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Kai Kupferschmidt Profile picture
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2 Feb, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Interim results from Russia’s #covid19 vaccine Sputnik V are out and looking good.

Vaccine efficacy was 91.6%

And once again an even stronger signal on moderate/severe cases:
20/4902 in placebo group
0/14964 in vaccine group
„The development of the Sputnik V vaccine has been criticised for unseemly haste, corner cutting, and an absence of transparency. But the outcome reported here is clear and the scientific principle of vaccination is demonstrated ...“
thelancet.com/journals/lance…
Authors end that comment in Lancet by pointing that the result „means another vaccine can now join the fight to reduce the incidence of #COVID19“.
12 countries are scheduled to start immunizations with Sputnik V this week:
Algeria, Armenia, Bolivia, Bosnia, Hungary, Iran, Kazakhstan, Palestine, Paraguay, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates and Venezuela

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More from @kakape

Kai Kupferschmidt Profile picture
4 Feb
I‘m struck that it still hasn’t sunk in how much #b117 may change the course of this pandemic.

The initial shock about it being more transmissible seems to have worn off. But we are barely beginning to see its real-world impact.

A story: sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/d…
And a thread
After #b117 was identified in England and seemed to be taking off there, many people like me started looking at Denmark for clues.
Why Denmark? It sequences a lot! Here is a graph from @ECDC_EU from late December showing EU sequencing (look at B and note that it’s a log-scale): Image
@ECDC_EU Denmark has actually massively scaled-up its sequencing since then.
@MadsAlbertsen85 and his team, who have basically been doing all the sequencing for the whole country, are now getting close to 70% which is about as much as is possible (30% have low virus concentrations).
Read 15 tweets
Kai Kupferschmidt Profile picture
3 Feb
COVAX facility just published a forecast of what country will receive how much of what #covid19 vaccine in the first half of this year.
Lots of caveats of course. This is mostly AZ vaccine, which does not have emergency use listing yet, for instance.
gavi.org/sites/default/…
Big picture:
Countries can expect to receive vaccine to cover on average 3,3% of their population in first half of 2021, "enough to protect the most vulnerable groups such as health care workers”.
Here is “A” to give you an idea (SFP are self financing countries) Image
Most vaccine here is AstraZeneca’s:
240 million doses of AZ vaccine licensed to Serum Institute of India (SII)
96 million doses directly from AZ (this was supposed to be 153 million, but some shipments delayed to Q3)
Read 17 tweets
Kai Kupferschmidt Profile picture
2 Feb
First results (yes, really!) on what #b117 + E484K might mean from @GuptaR_lab:
„Introduction of the E484K mutation in a B.1.1.7 background to reflect newly emerging viruses in the UK led to a more substantial loss of neutralizing activity by vaccine-elicited antibodies“
Quick explainer:
The researchers took blood from 23 people vaccinated with Pfizer vaccine and then checked how well it neutralized retroviruses that they had engineered to contain the spike protein of #b117 with or without E484K.
Preprint is here: citiid.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/upl…
Interpretation:
This is roughly what I expected given B.1.351 and P.1 data.
If you‘ve followed my reporting the last weeks you know that it is difficult to know whether/how much a drop in neutralization in the lab will translate into a drop in vaccine efficacy in the real world.
Read 7 tweets
Kai Kupferschmidt Profile picture
1 Feb
And now for the bad news. *sigh*
It looks like #B117, the more transmissible variant first detected in England, has now picked up the E484K mutation as well. That is the one linked to evading SOME immunity in SAfrica and Brazil.

h/t @_b_meyer
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…
@_b_meyer "Preliminary information suggests more than one acquisition event.”

If this is true, it is one more sign that this mutation is a relatively easy way for the virus to acquire some advantage in populations with some immunity.
I worry that we will see this in many places with B117.
@_b_meyer And as @_b_meyer points out it may very well be that a mutation like N501Y makes it more likely for the virus to acquire this mutation because it almost “needs" it.
(Or as @K_G_Andersen would probably say: Maybe Nelly kinda seeks out the bad guys… )

Read 6 tweets
Kai Kupferschmidt Profile picture
1 Feb
With all the breaking news on vaccines and variants I’ve barely had a chance to talk about this piece on microbes moving between humans and animals.
I think it’s important for the conversations we’re having around #sarscov2.
So, piece is here: sciencemag.org/news/2021/01/w…
And a thread
I’ve long been interested in the way infectious diseases affect wild animals and what we can learn about human disease from this.
So in 2019 I joined @Leendertz_Lab on a research trip to Taï National Forest in Cote d’Ivoire, where he has been studying this for 20 years.
@Leendertz_Lab The research station in Taï goes back to Christophe Boesch and Hedwige Boesch-Achermann who came to the forest in 1979 to study the chimpanzees. It took them years to habituate the animals (get them used to humans). Ever since then, researchers have been following them.
Read 15 tweets
Kai Kupferschmidt Profile picture
29 Jan
More vaccine news, this time from phase 3 trial of Johnson&Johnson:
According to the company, their vaccine based on an adenovirus was 66% effective at preventing moderate and severe #covid19, 28 days after vaccination.

prnewswire.com/news-releases/…
Good news:
- Big study with 45,000 participants across multiple countries
-Vaccine was 85% effective in preventing severe disease overall
- all hospitalisations and deaths in placebo group
- efficacy against severe disease increased over time (no cases in vaccinees after day 49)
Most importantly:
This is a single-dose vaccine and only needs standard refrigeration.
That means of vaccines so far it is the easiest to distribute.
And plan is to produce one billion doses this year, so protection for one billion people hopefully.
Read 9 tweets

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