interesting places you visiting

I agree... But I think we really do need to be careful. I mean, a vaccine could potentially have long-term effects that require time to manifest -- particularly a vaccine that was rushed in development and through trials. We don't want to give a huge percentage of the population a vaccine that could, for example, end up proving to damage the nervous system.

Curiously, has the development of a new vaccine ever been rushed like this before, in human history?

(By the way, I am not at all anti-vaccine. I just think we need to be careful in terms of a rushed vaccine that is given to a huge percentage of the human population).

Yes. Thank you. Somehow I had missed that other thread altogether! Only noticed it today. Or else I'd not really noticed that it and this were separate threads.

The whole topic of Corona/Covid19 seems so all-encompassing, like a heavy, sodden blanket that weighs down on us, or trips us up, or even when it doesn't, someone else will soon be along to talk about it. Recently, I spent an evening with a friend, and we shared so many other topics that we actually didn't mention this for a whole four hours... it was lovely. Otherwise, it seems to creep into every interaction, one way or another.

I'm somewhat surprised by this. Usually, foreign military isn't accepted nilly-willy due to sovereignty issues. Belgium's government isn't mentioned even once however, let alone a formal agreement. As if permission to use Belgium's airspace and land there was a given.

Does the UK military have some kind of permanent landing rights in Belgium? Perhaps from WW2?

More likely NATO related. Or just that they are military aircraft but operating as civil (they would only be transporters and not armed)

Unarmed freighters would be allowed to even transit Swiss airspace without anything more than a simple notification. UK unarmed military aircraft* performing a humanitarian mission would need to notify Belgium but they are allies and permission would be granted. Perhaps they would even use Belgium military airfields, perhaps a commercial airport.

The Belgiums would be happy to help.

*The crew could even be carrying side arms, that wouldn’t be unusual.

40,000 having had the vaccine is incorrect, 40,000 have been in a trial, half of which would have had a placebo. I thought you were better informed.

The Pfizer phase 3 alone had 43000 participants.

So just 21,500 have had the vaccine.

Read the Pfizer press release. There are also a number of phase 3 tests with other vaccine candidates.

https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-re...vid-19-vaccine

Moderna's phase 3 trial had 30,000 participants.

I didn't see his post until you quoted it, but the article, which he clearly didn't read in any detail, even says:

Not very bright.

Impactful article on those we have lost during this pandemic ... not common to see such stories in Swiss Media. Particularly striking is the rather young patient who died because the hospital was full in November:

https://interaktiv.bernerzeitung.ch/...n-der-schweiz/

Posted in reply to my post so I could not have seen it first. Your personal attacks are usually better than that.

First prize for not being very bright goes to XXXX,

I lost both my uncle and aunt to COVID this week, they died within two days of each other.

Sorry for your loss.

At least in the AZ study there probably isn't enough data for that to be conclusively proved. 30 infections in total was it? What's the expectation level on a severe case? About 1?

(YT) What you always wanted to know about the main vaccines (but were afraid to ask)
Moderna vs Pfizer/BioNTech vs AstraZeneca/Oxford

An overview how they work, and the main characteristics of the AZ/Oxford test.

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but I don't know anything about vaccine trials.

In these trials, one group gets the vaccine and one doesn't. Clear enough. After that, are both sets of participants deliberately exposed to Covid, or do they just go out and live life as usual? If deliberately exposed: for how long, how much, etc.?

If the results companies have shared so far are only based on potential community spread, then the effectiveness is not necessarily that high. However if every person who was vaccinated "sniffed" the virus or whatever and still didn't get sick then that would be more impressive.

Hopefully that makes sense.

It does, but no, intentional exposure/infection (human challenge trial) is considered unethical. I seem to remember that there would have been enough volunteers at least for the Moderna test but still, no. At least that's the situation for the three main candidates.