Suga vows to secure enough vaccines as hopes rise for breakthrough

I agree with P.

Glad to see the government is trying to take care of a serious situation affecting Millions in Japan and worldwide. If this vaccine is successful we can export to other countries to help them get back on their feet as well.

While the biggest sources of infections were still Tokyo and Osaka, there continued to be a worrying increase of clusters in northern regions such as Hokkaido, a popular tourist destination for its nature and cuisine.

If people were not being encouraged to travel all over Japan then there would not be a pressing need for a vaccine.

That is really good news!

Vaccines are here to safe the people from sickness.

I hope Japan can get the enough doses to vaccine all the people by beginning of next year.

I read in another news this morning, that the US will start the vaccination already next month.

@ReasonandWisdom

 If this vaccine is successful we can export to other countries to help them get back on their feet as well.

I believe Japan will be importing and not exporting this vaccine so in this case Japan will not be exporting a vaccine.

They're going to have to make the vaccine mandatory in the US if they want to beat it. Anti-vaxxers are on the rise, more misinformed and more bold in their claims then they've ever been.

*than

Man, I really can't type this morning.

@JPGB

You take it first and tell us how it went given that they have completely skipped the animal testing phase.

And good lock getting injury compensation from the J. governement.

If I were elderly then I might chance my health on an untested vaccine but I am not so I won’t.

The last outbreak In 1918 lasted a year so I do not see much point actually.

Until now I have relied on vitamin C and D and eating healthily without smoking to keep my immune system up-it seems to be working so far.

I wonder whether, if Trump challenge is successful, that suddenly there' s a problem with the vaccine and the miracle cure goes back for "further testing."

It just seems so odd that just a short time ago that SARS-CoVid-19 vaccines were still months away, and people getting together at Trump rallies masked and unmasked were evil super-spreaders. But now that Biden has "won," this vaccine is just about ready and Democrats are dancing and chanting close together masked and unmasked in the street and in bars, social distancing be damned!

And given that credible experts are coming out to denounce lockdowns and the efficacy of PCR tests even in the face of media and Big Tech censorship of their information, it seems that the whole virus fear campaign is coming apart.

But hey, if you want to take a vaccine for this, go ahead. Just don't try to force anyone else into it it either by mandate or guilt-tripping, because it will backfire.

While the legislation obliges the population to "make an effort" to be vaccinated, it will not be strictly mandatory and there should be no discrimination against those who choose not to do so, Suga said.

The last part is reassuring, but why did they use the word "obliges". What happened to "urges" or "encourages"?

Anyway, by the time the vaccine will become available, it will no longer be very relevant, as many of us will likely already be immune and considering the low death rate.

Maybe people should focus on the saving lives part instead of whose presidency it was delivered under.

People have not understood yet that coronavirus is like flu, you will need to get vaccinated regularly.

Personally, I won't take vaccine since there is a risk and the chance to get bad are low in view of my age. It is a balance to assess for everyone. Old people (over 75) should consider vaccination.

My grandmother gain overall disability because she was testing new pills, but from her own will for science and was already old enough (around 80).

It everyone's choice however No jab No travel simple!

What's the latest on the vaccine being developed by Osaka University , no news for the last 3-4 months. Are trials proceeding ? It's always good to have a home-grown vaccine .

Well, all hail the vaccination program.

That said, the logistics are a nightmare waiting to to happen.

Yet health experts cautioned that the vaccine, should it be approved, was no silver bullet - not least because the genetic material it's made from needs to be stored at temperatures of minus 70 degrees Celsius (-94 F) or below.

https://japantoday.com/category/features/health/how-pfizer-vaccine-could-be-cold-comfort-for-some-asian-nations

Genetic material...........!? What is all that about?

Not wishing to rain on Pfizer's parade, this all sounds a tad rushed.

Less haste more speed.

Then the common side effects of vaccines. High temperature, swellings, fever. possibly worse,

I may not be the pretties flower in the community, but I would be rather miffed to wake up one morning sporting a mustache.!!

I think I will wait, research, wear a mask, and socially distance for the time being.

Doesn’t Japanese law state that western medicine, although approved in their home countries, must be tested on Japanese before legally entering the Japanese market? Correct me if I’m wrong on that. If it’s true however, how long would that delay the availability?

While the legislation obliges the population to "make an effort" to be vaccinated, it will not be strictly mandatory and there should be no discrimination against those who choose not to do so, Suga said.

There better not be Suga, I will hold you to that. I will NOT be taking this vaccine next year, or the year after that, or for many years thereafter. Trust me, I have all my legal ducks lined up, and if there is any attempt to coerce me you will be going to court.

So every other vaccine needed a minimum 2 to 3 years for testing but now ... bazinga!

Seems legit to me (snicker, snicker).

You take it first and tell us how it went given that they have completely skipped the animal testing phase.

That is false, an absolute requirement for any clinical trial to be approved is to have full safety and efficacy tests done on animals. No vaccine candidate currently on phase III skipped animal testing.

If I were elderly then I might chance my health on an untested vaccine but I am not so I won’t.

Which is completely fine, except the vaccine is not untested, and the natural infection is very likely to have medium to long term health risks not yet clarified. You risk your health much more with an infection than with an approved vaccine (but of course you are free to do it).

I wonder whether, if Trump challenge is successful, that suddenly there' s a problem with the vaccine and the miracle cure goes back for "further testing."

That is the problem with defaulting to unproved world wide conspiracies to explain reality. No matter what happens some conspiracy must be behind it, no matter lack of proof.

Anyway, by the time the vaccine will become available, it will no longer be very relevant, as many of us will likely already be immune and considering the low death rate.

No professional health association in the world thinks that, and they have the scientific data to sustain that position.

People have not understood yet that coronavirus is like flu, you will need to get vaccinated regularly.

That is false, the flu have many different serotypes (strains of virus that can escape the immunity made against other strain) the pandemic coronavirus only has one in the whole time it has been here. There is no evidence that a regular vaccine is going to be necessary. If that were the case reinfections would be very common.

Even for young healthy people the risk from an approved vaccine is lower than in the natural infection.

What's the latest on the vaccine being developed by Osaka University , no news for the last 3-4 months. Are trials proceeding ? It's always good to have a home-grown vaccine .

Osaka University's vaccine just began phase I trials on July, it is delayed at least 4 months from the leading candidates, even if they manage to run all III phases smoothly (with enough volunteers getting infected to make statistical results significative) it would be around spring before they get this kind of preliminary data to announce.

Doesn’t Japanese law state that western medicine, although approved in their home countries, must be tested on Japanese before legally entering the Japanese market? Correct me if I’m wrong on that. If it’s true however, how long would that delay the availability?

In theory no more than a couple of weeks, companies can deliver doses for research purposes in the Japanese population even from now since it is planned to seek approval, tests can be then run on parallel and prove it is comparatively safe.

So every other vaccine needed a minimum 2 to 3 years for testing but now ... bazinga!

That is false, there are vaccines right now being used (and safe and effective) that use a similar schedule, with a Phase III or around half a year. There is no absolute requirement for testing to last for years except where known problems are expected (like antibody dependent enhancement for example).

@virusrex

Thank you for your service my good sir.

Dear Mark..

My kids, my wife, and i, doesn't take any vaccines. It's a choose and u gotta respect it.

@virusrex

"........natural infection is very likely to have medium to long term health risks......"

Did you write this with a straight face?

"That is false, an absolute requirement for any clinical trial to be approved is to have full safety and efficacy tests done on animals. No vaccine candidate currently on phase III skipped animal testing."

Are you sure about that?:  ""https://www.peta.org/blog/covid-19-vaccine-fda-animal-testing/

"Last month, for the first time in history, both the FDA and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) greenlighted a landmark human clinical trial of a vaccine without first requiring extensive animal tests.

So every other vaccine needed a minimum 2 to 3 years for testing but now ... bazinga!

Seems legit to me (snicker, snicker).

Yeah, my understanding is that a condition for rushing the vaccine trials is that there should not currently be any safe and effective treatment. I believe that might be why they came up with the infamous Lancet paper concluding that HCQ was toxic and ineffective. That paper was retracted, but the damage had been done.

There have since been many studies that have concluded that HCQ is safe and effective, especially when given early:

https://c19study.com/

Of course, those who hope to profit from vaccine sales will continue to deny those studies.

My kids, my wife, and i, doesn't take any vaccines. It's a choose and u gotta respect it

Your wife and kids choice ? Hmm ..

@john smith.

vaccinations are there to stop disease and illness in its track and to control it. That’s why we don’t need to worry about such things like polio or smallpox anymore. You’re right, it is a choice you are fully able to make. You are also choosing to put the general population at risk though. With little backed evidence of the negative effects on vaccinations, I would say more research is needed before you make such bold decisions. But again, you have that freedom. Just saying.

Vaccines are here to safe the people from sickness.

Nope, this is for those who are not auto-recovring from the virius, the 3-4% of the infected.

Did you write this with a straight face?

Of course, if you follow the news on COVID-19 it has been related with long lasting health problems and sequelae even in patients that never were hospitalized on the first time. It would not be surprising at all that a few years from now people infected ended up with importantly higher risks all over the place, from endocrine disease to neurological problems. Medical researchers in many countries are setting up vigilance systems to check for this possibility.

Are you sure about that?:  ""https://www.peta.org/blog/covid-19-vaccine-fda-animal-testing/

Yes, the important word in your quote is "extensive". This would not be the first nor the last disease where years of testing on tens of thousands of animals are not a requirement, that does not mean that animal tests are not done, they are and the proof is still a requirement, just not endlessly long and complicated ones.

Yeah, my understanding is that a condition for rushing the vaccine trials is that there should not currently be any safe and effective treatment. I

For all the vaccine candidates currently on phase III there is no rushing being done, the protocols are in line with what has been done with other vaccines of proved efficacy and safety that are in use right now.

There have since been many studies that have concluded that HCQ is safe and effective, especially when given early:

https://c19study.com/

As I already corrected you on this, just collecting high and low quality studies and giving them the same weight is not a valid scientific practice. It is well know that studies that showed protection by HCQ this is due to biased selection of patients with higher risk being systematically chosen for the no-treatment group.

When a proper meta-analysis is done it is clear that the best designed studies all point to no use at all, and the lower the quality of the studies the less clear this conclusion becomes. That is why it was concluded that HCQ has no use for COVID-19.

https://www.self.com/story/hydroxychloroquine-myth-coronavirus

Another thing is that there are drugs that have already proved to be much better at improving the treatment, even compared with the worst studies on HCQ, like dexamethasone. And that has absolutely no effect on reducing the demand for a vaccine. A drug that prevents some deaths do not let people go back to normal, a vaccine with over 90% efficacy would allow at least something much closer to it.

Japanese contracted with the virus is 100,000 and Japanese population is 120,000,000. It is less than 1%. Is it reasonable that 99% of healthy people receive the vaccine? Safety of the vaccine must be checked carefully so that healthy people do not become ill because of the side effects of the vaccine.

Japanese contracted with the virus is 100,000 and Japanese population is 120,000,000. It is less than 1%. Is it reasonable that 99% of healthy people receive the vaccine?

It is very important to point out that people are not living their normal lives for this limited spreading to be happening. If a vaccine replaces the very heavy measures still in place, it would be perfectly justified.

Safety is being examined very carefully over a half a year period on thousands of people. That is. statistically speaking, enough to estimate if the risk is importantly lower from the vaccine than from the infection.

At this point we only have preliminary data from the phase III, it looks promising, but it is still necessary to have the full data at the end of the agreed protocol of the trial to be able to say this.

@Virusrex

Thank you for your comments, they are the best scientific ones I ever read.

I usually always agree with you on everything, but

There is no evidence that a regular vaccine is going to be necessary. If that were the case reinfections would be very common.

There is no evidence of the contrary either... We still don't know the duration of the immunity triggered by the vaccines. I may be wrong about it but

vaccine-triggered immunity is not always the same as disease-triggered immunity

Pfizer is using a brand new technique (mRNA), so it's too soon to say how long the immunity will last.

other seasonal coronaviruses (Sars-COV-1, MERS) immunity seems to be 4-5 years

Let's be optimistics and say that the immunity will be more than 1 year.

Doesn’t need one for me.

Thank you for your comments, they are the best scientific ones I ever read

I agree!

I am a pro Vaxer, but I don't cleary understand the medical investigations behind the vaccines.

But Virusrex explanations always gives me a better understanding.

I guess he is a medical laboratory scientist or something like that...

There is no evidence of the contrary either... We still don't know the duration of the immunity triggered by the vaccines. I may be wrong about it but vaccine-triggered immunity is not always the same as disease-triggered immunity

The point was that coronavirus is not like the flu, the mechanism of immunity scape is not present in the coronavirus family, so a yearly vaccine to immunize for the new serotype that becomes predominant is not a realistic probability.

Now, there is evidence that indicate that cell mediated immunity is stimulated strongly by the vaccines, this kind of immunity is quite long lasted as corroborated by previous highly pathogenic coronavirus infections (SARS and MERS) that is why is is more likely that vaccines, heavily symptomatic patients (and according to a new report also asymptomatic patients) develop immunity that will protect for at least as long as what has been observed for SARS (so more than 15 years). Without a natural reservoir in the wild 3 to 4 years of immunity from a vaccine still means the disease can be eradicated, anything above just makes it easier to do it.

Coronavirus that cause common cold stimulate another kind of immunity pattern, called "broadly protective immunity" that is in comparison shorter and less intense, maybe because the infection produced by those coronaviruses is also much more limited. That shorter immunity is still enough to control the pandemic for long enough to eradicate it (with a lot of effort) or make it not more dangerous than seasonal influenza with specific antiviral therapies that may be discovered during that time.

The advantage of the mRNA vaccine is that it will not only stimulate immunity for the produced protein as in an inactivated vaccine, but it also triggers the intracellular immunity pathways that detect viral genetic sequences and foreign proteins being produced in the cells (like an attenuated vaccine, but without the extra risks) so that is also something that points towards longer lasting immunity.

I am concerned about the complete absence of news about the Covid-19 vaccine supposedly being developed by Osaka University in conjunction with a biotech firm. There should be more transparency about this because Japanese people may be more inclined to take a local vax rather than a warp-speeded foreign vaccine.

Japanese contracted with the virus is 100,000 and Japanese population is 120,000,000. It is less than 1%.

There have so far been a total of 110,487 confirmed infections in Japan. The actual number is certainly much higher, I suspect over 10-fold higher. It also appears that many of us were already immune to SARSCoV2 probably due to previous exposures to related viruses. And an antibody study that we recently discussed on JT showed that over the summer many have made antibodies to SARSCoV2. That study was limited and we should extrapolate it to say that 50% of Japanese people made antibodies over the summer, but I suspect many have made them. I feel we are on the verge of achieving herd immunity; that's something that terrifies certain people.

As I already corrected you on this, just collecting high and low quality studies...

Yeah, you keep saying that, but simply saying that the studies that agree with you are high quality and those that do not are low quality is not the same are "correcting" me and it is clearly no scientific.

There have been 165 studies on HCQ (100 peer reviewed). They showed that HCQ is very safe (unlike remdesivir) when given early at the recommended doses, and several studies showed a clear positive effect. If these HCQ results were seriously and objectively considered, it would be used as treatment... and vaccine candidates would undergo normal clinical trials (years) with greater confidence.

The advantage of the mRNA vaccine is that it will not only stimulate immunity for the produced protein as in an inactivated vaccine, but it also triggers the intracellular immunity pathways that detect viral genetic sequences and foreign proteins being produced in the cells (like an attenuated vaccine, but without the extra risks) so that is also something that points towards longer lasting immunity.

Yeah, I initially had a relatively positive impression of mRNA vaccines, as they do not contain any byproducts of human fetal cells or monkey cells or live viruses. BUT, mRNA vaccines are not completely harmless. Months ago, in early clinical trials of the Moderna mRNA vaccine, 3 of the 15 human guinea pigs in the high dose cohort suffered a “serious adverse event”.

Moderna did not release its clinical trial study or raw data, but its press release, which was freighted with inconsistencies, acknowledged that three volunteers developed Grade 3 systemic events defined by the FDA as “Preventing daily activity and requiring medical intervention.”

The injuries were transient and self-resolving, but I worry about what could happen when mRNA vaccines are given to people who are not so young or healthy...

It also appears that many of us were already immune to SARSCoV2 probably due to previous exposures to related viruses

No, there is no evidence of this. Cross-reactivity from T cell is called reactivity and not cross-neutralization for a reason. As I mentioned the last time you said this the reactivity profile from the people only exposed to other viruses differs substantially from what is observed from people infected of COVID-19 or vaccinated in the trials. This difference is enough to make invalid any claims of immunity.

The badly botched study of antibodies is also more proof about the lack of experience of the authors (and their very lax approach to human rights and ethics) than of common immunity to COVID-19, according to that study it would be impossible by this time to have even stable number of positive cases, since the positive rates are actually increasing that is enough to prove them wrong.

Yeah, you keep saying that, but simply saying that the studies that agree with you are high quality and those that do not are low quality is not the same are "correcting" me and it is clearly no scientific

and several studies showed a clear positive effect. If these HCQ results were seriously and objectively considered

Again, that is the problem with thinking any study has the same value, if the authors of those same studies recognize their methods are biased and that properly randomized studies would be a much better evidence you have no argument to contradict them.

And no, there reason why the articles are of high or low quality are not the conclusions reached but the methods followed, much better methods (specially proper randomization) is what makes them of much higher quality, this is acknowledged even by the authors of the studies you want to misrepresent. They themselves argue that proper unbiased randomization could prove their limited conclusions wrong, and it did.

The best evidence clearly points to HCQ having no utility against COVID-19, I know you don't like to read, but the link I already put here clears that out. Even if you keep repeating that many low quality studies say something different that still means they are biased and wrong because of that.

Yeah, I initially had a relatively positive impression of mRNA vaccines, as they do not contain any byproducts of human fetal cells or monkey cells or live viruses. BUT, mRNA vaccines are not completely harmless. Months ago, in early clinical trials of the Moderna mRNA vaccine, 3 of the 15 human guinea pigs in the high dose cohort suffered a “serious adverse event”.

Since you don't know to which group those volunteers belong it is perfectly possible that any of them (or all) belonged to the placebo group. This means you cannot arbitrarily assign the effect to the vaccine as if it was the only possibility. People do get fevers, pain, accidents, etc. that prevents daily activity all the time.

Also, do the 20% of the thousand volunteers participating in the phase III present these adverse effects? Because that is precisely why such large numbers are included, to see the real incidence rate.

Phase III is done with people that are not young and healthy (criteria of inclusion mention specifically people with preconditions or advanced age) your worries are only because you don't understand what are the phases of a human clinical trial.

Trump said that there would be a vaccine by the end of the year and no one listened!!!

Please don't rush... again. Japan ALWAYS rushes to buy something on the slightest whiff it MIGHT work, and then when it doesn't we're stuck with a bill for storage of useless devices/meds.

A protection from this novelty ..... and the best bet is a multinational for distribution and an Osmanic Prussian developer startup. Well well, Europe is alive and kicking.

All hail Suga the Savior !

Only himself could secure the transaction.

Vaccination compulsory ?

What a completely sick talking...Hope, promises and possible contracts for sufficient vaccines...What comes next? Prayers and voodoo dolls? Now listen, that underestimating and all the false strategies lead to nothing else but our cemeteries. That virus is made to be and released as biological warfare and therefore has to be treated as such. It can survive up to 70 days in living spreaders who show no symptoms. Two vaccine doses every some weeks or months, distribution at minus 80 degrees to all corners, also in Africa etc.? Forget it. You need anyway sooner or later a prepared, concerted and well-planned as well as exemptionless complete shutdown for those 70 days, otherwise the exponential process cannot be handled. Now laugh, censor or ignore, but please do me the favor and don’t cry afterwards while fighting the last hours in intensive care units.