COVID Transmissions for 5-26-2021
Moderna in teenagers
Greetings from an undisclosed location in my apartment. Welcome to COVID Transmissions.
It has been 556 days since the first documented human case of COVID-19. 5.56 mm is a common rifle ammunition size. I prefer making vaccines to making bullets.
Speaking of that, let’s discuss various exciting vaccine developments today. Moderna in teenagers, rises in vaccine confidence, and also a downward trend in COVID-19 cases in the US are all on our plate for today.
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Now, let’s talk COVID.
Moderna vaccine effective in teenagers
Moderna has put out a press release reporting data from their Phase 2/3 study of vaccine efficacy in teenagers: https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-announces-teencove-study-its-covid-19-vaccine
The topline result here reports 100% efficacy, but let’s be realistic: nothing has 100% efficacy. According to the typical case definition for disease, there were no cases in the vaccinated group. This doesn’t mean the vaccine is perfect. It means that the sample size of the trial was too small to accurately model the frequency of cases in vaccinated teens; that’s also great news, since this trial had around 2000 vaccinated patients. The vaccine being able to reduce the frequency of disease to somewhere below 1/2000 in pretty impressive.
That said, the Moderna trialists were considerate in their design. Thinking about the fact that disease is often milder in younger people, they had a secondary endpoint that defined disease cases by a looser definition than the primary endpoint. This definition calls things “disease” that a typical physician or even a typical person may not thinking of as being “sick,” per se. Using this definition instead, the vaccine efficacy was still 93%. So that’s quite impressive as well.
In light of these results, Moderna intends to seek approval in teenagers. That’s great, because it brings more options to the market for COVID-19.
Seeing a boost in vaccine confidence in the US
A recent survey-based study has showed a steady rise—a boost, if you will—in vaccine confidence in the US: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2780519
This is a survey methodology that followed respondents for months, with repeated surveys. It showed that overall, vaccine hesitancy declined more than 10% from October 2020 to March 2021, which is great news. Still, it was too high by the end of March, around 35%. We need to continue to work on assuring people that the vaccines are safe and effective.
Something that really reassured me is that hesitancy among minorities that have been heavily affected by COVID-19 has gone down faster than in the general population. Vaccine hesitancy among Hispanic respondents dropped more than 15 percentage points and also dropped more than 20 percentage points in Black respondents. Again, hesitancy remained high in these groups but these are good improvements.
Overall, vaccine hesitancy was frequent in people with low household incomes, aged between 18-39, and “without a degree,” which I presume by inference from another sentence refers specifically to lack of college degrees.
Things are getting better as far as US attitudes about vaccination, which is good. I hope that if things can improve here with respect to that, it bodes well for global vaccine uptake as well. Now we need to work on the global vaccine supply.
White House encourages vaccination incentive programs
I’m also encouraged—in multiple ways—by this CIDRAP article: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/05/white-house-encourages-covid-19-vaccine-incentives
The article begins by noting that the White House has endorsed vaccination incentive programs, like the million-dollar lottery that the state of Ohio has rolled out which awards that nice round number in crisp American dollars to a handful of lucky vaccinees. What a great idea!
I have a sneaking suspicion that political operatives and politicians actually find these vaccine incentive plans kind of fun. Incentivizing voting in material ways is something that’s pretty explicitly illegal in the US, but I imagine that politicos here dream of being able to do as Australia does and provide free “democracy sausages” to people who vote.
And now here are vaccines, another thing we wish to incentivize, but that don’t have laws making it illegal to offer clear material inducements for their use. So, having realized that they can literally give away free stuff to ask people to get vaccinated, the powers that be are really going to town—and I love it.
If a lottery, a free donut, a free museum admission, or a free beer will mean someone gets vaccinated, that’s great news. The person gets something free and we also prevent many potential deaths from COVID-19. Each vaccination makes a huge difference…as we see later on in that story.
With vaccine uptake still increasing in the US, daily new infections have fallen to around 22,000. Daily deaths, likewise, are now around 500. This is a huge drop compared to just a month ago, and is spread across the entire nation. Daily new cases have not been that low since mid-June 2020. Daily deaths, likewise, have not been so low since late June 2020. If that represented a seasonal pattern, we are now trending somewhat ahead of it, which I believe is the result of vaccination.
Hopefully with incentive programs and continued vaccine confidence measures, we can get these numbers even lower very soon.
What am I doing to cope with the pandemic? This:
Reading a study where scientists counted all the birds
A friend sent me a link to a paper where some ecologists tried to estimate how many birds there are, among 9700 species. That’s 92% of all bird species.
Here’s the study: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2023170118
The researchers estimated that there are about 50 billion birds (median estimate) in the world today, or between 5 and 6 birds per human being on Earth. They also noted that the numbers are highly skewed per species, with only a handful of species having extremely high populations while many species are extremely rare.
Here’s a figure from the paper that I don’t fully understand but that shows how the size of the population in each species is skewed towards smaller-count species:
Anyway I just thought this was really cool. The paper is relatively approachable. If you can look at log graphs of virus growth from papers that I’ve shared here before, you should be able to make your way through this one and have some fun in the process.
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See you all next time.
Always,
JS