AZ will work flat out to improve yield. It’s better for everybody, including their bottom line.
AFAIK all the pharmas are having yield problems.
Graham wrote:
In referencing the big companies and who does what it is perhaps enlightening to distinguish between R (research) and D (development).
The big pharma companies do nothing like as much research and innovation as they used to. They are far more concerned with the D, which costs big bucks and is the industry I work in – clinical research. The research and innovation comes from smaller operators (small companies, biotech startups and university tech-transfer spin-outs) who then look to market their IP to pharma companies.
Absolutely! I can even remember very serious discussions within very big PharmaCos some 10 yrs. ago (at the peak of the first life science startup hype wave) if they should not go out of R&D altogether and only take care of C …
And btw.: This industry shift doesn’t keep big Pharma still to justify their huge margins vis-a-vis the paying side of the industry with the tremendous risks…
The downside of this development is that all of the sudden the capital market (and its wanted and unwanted mechanics) start to play a major role in Pharma: The key reason why Sovaldi has been (and still is) so extremely expensive is not its extreme R&D cost but the tremendous 11bn Gilead had to pay to acquire Pharmasset…
Malibuflyer wrote:
if they should not go out of R&D altogether and only take care of C …
The only reason they don’t do this is because the pipeline would dry up due to lack of funds for D…..
WingsWaterAndWheels wrote:
Not so sure EU cocked up though, heard today that they will get 20% more of the AZ vaccine than what AZ had said when they warned about reduced capacity. I don’t know exactly it these 20% are linked to the EU strategy, but I guess we will never know… It’s politics anyway…
My guess is that AZ took an under-promise-and-over-deliver approach when they gave their bad news last week. They’ve discussed it at length and now promised a bit more (9m extra doses).
Lots of estimating going on I should imagine – we do it all the time on pharmaceutical development timelines and costs. If someone doesn’t like your estimate then you just estimate something different :-) Fun and games!
LeSving wrote:
Has that been in the center of the media? Nothing from Sweden or Denmark that I know of, but maybe in the trash press?
I suppose they would not be all that concerned. I am not sure most of the rest of the world is interested at the moment what the EU gets up to (or not). I have had a look at one or two of the better German papers and there is certainly plenty of unfavourable comment there.
LeSving wrote:
Well, it would be nice to hear from some EU members, or have they all left? Grantly the “incidence” has been in the news, due to the effect it causes to the vaccination program (also in Norway by the way), but all this bad mouthing ? Has that been in the center of the media? Nothing from Sweden or Denmark that I know of, but maybe in the trash press?
Of course it has been covered in Swedish media, but the fuss isn’t nearly what it is here in EuroGA.
Airborne_Again wrote:
Of course it has been covered in Swedish media, but the fuss isn’t nearly what it is here in EuroGA.
Sums it up 
This comes out of a survey done by a large DNA database, 1M people polled, with my own parameters entered
6% chance of being hospitalised. I’d say that’s pretty crap. That is also way more than 1% chance of death.
It’s 7.5% hospitalisation rate out of their 10,000 positive cases, and those who died didn’t participate, so the results look even better than they actually are.
Definitely a good idea to not catch this thing!
Over 65s getting vaccine invitations from next week…
Peter wrote:
I’d say that’s pretty crap.
However, I’d say the biggest crap is their methodology!
They say by themselves that they have 1mn participants in this survey but only 750 Hospitalizations – that is less than 0.1% of their partizipants hospitalized. If they predict you a 6% (and me btw. an 8%) hospitalization probability we are in an extremely small part of their survey population with very shaky statistics.
In addition the only pre-existing diseases they control for are FLD, hypertension and T2-diabetes. Nothing about COPD or other lung conditions.
Btw.: Playing around with the input values I did not find a combination that gave me less than “1-5%” hospitalization risk – so even their lowest risk estimate they give is more than 10 times the hospitalization rate they actually observed in their sample…
Something’s not right there. Some quick research indicates that 23andMe has some ‘interesting’ history. Like @Malibuflyer I couldn’t get it to give a value below a rather vague ‘1-5%’ no matter what I entered, and for my own personal info it didn’t make a difference whether I exercised or not. Very crude.
Given what we know about hospitalisation and death rates in the population as a whole, it isn’t plausible to see such high figures for a generally-healthy profile if it purports to be compensating for your individual factors.
I’d have thought that a personalised risk assessment is all about understanding that risk is not spread evenly throughout a population. If across the whole population the risk of death after getting Covid-19 is 1% for a certain age range, then it does not mean that as a relatively healthy member of that population your own risk is 1%. Your own risk is far, far lower because almost all the risk in that group lies with a relatively small number of people – generally the unhealthiest.
It’s like a cheetah going for lunch and picking off one wildebeest from a herd of 100. With the crude average in this scenario, each wildebeest has a 1% chance of death. However, we know this is not the case because not all wildebeest are the same. Almost all the risk lies with the few weakest members of the herd because they will be at the back once the chase gets going, therefore most individual wildebeest have significantly <1% chance of being lunch.
