COVID Transmissions for 8-31-2020

Aug 31, 2020

Greetings from an undisclosed location in my apartment.

It has been 287 days since the first documented human case of COVID-19.

Housekeeping note:

Welcome to a new week! There are a couple of in-depth topics that I’ve been thinking about for this week, a lot of them centered on the logistics of delivering vaccines around the world. In a couple of past parts of my life, I’ve been involved in making vaccines for tropical diseases more available to people in developing countries, and I think a lot of that experience is going to be relevant to COVID-19. Keep an eye out for some vaccine topics, then, later in this week.

Glossary terms are bolded words with links to the running newsletter glossary.

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Now, let’s talk COVID.

FDA announces willingness to approve vaccine before trials are over

In a move that no one asked for, the FDA has announced that they might be willing to approve vaccines that have not completed their Phase 3 clinical trials yet: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/30/fda-willing-to-fast-track-coronavirus-vaccine-before-phase-three-trials.html

They insist this would not be influenced by President Trump, but this doesn’t get around the main issue here.

I don’t see what reason they could have to bypass these essential trials. One might suggest that there could be an interim analysis that could lead to early data, but these trials are already on a very aggressive timeline. I don’t know that we have enough time to see all of the potential adverse events and make a real, reasonable assessment of benefit-risk for a vaccine candidate on this kind of schedule. This strikes me as dangerous.

The US has been down this road before. In 1976, a swine-origin influenza virus outbreak led to a national vaccination campaign. The vaccine was rushed and there were safety issues, leading to a much larger than expected numbers of a neurological side effect known as Guillan-Barré Syndrome. The feared pandemic of this swine-origin influenza virus did not materialize, either. The main point here is that it’s not good to rush vaccines.

By the way, in checking my spelling of Guillan-Barré, I learned that there is apparently some amount of Guillan-Barré Syndrome associated with COVID-19, though I can’t say if that would be an expected adverse event for any vaccine against COVID-19 because…you guessed it…trials aren’t completed yet.

Australian response spotlight

I wanted to highlight how COVID-19 has been spreading—and controlled—in Australia.

Australia is a country that has a similar individualist attitude to the US, and that has a large amount of rural territory but also substantial urban areas that had COVID-19 outbreaks. On the other hand, they never reached case levels that are similar to the US even per capita.

Part of this was because of a willingness to impose, relax, and re-impose restrictions based on prevailing conditions.

Take a look at the Guardian’s Australia tracker here, which shows how things proceeded in that country: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/datablog/ng-interactive/2020/aug/31/coronavirus-australia-map-cases-covid-19-tracking-stats-live-data-update-by-state-suburb-postcode-how-many-new-active-case-numbers-today-statistics-corona-deaths-death-toll

What am I doing to cope with the pandemic? This:

Biking

My wife and I took a cycle trip down to a pierside outdoor bar yesterday, which is a great way to spend an afternoon. Until a gust of wind dumps your drink on your lap!

I dried off fine, though, and it was fun overall.

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