibodies.
"Toward the very end of his life, he was treated with monoclonal antibodies, from Regeneron," Li says. "And shortly thereafter, we saw evidence that suggested the virus was developing resistance or escaping from these antibodies as well."