re: #130 ericblair

In good news about not-insane people, another effective COVID vaccine which is much easier to store and transport than the first two.

The Oxford AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine is a more conventional vaccine compared to the first two vaccine candidates which have announced test results, the encapsulated-mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. It’s more of a shotgun, a modified inactivated chimpanzee cold virus compared to the “sniper” spike-protein antagonist mRNA antibody generator. This makes it a lot cheaper to produce and there’s a greater worldwide capacity for production — it may be possible to produce 3 billion doses of this vaccine next year whereas only a few hundred million doses of the mRNA vaccines can be produced in the same time period.

Even with the reported 70% baseline effectiveness (and understand that those figures are based on only a few hundred placebo recipients worldwide going on to be infected with COVID-19 so the error bars are quite large) it’s still a good vaccine to have in the arsenal.