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© Thomson Reuters 2021.Japan ramps up ultra-cold freezer production ahead of vaccine roll-out
By Rikako Maruyama and Akiko Okamoto TOKYO©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.
21 Comments
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William Bjornson
Should have waited for the Moderna or insisted that Pfizer pay for the freezers. The Pfizer design is a BAD design when the absolute necessity of Human error is added to the plot. How many people are going to get dead vaccine even with temperature tells on the packaging? IF something CAN go wrong...and this is a BIG 'CAN'...and the Pfizer requirements, that is, the high lability of their vaccine to ANY rise in temperature and the ubiquity of RNAses (RNA degrading enzymes) in the general environment, means that the Pfizer vaccine should still be in trials, but not for viral blocking efficacy under ideal conditions. The trials should be real-world distribution trials and vaccine competence AFTER 'normal' distribution by 'normal' means. If you have ever worked in a research lab working with RNA (Hello), you will know the extraordinary sequestering and acid washing necessary to keep and work with RNA or it just vanishes. For all but the most corporately dominated nationalities with facilities, the Pfizer vaccine is completely impractical on a global basis, whatever its theoretical efficacy against SARS-Cov-2 and its emerging, even MORE interesting, offspring.
Akie
"Japan ramps up ultra-cold freezer production ahead of vaccine roll-out".
Why ? Should Japan increase vaccine production, instead of the ultra-cold freezer?
kurisupisu
There is no dog wagging the tail in Japan...
foreignbrotherhoodarmy
They can acquire as many freezers as they want, it’s not going to mean a quicker rollout
Peeping_Tom
What about using the same freezers where they keep all the unsold whale meat?
As suggested by "a few" JT experts a week or so ago!
Antiquesaving
Like nearly every country Pfizer will be the first to roll out because they started production even before testing in most countries, so they already have that stock.
AZ was tested in Japan and all anyone is waiting for was for them to apply for approval, which they haven't done because they knew they could not supply.
Now that the Japanese government signed an agreement to produce the AZ vaccine locally using Japanese pharmaceutical companies under license they will now apply for approval and that vaccine will roll out fairly quickly.
But in the meantime Pfizer will be used for medical staff, etc...
It is shocking how all this is such a mess.
Their are laws in Japan, UK, Canada, the USA that governments can use to force patent holders to let other companies make the vaccine but none has done it.
The USA has 2 approved vaccines 4 factories producing them but it has 26 factories capable of producing these vaccines but 22 belong to other companies that are rivals so the 2 companies with working vaccines won't let them produce them.
Governments in other countries like India passed emergency legislation to force vaccine producers to permit other companies to produce their vaccines under a forced licensing law. Smart move.
virusrex
Not necessary, human error is part of the margins, it may surprise you but the vaccines don't lose efficacy instantaneously, and fail-safe mechanisms are plenty because working with ultra cold temperatures is not something that just became necessary, many companies have literally decades of experience dealing with materials that require those temperatures constantly so it is well understood what to do to avoid damaging them, if your worries were justified then no biological laboratory in the country could get any work done.
Yes, accidents are always a possibility, but to make the vaccines inactive you would need several layers of human error happening, that is not something that can happen commonly.
And no, the trials were not under optimal conditions, just under what is perfectly possible to do, so there is no need to repeat them just because of a wrong idea about what is necessary to do or not.
That applies only to naked RNA at room temperature, not frozen behind a microvescicle coating and specially not at ultra cold temperatures, The very special care is necessary before you get the RNA to freezing conditions, but if you are going to apply it a short time after thawning there is no need to do anything special, after all once inside the body it will be exposed to high concentrations of RNAses at 37 C, precisely the temperature at where they are more active. If the vaccine can hold at those conditions for as long as necessary to be delivered then a short time on a syringe is nothing.
Every vaccine has their advantages and disadvantages, none are perfect, the trade off with the Pfizer vaccine is the temperature, but it comes with less antigenic materials and increased safety, the whole point is to have more options, not less.
Antiquesaving
@Virusex
Thanks, you are clearly needed here to debunk so much misinformation.
Antiquesaving
@Peeping_Tom
Nice try at going after Japan again.
But a little knowledge goes a long way, food freezer even industrial ones don't go down to -75°C.
But nice try.
William Bjornson
Please note that 'field conditions' are VERY different from the controlled results which have been published so far. The Pfizer vaccine is impractical and better vaccines are available but, as AntiqueSaving pointed out above, held up by corporate competitive psychopathy and government corruption. No one will want to produce the Pfizer vaccine. even if allowed, because of the heavy price in storage and overall viral efficacy security. The Moderna vaccine is also an RNA vaccine but does not require such extreme and difficult to maintain safety measures. Perhaps virusrex could tell us why? Or tell us the meaning of "but it comes with less antigenic materials" in a substance mix where 'antigenicity' is the exactly desired aim? This could be a good discussion if allowed...
justasking
This requirement should have been lifted, or at least addressed early on. Political will and good leadership is what's lacking.
virusrex
In what are they different? what conditions are impossible to guarantee on countries like Japan?
Again, vaccines are different, and some will have one advantage over others but that do not make them better for everybody because they are compensated with disadvantages on other details, there is no vaccine that is perfect, none.
Sure, prove it, your personal opinion based on ignoring very basic things about the vaccine (such as when is important to take care of RNases) is not a valid argument to conclude it. Bring objective proof that other vaccines have no disadvantages against this one, or accept that it is just your personal and very subjective opinion.
It takes no time flat to see the composition of the vaccines,
https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/you-asked-we-answered-are-covid-19-vaccine-ingredients-public
And you can see that the lipid nanovesicle is different, this means delivery is also different and that can explain why moderna requires over 3 times more mRNA to reach basically the same effect, it can be that the higher temperatures make the RNA unstable so a lot of it is lost before delivery, it can be that the vesicle do not deliver the RNA to the cells efficiently this would indicate a variation of the dose that is much higher than Pfizer. This is not desirable.
And no, amount (and variety) of antigens is not the same as antigenicity. You want an appropriate level of the later (not too much, not too little) with the least possible amount of the first. Depending on the person even the buffers can give problems, so it is natural to desire never to give more of the main antigen than what is absolutely necessary, and also not include other antigens if possible. A vaccine that works without any adjuvant is better than a vaccine that needs them.
Higher amount of mRNA at this point is a disadvantage, that could increase the risk of unpredicted effects, Pfizer would be at an advantage then because of a higher safety profile. Maybe in the future we will know that 100ug or 200 or more is a safe amount, but for now having a lower amount without reducing the efficacy is a big advantage. Health authorities can decide what to prioritize. If a country have the infrastructure necessary to use ultra-cold temperatures for the vaccines (like Japan does) and gives a lot of value to prevent negative effects as much as possible (again like Japan) then Pfizer vaccine can be a better vaccine for this specific situation.
Maybe for other countries price would be a much more important parameter than efficacy, for others it would be availability, for others safety may not be such a heavy requirement, that is why it is desirable to have many vaccines approved for human use, so each country can choose the best one for its own situation.
as_the_crow_flies
As soon as February? It is February! I mean, who writes this stuff?
Israel has already vaccinated 56 per 100 people, the UK 14 per 100. Even the US has managed 9 per 100.
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
Good ol' Japan should have completed its annual vaccination preparation drill and oiled the faxes by National Disaster Day. Oh, and refrigerator manufacturers are rolling it in.
We saw the article a couple of days ago with a dry run at a vaccination centre in Kawasaki. Capacity: (drum roll) - about 200 vaccinations a day! Hope they plan more than one centre in Kawasaki (population 1.4m)
Meanwhile, in the first world....
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/11/thousands-of-hospital-staff-to-be-deployed-in-covid-vaccine-rollout
Sven Asai
Don’t forget to make them really unique and decorate the freezers in demon slayer design. lol
i@n
You actually think its better this way?
i@n
Very unfortunate. Hope they do something about it
anon99999
I guess this will not happen here
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/01/us/vaccine-hunters-covid-trnd/index.html
The easily expired vaccine because of the short usability of the vaccine after it is thawed, will go to the rubbish or more likely they will just use ineffectual expired doses on people as they wouldn’t even understand the expiry issues after it is thawed.
virusrex
There is nothing mysterious about the drop of influenza deaths, the social distancing measures intended for COVID-19 are much more effective for other infectious respiratory diseases that are transmitted with less ease, this is a (positive) side effect of taking proper care of not spreading viruses. Anything is produced very quickly when it does not have tu surpass other available options that are good enough (and is given billions to be developed), Animal experiments were finished long before the human trials, that is why they are called pre-clinical studies and very cost intensive measures have been done to prevent health services from collapsing, it is not like this was avoided without doing anything about it.
The scientific evidence points clearly that this is not the case, not only the process has been repeatedly proved to happen in nature, the examples of studies where viruses gain infectivity for human cells depend on a completely different process (much more efficient) so there is no merit on thinking the illogical option must be the truth. So are the new variants, terribly easy to predict happening and one of the reasons why vaccines have been developed so quickly. It is as surprising as to observe climatic changes when the science have been predicting it happening for decades.
I would really recommend you to improve whatever sources you are using to understand the situation, you are getting the wrong idea about almost everything related to the pandemic.