so the HK vaccine advisory panel released their report re: approving it for emergency use in HK despite it not meeting data requirements & uh... it's not looking very good.

here's a quote that's quite representative of the whole mess for now while i write this thread (pg. 10): https://twitter.com/tripperhead/status/1362748732408700933

okay, here's... basically all of the useful data in the paper in one table, that i've translated since inexplicably that's one of the few things that *didn't* get translated in the appendix:

So we have ~5k people followed up on among healthcare workers specifically (so a population more likely to notice mild #COVID19 symptoms & get tested -- according to https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04456595 which has the study protocol there was no routine testing done outside of symptoms).

the lines i immediately care about are 2 & 3: moderate & severe #COVID19 cases. 5 moderate, 0 severe in the vaccine arm, 20 moderate, 10 severe in the placebo arm.

that being said, the *total#* of severe cases is so low that there really isn't that much statistical power...

...the only reason i'm confident that 100% efficacy against severe disease will hold (& even then i'm a bit wary for reasons i'll get into later) is that over & over i'm seeing that the correlate for protection for stopping you from dying of #COVID19 is very low.

or, in other words, it's easy to stop you from dying of #COVID19 as long as you help the immune system *a little*, even an absolutely crappy vaccine is likely to do it.

& yeah, that's about the only good thing i can say about this vaccine.

unfortunately even the number of moderate cases is too small to be able to say too much with high confidence here. the overall protection is, ofc, awful.

some of it likely is due to the 14d spacing between prime&boost: WHY EVEN HAVE THE BOOST IT WON'T DO ANYTHING USEFUL.

anyhow, that is the *entirety* of the data used to justify that the benefits outweigh the risks of using this vaccine here.

there is *no* immune profiling data. the data from Turkey is too messy to be useful. one study. *ONE*.

this would be excusable if we didn't have other, better vaccines. but this is coming against things like Pfizer&Moderna's vaccines inducing a more robust nAb response than *natural infection*, but one dose will boost natural infection nAbs into that territory as well.

i get that a lot of this was decided early on, back before we knew much about how the #COVID19 vaccine landscape would look like, & why there was a focus on getting ones that use different platforms just in case. but at this point, it's abundantly clear which ones are good.

& i'm sorry, *even tho i believe that SinoVac is likely to still have good efficacy at keeping people out of the ICU* (something i only say b/c of CoV immunology work combined w/other vaccine data across the board, otherwise i couldn't say that), it's just not a good vaccine.

(like i suspect two low-hanging fruit fixes would be to prefusion-stabilize the Spike & use a TLR7/8 agonist instead of alum, which i would be very curious to see looked at fwiw).

now combine this with the social effect of it's a vaccine people here don't trust *to begin with* & like...

immunologically, i can see someone say "the benefits of SinoVac outweigh the drawbacks" b/c the drawbacks are small even if the benefits are small.

worst-case we can immunize overtop of that w/another vaccine, & vaccines in general are amazingly safe.

this is just speaking immunologically. speaking from a PUBLIC HEALTH ANGLE, abso-fucking-lutely no the drawbacks are enormous.

everyone here already is wary of SinoVac, & honestly even the panel basically concluded there's no useful data to justify *anything*. "it'll prolly work" is not confidence-inspiring. esp. when there are other vaccines that we know *DO* work. robustly. that we can get instead.

there's literally no justification for why they couldn't at the very least *mandate* SinoVac publish their actual raw trial data for Brazil *as a consideration requirement*.

going to be extremely direct here: we're only around 8mil, & HKSARG is the opposite of poor.

also, we know which vaccines work now & which don't.

how about we get a bunch of jabs from, say, Moderna & J&J instead of pulling this shit?