On the COVID-19 frontline but half of French care home workers don't trust vaccine PARIS, March 2 (Reuters) - Marie-France Boudret, who works in a French home for the elderly, watched a patient suffocate to death in front of her because COVID-19 had infected his lungs. But when her employer offered her a vaccine against the virus, the nurse hesitated. “I have some doubts,” said Boudret, 48. “I prefer to wait.” Around half of health workers in French care homes do not want to be vaccinated, according to the group of experts guiding the state’s vaccine rollout - compared to only 20% of the residents who have not been inoculated. If significant numbers of care home workers do not get the jab, they could transmit the disease to residents who are not vaccinated and at high risk of serious illness, say advocates for the elderly. One reason for the scepticism is that those recommending the vaccine are the same people - the French state - whom care home workers blame for their low pay and tough working conditions, said Malika Belarbi, a care worker and trade union official. “There’s a complete loss of trust,” she said. The issue is not unique to France. In Germany, care home operator BeneVit Group surveyed staff in November and found only 30% wanted to get vaccinated. Peter Burri, head of ProSenectute, Switzerland’s biggest advocacy group for seniors, said at most half of nursing staff in the medical sector were willing to get inoculated. GETTING THE JAB? At a care home in Clamart, south of Paris, on Monday, 66-year-old Marie-Dominique Chastel was playing a parlour game with residents. Chastel, an activity coordinator at the home, declined the jab because she said her own immune system could fight off COVID-19. She said some relatives of residents had asked if she was going to get vaccinated. “My response was: ‘I’m going to wait a bit’,” she said. Boudret, the care home nurse, recalled fighting in vain to save her patient during the first wave of the virus. The same day two more of her patients died. “That day, I broke. It was the last straw,” she said. She said she felt neglected and under-appreciated by the state, citing short-staffing and problems with equipment. Since then, she has had COVID-19. She was unwell for a couple of days, but is now fully recovered. Staff at her care home, in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, were offered appointments to get the vaccine. Boudret said she was not in a high-risk group and felt there had not been time to properly assess the jab. Regulators around the world have repeatedly said speed will not compromise safety and vaccine developers have said they will not cut corners in testing for safety and efficacy. The quicker results have stemmed from conducting in parallel trials that are usually done in sequence and can take years. Trials for the shots developed by Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have shown only temporary side-effects. France’s state drug safety watchdog has said the procedure for approving the vaccines ensures they are safe and that it monitors side-effects and has seen nothing to warrant stopping their use. The number of French care home workers declining the vaccine is half what it was in December, said Patrick Peretti-Watel, head of research at France’s National Institute for Health and Medical Research. But Peretti-Watel, also a member of the government’s vaccine strategy steering committee, said getting more of them inoculated would require tackling the harm done by disputes over pay and working conditions. “It’s a question of winning trust,” he said. (Additional reporting by Caroline Copley in BERLIN and John Miller in ZURICH; Writing by Caroline Pailliez and Christian Lowe; Editing by Janet Lawrence)
Johnson & Johnson really living up to its name with this chart. The 4th of July is looking like the unofficial beginning of the end.
Yep. As discussed, the J and J vaccine has unfairly been tagged as second-best by some. No. First of all J and J is a one shot vaccine as we know but they are in trials for approval for a 2 shot. Take a guess as to what a 2 shot JanJ will look like given what their one shot already looks like. Second, as noted, their trial results at approval time did not reflect subsequent findings showing that their antibody count kept going up for a longer period of time. Third- and this is no small point- the J and J study included populations that were significantly impacted by the South African virus, whereas Pfizer and Moderna's studies did not. Or to put it another way, the slightly lower effectivity rate shown in J and J's trials might have been/would have been thusly for Moderna and Pfizer as well if they retest against the South African. And the fact that they are developing booster shots for the S A variant is already an admission of such and same.
Right. Consider the mRNA shots take two doses and 6-8 weeks for full effectiveness and J&J is right there in terms of severe disease.
It appears that the Chinese COVID vaccine is worthless in Brazil... Sinovac vaccine may not trigger sufficient antibody response to Brazil variant: study https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vaccine-sinovac-idUSKBN2AX0KK Sinovac Biotech’s COVID-19 vaccine may not trigger sufficient antibody responses against a new variant identified in Brazil, a small-sample lab study showed. The emergence of variants of the new coronavirus has raised concern that vaccines and treatments that were developed based on previous strains may not work as robustly. Plasma samples taken from eight people vaccinated with Sinovac’s CoronaVac failed to efficiently neutralize the P.1 lineage variant, or 20J/501Y.V3, researchers said in a paper published on Monday ahead of peer-review. “These results suggest that P.1 virus might escape from neutralizing antibodies induced by... CoronaVac,” researchers at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, Washington University School of Medicine in the United States, and a few other institutions said in the paper. CoronaVac is being used in mass vaccination drives in countries including China, Brazil, Indonesia and Turkey. Although the study suggests re-infection may occur in vaccinated individuals, the protection given by CoronaVac against severe COVID-19 may indicate other mechanisms in the human immune system, aside from antibodies, may also contribute to reducing disease severity, researchers said. A Sinovac spokesman was not immediately available for comment. Chief executive Yin Weidong said in a programme aired by state-backed broadcaster CGTN on Thursday the company is “fully capable” of using current research and manufacturing capacity to develop a new vaccine against variants if necessary. He also said the process would take much less time than it took to develop CoronaVac.
and we got lefty Bolsanaro south of the border. Low IQ populists, when will they learn? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...id-19-vaccine-for-emergency-use-idUSKBN2AB06E Mexico approves China's Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use
We are making really good progress with vaccinations in the US. Last week our best day was 2.5m, this week it’s 3m. We could theoretically break “100 million shots” this coming week: