In the rush of all the announcements yesterday from the UK, it might be easy to miss this Public Health Scotland / Usher institute preprint on real world effectiveness of both the Ox/Az + BioNTech/Pfzier vaccine (Note: I am still on the trial for Ox/Az). ed.ac.uk/files/atoms/fi…
The most important thing is that they both work - really very well (age adjusted odds ratios getting down to 0.25 ish). If anything the Ox/Az is shading better to the Pfzier one but remember in a real world setting one doesn't have randomisation to help isolate the effect >>
This is clear evidence that both vaccines work - which we knew from trials, and for BioNTech/Pfzier real world Israel data; it shows also that effect works at the highest age ranges (for both vaccines) which was always expected but had thinner trial data in Ox/Az.
This real world efficacy data puts that question to bed pretty clearly - you can't get these odds ratios without a big biological effect.
There can be some vaccine snobbery that comes out on twitter and wide discourse which I don't get - the key questions are whether a vaccines is (a) safe (b) works and (c) available. It is simply great that we have 3 such cases, and more coming.
The real world efficacy vs SARS-CoV-2 variants is going to be the next phase, and here deep testing alongside deep vaccination (UK, Israel) is going to be the key proving ground.
But - we should celebrate the innovation of scientists in Moderna, BioNtech, Oxford Jenner, and trialists/production delivery of AstraZeneca, Pfzier and Moderna in having these tools at our disposal.

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More from @ewanbirney

23 Feb
Doing a postdoc in computational biology? Got your own ideas? Want to set up your own group, with freedom to follow your vision? Apply to being a Group Leader (PI position) @emblebi embl.org/jobs/position/…
EMBL-EBI is part of the international treaty organisation @embl; Headquartered in Heidelberg Germany, @emblebi is the UK site of @embl focused on computational biology both in blue skies research and computational data services.
The amazing and supportive John Marioni (@MarioniLab) is Head of Research @emblebi and I know he his happy to talk through any details of this position with interested candidates. We can hire from anywhere in the world, and interested in scientific potential above all.
Read 7 tweets
21 Feb
Views this afternoon in the early spring in London; crocuses are coming out, some early daffodils, and coronavirus is falling, but we're not out of this pandemic yet, and even "out" is a complex endpoint.
Context: I am an expert in human genetics and computational biology; I know experts in infectious epidemiology, viral genomics, immunology, testing and clinical trials. COI: I am long established consultant to Oxford Nanopore and I am on the Ox/Az vaccine trial as a participant.
I will comment mainly from the perspective of UK and broadly Europe which are the places I know and understand the best.
Read 34 tweets
9 Feb
The @uk_biobank is ... amazing and is basically, in my view, rebooting the science of human physiology.
Why? First it is just a really well phenotyped cohort at scale. Back in the early 2000s a number of people did key power calculations and amazing (or not so amazingly for epidemiologists) 500,000 was the minimum prospective cohort to have to impact common disease
Secondly the phenotyping has been done centrally and consistently, and some key imaging phenotypes have been done at scale. This is remarkable logistics, fund raising/arguments and delivery. *so* many things could have gone wrong which didn't.
Read 13 tweets
6 Feb
This weekend is a festival of sport in the UK - Premier League action (sadly - Arsenal lost); Start of Rugby's 6 nations; Superbowl - against a background of a COVID still whipping around us. Some thoughts from sport-heavy London:
Reminder: SARS-CoV-2 is an infectious virus which causes a nasty disease (COVID) in a subset of people (more likely if older; male; overweight) and sadly a proportion of people die who get the disease.
If we let the virus follow its natural course in populations our health care systems would be overwhelmed; far more people would die both due to the virus and other things and it would be near catastrophic for the function of modern society
Read 23 tweets
31 Jan
COVID thoughts on a cloudy late January day in London - longer evenings, and our house lockdown rhythm has settled somewhat.
Context: I am an expert in human genetics and computational biology; I know experts in infectious epidemiology, viral genomics, clinical trials and immunology. I have some COIs: I am a long established consultant to Oxford Nanopore and I am on the Ox/AZ vaccine trial.
Reminder: SARS-CoV-2 is infectious virus which causes a severe disease in a subset of people (older; more obese; male risk factors) often leading to death. If we let the virus go through the population both a large number of people would die and healthcare systems would melt
Read 21 tweets
22 Jan
A perspective on COVID from a sunny, crisp London house, in a break between zoom calls.
Context: I am an expert in human genetics and computational biology; I know experts in infectious epidemiology, viral evolution, clinical trials and (now) public health delivery. As Deputy Director General of @embl means I have a working knowledge of many European countries
I have two conflicts of interest - I am a consultant to Oxford Nanopore that makes SARS-CoV-2 tests+sequencing kits and I am trial participant on the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine trial.
Read 24 tweets

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