This is why ‘first to market’ can’t mean ‘stop R&D on all the others.’ The vaccines are going to have different profiles for safety, efficacy, and yes, ease of distribution.
One reason that I consider the peptide vaccines the way of the future is that they are long-term stable when lyophilized. They can even be compounded, so you can add and subtract epitopes or use a different adjuvant to match a patient’s known allergies. No more tough decisions: “This patient is allergic to eggs/neomycin; do we skip the vaccine, or push Benadryl and Pepcid, keep the epinephrine at the ready and hope for the best?”
Although, to be fair, shipment on dry ice isn’t that bad. At least it doesn’t need to go in a Dewar of liquid nitrogen. Dry ice can hold in a Styrofoam cooler while in transit, and you can get the stuff practically anywhere, it’s a byproduct of producing welding gases and medical oxygen. I once bought a block of the stuff in a grocery store in Albuquerque because I underestimated the amount that I needed to pack in a cooler on a cross-country trip.
The delivery system is complex, requiring the use of a custom-built “cool box” that can store 1,000 to 5,000 vaccines for up to 10 days at minus 94 degrees.
Never fear, I am sure they will include enough custom built cool boxes for what would be an affordable price to most first world governments.
Pfizer said it would be partnering with UPS to create mobile “freezer farms” that contain 48,000 vaccines and are strategically placed throughout the country for swift distribution.
DeJoy is probably on the phone right now, explaining how the company that he left but still has stock in and still subcontracts to the USPS, is a far better choice.
ive heard this meme like a thousand times now. it’s as if people have forgotten that being unemployed means being uninsured. ( cobra is a joke. no one can afford that. even if they had a job, most people couldn’t afford it. )
Blue Cross Blue Shield pretty much has a lock on health insurance in this state; if you have any of the others (United Healthcare, Cigna and such), that’s a real problem.
Even with the “right” insurance, finding a primary healthcare provider who is accepting new patients is hard. We only got in with this pediatrician, back in the Beforetimes when mask policies/politics didn’t exist, because my in-laws knew the doc’s parents socially.
That is going to get worse. Even before covid, primary care in general and peds specifically was in trouble. Coming out of med school carrying 6 figure debts, expected income is a factor in choice of fields. Peds makes anywhere from 10% to 25% of what most specialties do. FP does a bit better. But neither is bringing in young docs sufficient to meet the needs, or even to keep up with oldsters retiring. And Covid makes that much worse. We are now one of the riskiest fields when it comes to contracting the disease, which is not much of a selling point, and is pushing a lot who have the option to retire now rather than taking chances. Our practice just (as of today) inherited 4300 new Medicaid patients from an office that closed for exactly that reason. 4300 new patients, no new docs, and we have had 2 nurses quit because of risk to their families. Guys, I keep saying it’s going to be bad. We keep chugging along, but I keep telling them I can only see one at a time. Ive gone from 24 patients a day to 32. Might not seem like much, but its the same hours, so less per kid. We will lose more nurses as we push them harder. And locally it is just beginning to set in that our cases are exploding. Yay in person schooling!
Apologize for the long bitch session, tired today and not seeing an end to it.
I’ve had routine screenings and one minor surgery since May. Every medical office has been diligent about distancing, masking and using hand sanitizer. I felt very safe and I hope anyone reading this to not postpone any necessary cancer screenings.
I get it that they are vulnerable as a community based on their small population size, and their generally poor health outlook. But in this case, they are just as immunologically naïve as everyone else. The focus “New pathogens like SARS-CoV-2 are a dire threat” is bullshit, IMO: ANY pathogen is a dire threat to them.
Indigenous tribes are among the groups most vulnerable to COVID-19 infection as they live in insulated, close-knit communities.
Being insulated is good. Being close isn’t.
“Of course, the uncontacted Sentinelese are always vulnerable to all outside diseases”
This.
Well, the piece ain’t wrong, but I suspect many will get confused and understand that they are particularly threatened by Covid-19 because they are particularly vulnerable to Covid-19.
So, I guess this somehow has the intention to draw attention to them generally being on the brink of annihilation, but I suspect most people just think that Covid-19 is particularly dangerous to them.
