Australian (ASX) Stock Market Forum

Coronavirus (COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2) outbreak discussion

Will the "Corona Virus" turn into a worldwide epidemic or fizzle out?

  • Yes

    Votes: 37 49.3%

  • No

    Votes: 9 12.0%

  • Bigger than SARS, but not worldwide epidemic (Black Death/bubonic plague)

    Votes: 25 33.3%

  • Undecided

    Votes: 4 5.3%
  • Total voters
    75
Jump to new
Can get vaccinated in chemists in NSW. Walk in vaccination hubs. Plenty of astra. The finger can be pointed at the media for causing problems. They wanted to 'get' scomo. That then ruined any messaging. Imo astra was the safer bet.
 
rederob said:
While vaccination hesitancy is a thing, the reality is that surveys suggest it has been significantly less than the number of people that want to get vaccinated and have not had the opportunity. The States, and Shires like Narrabri, are proving that accessibility to vaccinations is an important driver of take up. It is also universally the case that as covid vaccination rates increase, hesitancy decreases.
Click to expand...
Well said Rob and a balanced objective view.
The hesitancy is a huge problem still, especially in Aboriginal communities, I believe a load of vaccine was flown out to a community with staff and everyone had gone walkabout.
With the lack of supply especially pfizer, it makes sense to direct the majority of available vaccine to the areas of largest population density, where the greatest possibility of an outbreak will occur.
If limited supply was all directed to the regions, where there is no covid, then a major outbreak occurred in a major city there would be an outcry about that.
It must be difficult to source vaccine, when other countries were in much greater need of it, as their outbreak were running rampant, while our number of cases were minimal.
It is hard to justify that we are more deserving, they can only make the vaccine at a certain pace, to demand we get priority, when Countries like India probably needed all that was being produced at the time, really is a bit rich but does align with our entitled mentality. :2twocents
I just noticed in the SMH, the media has finally decided they had better mention hesitancy in an article, been a long time coming IMO.
www.smh.com.au

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy plunges to record low, poll finds

The latest Resolve Political Monitor findings suggest Australia could achieve a 90 per cent vaccine target across the adult population.
www.smh.com.au www.smh.com.au
From the article:

Vaccine fears have plunged to a record low in a strong sign of support for the national plan to ease lockdowns, with only 9 per cent of Australians objecting to the jabs compared to 29 per cent in the early phase of the rollout.
The findings suggest the country could achieve a 90 per cent vaccine target across the adult population as the federal government promises more supplies of Pfizer and Moderna doses over the next three months.



Here is another article on efforts to overcome mass hesitancy in the indigenous population, I think i heard the other day only 20-30% of indigenous have come forward for the vaccine.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/...ne-hesitancy-indigenous-communities/100451174
From the article:
Vaccine hesitancy isn't exclusive to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, but factors like traumatic historical events, barriers to access and supply, and misinformation, have turned a tool of protection into a tool of fear.

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains an image of people who have died.

"We had to do a lot of community sessions around trying to inform and educate that blood clots were like one in a million," she said.

"It doesn't matter what [vaccine] you bring in after that, the same thing happened … people were still hesitant."

In addition to this, Ms O'Donnell, who is also the chief executive officer of the Kimberly Aboriginal Medical Service in Broome, said there was a gap in the way information was being shared.

"A lot of people are saying they feel sorry for NSW, but [when] you say, 'Do you know there is over 800 of our mob sick with COVID?', they can't believe it," she said.

"The numbers don't get told at the press conference, so some people think it's only 'white people' with COVID."

Gaps in information have also allowed certain faith groups to target Aboriginal people, particularly in regional areas with low vaccination rates.

"If you home in on some communities, you'll find there's been no vaccination at all," Ms O'Donnell said.

"There's all these rumours around '666' and collecting or changing your DNA, so we're working hard to combat this."

"The good news is that Aboriginal people over 60 who are our highest risk group, 42 per cent are fully vaccinated and a further 10 per cent had their first. That's more than half of our older people already protected
 
In W.A nurses are joining the anti vax protests, as the health care worker mandatory vaccination rue comes in on October the 1st.
www.watoday.com.au

Perth protesters join national push against lockdowns, vaccine mandates

While Perth itself is not in lockdown and COVID-19 restrictions in WA are minimal, the crowd voiced support for other protests around the country on Saturday.
www.watoday.com.au www.watoday.com.au
From the article:

The most vitriol, however, was reserved for vaccine mandates.

Signs such as “Healthcare workers say NO” took aim at the WA government’s move to make COVID-19 vaccinations compulsory for all health staff – including food providers – by the end of the year.
When the policy was announced earlier this year, Australian Nursing Federation WA secretary Mark Olsen supported it, but predicted between seven and eight per cent of the nursing workforce would choose not to get the vaccine, putting more pressure on an already strained system.

Chief Health Officer Andy Robertson believed there was only about 1.5 per cent of the health workforce “philosophically opposed” to the vaccine.

Dr Robertson at the time predicted there would likely be a small impact to the system as workers left, but said a COVID-19 outbreak in hospitals would have a “far more crippling effect”.
 
SirRumpole said:
How we kept our blot clotting death rate low.

www.abc.net.au

How Australia kept AstraZeneca-linked clot deaths so low

Australia's mortality rate from a rare blood-clotting disorder linked to the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine is nearly a fifth of what experts originally thought it could be. Here's why.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au
Click to expand...
Yet another example, of the benefit of not running ahead, like headless chooks.
Australia has done extremely well dealing with covid IMO, despite wailing to the contrary, as I've said before the handling of the virus will be better assessed with hindsight.
I initially was extremely reluctant to have the AZ, due to all the bad press it attracted and decided to wait for the Pfizer to be available to those over 60.
Eventually as more information became available and results were staring to be compiled on the effectiveness of both vaccines, I started to lean more toward the older style AZ vector vaccine, which I ended up taking.
 
sptrawler said:
Yet another example, of the benefit of not running ahead, like headless chooks.
Australia has done extremely well dealing with covid IMO, despite wailing to the contrary, as I've said before the handling of the virus will be better assessed with hindsight.
I initially was extremely reluctant to have the AZ, due to all the bad press it attracted and decided to wait for the Pfizer to be available to those over 60.
Eventually as more information became available and results were staring to be compiled on the effectiveness of both vaccines, I started to lean more toward the older style AZ vector vaccine, which I ended up taking.
Click to expand...

I didn't have a choice really, it was AZ or nothing at the time.

I initially preferred Pfizer if I could get it because of the shorter waiting time between doses but they bought forward the second dose of AZ so now I've got both doses.

No after effects yet, so I should be ok.

And I agree we have generally done well, despite some stuff ups along the way (and some stupid people not taking medical advice).
 
SirRumpole said:
And I agree we have generally done well, despite some stuff ups along the way (and some stupid people not taking medical advice).
Click to expand...
It certainly wasn't by good planning, or execution, it was more the fact that due to delays and lockdowns people have had more time to accept the reality.
Whereas if it had been forced along in the early period, the backlash would have been much bigger than what has happened, in reality the numbers of protestors are small considering it is a universal issue.
Like I said in hindsight they will say that we went extremely well, initially lockdowns were used to reduce numbers of infections, not a lot of vaccine was wasted and later as numbers of infections increased the vaccine roll out ramped up to match the demand.
Pure ar$e, but when history looks back, they miss a lot of the finer points of incompetence. ?
 
SirRumpole said:
And we STILL have no action on dedicated quarantine centres or our own mrna manufacturing capability. Both Federal responsibilities , what's wrong with them ?
Click to expand...
Too busy trying to backfill a hole they have dug for submarines. ? ? ?

On the mRNA facility though apparently they are trying, but every other country is trying to get facilities built at their location as well.
This is quite a good article:
www.abc.net.au

Australia wants to make mRNA COVID vaccines onshore. Here's how long that could take

Pfizer has confirmed with ABC News that it has no immediate plans to manufacture its vaccine in Australia. This means manufacturing these sorts of vaccines anytime soon hinges on one global player.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au
From the article:
Australia is one of many nations seeking to make the type of COVID-19 vaccine pioneered by Pfizer and Moderna during the pandemic – but can we make doses onshore anytime soon without help from big pharma?

ABC News has confirmed several players, including CSL, BioCina, Luina Bio and IDT, are proposing to set up large-scale local manufacturing of mRNA vaccines.

The Commonwealth is now assessing their bids and almost 10 others as part of a push to get these types of vaccines made here.

Experts say local manufacturing could ensure steady a supply of these sorts of vaccines, and help with developing booster shots for variants of COVID-19 that may become specific to our region.

But Pfizer has confirmed with ABC News that it has no immediate plans to manufacture its vaccine in Australia.
This means short-term manufacturing here hinges on Moderna.

"There's a lot of goodwill and international cooperation [currently] that people haven't seen before in the biotechnology and the biopharmaceutical sector," RNA expert Archa Fox, from the University of Western Australia (UWA), said.

"But at the end of the day, there is obviously also profit involved as well."
Messenger-RNA (mRNA) is literally a molecule.

Research into its use in vaccines and in other areas of biomedical research such as cancer had been going for years before the pandemic hit.

Yet it was the American multinational pharmaceutical company Pfizer, in partnership with German biotech company BioNTech, that got the first ever mRNA vaccine to market.

That was its COVID-19 jab and it was approved late last year, and only for emergency use.
While Pfizer grabs a lot of the headlines, it was actually BioNTech that developed the groundbreaking vaccine. Pfizer, one of the biggest pharmaceutical corporations in the world, carried out mass clinical trials and led global manufacturing.

RNA expert and Monash University professor Colin Pouton said there was currently no capacity to manufacture clinical-grade mRNA vaccines in Australia, although there were some facilities that could do parts of the process.

He said producing this sort of vaccine was a multi-step process that involved making DNA, then turning that into mRNA, and then putting that into lipid nanoparticles that essentially held the molecule.

"It's really because we don't have the facility to make a large enough batch under specific conditions that we can't do it here," he explained.

His research team is about to spend half a million dollars sending DNA to Belgium to have it processed for its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine research. It will get back just 2,000 vials.

"It's going to be quite a costly process," he said.

Compare that to the global machine making Pfizer on a mass scale.

The conglomerate has some manufacturing hubs in Australia, but none are set up to mRNA vaccines here.

Its COVID vaccine manufacturing involves the use of 280 materials from 86 suppliers in 19 countries. There are two supply lines – one each in the US and Europe – that exclusively manufacture the final product.

"This is to ensure quality, speed and scale," Pfizer told ABC News in a statement.

"Vaccine manufacturing is a biological production. It is extraordinarily complex under any circumstances, and even more so during a pandemic.

"We now expect to manufacture approximately 3 billion doses by the end of 2021."
Click to expand...
Australia has so far ordered 40 million doses of Pfizer. On the weekend, the government announced it has also ordered 85 million booster shots of Pfizer, which would start arriving next year.


Then there is Moderna's vaccine.

Moderna is comparable to BioNTech – it was mostly a biotechnology developer when the pandemic hit. It came up with its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and then needed to figure out how to make it on a global scale.

"They're not like Pfizer, which has got a whole range of existing infrastructure across the world for doing commercial product manufacturing," UQ biotech and pharmaceutical expert Trent Munro said.

"Moderna has had to rely on partnerships with other companies, so-called contract manufacturing companies, to help boost their manufacturing capacity."
That is the sort of commercial arrangement that CSL already has with Oxford's AztraZenca to make 50 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine here in Australia for us. It's a viral vector vaccine, which is made in a different way to mRNA shots.
Moderna's mRNA vaccine is not approved for use in Australia yet.

However, it has been widely used in the US and elsewhere, and the federal government has ordered 25 million doses, pending approval from the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

What Australia is now hoping to do locally​

Interest is clearly growing in mRNA.

"There's such a buzz around RNA as a technology platform, because it's gone past the proof of concept," Professor Munro said.

Earlier this year, the federal government announced an "approach to market" (ATM) where it asked for proposals to set up end-to-end mRNA vaccine manufacturing in Australia. That means a set-up that can do the whole supply chain domestically, without imports.

Crucially, it wants proposals that can deliver so-called population-scale quantities — enough doses for our entire country — within three years.

The ATM notes this is not just about delivering mRNA vaccines for COVID, but about tapping into the broader potential of this emerging space of biotechnology to help with areas like influenza or cardiovascular research.

The Commonwealth is also not obliged to fund anything out of this process.

More than a dozen applications are now being assessed, including those from CSL, BioCina, Luina Bio and IDT.
 
This is one of those sorta good news /bad news stories.
The good news is that there are far fewer deaths from the rare blood clot disease that has been dtected as a side effect of the AZ vax.
The bad news is that once again the "experts" and their models had it grossly higher than it turned out to be.
How many more times will this happen before the general public start to lose faith in experts and their models?
From ABC NEWS
The mortality rate from a rare blood-clotting disorder linked to the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine is nearly a fifth of what experts originally thought it could be.Key points:
  • Experts say widespread awareness of the symptoms of clots means people are seeking medical help quickly
  • They say it means treatment, even of severe cases, is more effective
  • People are more likely to get blood clots from COVID-19 than from the vaccine
Earlier this year, as data emerged from overseas about the disorder — called TTS for short — it was estimated that the chance of dying if you developed a clot was about 25 per cent.

In Australia, 11.3 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine — now called Vaxzevria — have been administered, with a total of 141 people developing a confirmed or probable case of TTS linked to the jab.

Out of those 141 cases, eight people have died of the clots, or around 5.6 per cent.

In the UK, the rate of dying from TTS was 17 per cent. However, research published in August showed in one study it was as high as 22 per cent.

So, how has Australia kept its rate so low?
The head of the national medical regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), John Skerritt, thinks it is a combination of a few things.

First, we were given a heads-up by what was happening in the UK and Europe.

"They'd vaccinated more than 10 million people before we had started to see possible cases," Professor Skerritt said.

"Our doctors were able to pick up on the signs and symptoms and treat early.
"We also have been able to pick up more less mild cases."

Professor Huyen Tran, a haematologist at Monash University, agreed having information from other countries early on made a big
difference.

"I think initially following what we were seeing in Europe I was expecting a higher fatality rate, but I think I'd caveat that by saying they had a much longer run-in," he said.

"So that awareness, that understanding, is difficult early on, so we had that luxury of learning from other places."
Click to expand...
I thought that the answer from Skerrit was interesting in that if indeed Australia was better able to detect much milder cases of the blood clotting, then it would make the incidence of clotting higher than in the UK from which the original comparison was made. In Australia, where the AZ was administered almost exclusively to those over 60, the stats had 12.4 cases per million. The latest results I could find were from April 2021 (seeHERE ) which had the UK at a tad below 8 per million AZ doses . This obviously reinforces the idea that perhaps there were a more cases of of clotting in the UK than first realised, especially as the majority of people vaccinated in UK of all ages were AZ, as that was the only one they could get. Women under 60 were twice as likely to get the clots, but that may have been because health workers, who in most countries are dominated by women.

One might argue that the experts may not have known that the reasons above for the figures from their models being so much higher than actual figures.
However, that merely highlights the Donald Rumsfeld famous Unknown Unknowns that make modelling a bit dicey. Unless you know at the beginning what all the variables are and how each ranks in its ability to affect the outcomes, both statically and when they vary, the outcomes must be treated with caution.
Mick
 
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Covid 19 coronavirus: Norway dumps all Covid restrictions to 'live as normal'​



Norway has ditched all its Covid-19 measures, even social distancing, in a radical move that as yet has unclear consequences.

On Friday, the Nordic nation's government announced that it was time to "live as normal" with Covid-19 after 561 days of enduring some kind of restriction, whether that be venue capacity limits or stay-at-home orders.

Now, Norwegians can attend restaurants, night clubs, sporting events and anything else at full capacity, with social distancing thrown out the window.

They've even started encouraging travel outside of Europe, removing travel warnings.

The new rules come into effect on Saturday, 4pm local time (Sunday, 4am NZT).

"It is 561 days since we introduced the toughest measures in Norway in peacetime … Now the time has come to return to a normal daily life," Prime Minister Erna Solberg told reporters.

"In short, we can now live as normal."

They've even started encouraging travel outside of Europe, removing travel warnings. The new rules come into effect on Saturday, 4pm local time (Sunday, 4am NZT). "It is 561 days since we introduced the toughest measures in Norway in peacetime … Now the time has come to return to a normal daily life," Prime Minister Erna Solberg told reporters. "In short, we can now live as normal."


 
FromABC News
Norway, which has 76% of their population having received one Vax, and 67% of its population having been fully vaxed, has announced that it will relax all restrictions that had been in place to counter the Covid pandemic.
The Scandinavian countries are heading into Autumn and hence colder weather.
The colder weather seems to allow the virus to survive and prosper much better than in warmer temperatures.
Norway will join Denmark which ceased covid restrictions on September 10th.
Unfortunately, we in Victoria will likely be released in tiny increments to allow Genghis Dan to have a little longer playing dictator.
There is already talk that the first milestone will be delayed.
Mick
 
Just watching the World road race cycle championship, being held in Flanders, Belgium.
There are huge crowds of spectators jammed along the road, no one is wearing a mask.
 
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