Rejoice! There’s a vaccine! An experimental version has produced a strong positive response! We’ll have a therapeutic version available by September!
Ha ha. No we won’t. The measurable response to a vaccine being trialled by Oxford’s Jenner Institute used several thousand non-COVID-positive volunteers and to quote a surprisingly unreflective Guardian article on the Lancet write-up of the study:
The effect of the vaccine was measured by the amount of antibodies and T-cells it generates in the blood of the volunteers — not in any response to the virus itself.
So it triggered a generic immune response. No word yet on whether it will actually work against the virus.
The series of rolling announcements from the Jenner Institute — it’s the one who said there’d be a vaccine by September — is publicity with a purpose.
Multiple institutes are working on a virus, the competition for state and philanthropic funding is tough, and of course there’s the jockeying for private investment. The Jenner Institute is developing this vaccine with AstraZeneca, which is parallel-producing billions of doses in case it actually works.
So AstraZeneca’s stock must have gone sky high on this announcement, right? Actually it fell by 3.4%. Why? Well its stocks had already gone up by 21% this year as the overall market flatlined.
Why did its stock climb? Could it be all those breathless announcements about a vaccine by September? And why the fall? Could it be that the trial results were disappointing in ways that professional pharma investors could suss but that science stenography, posing as journalism, couldn’t?
The vaccine gold rush runs on confidence, as all capitalism does, but this time with a twist. The search for a vaccine bears with it the hope that all this will be over as soon as possible — and leave no mark.
There’s caution behind the spin
The massive global parallel vaccine development process makes that more likely than it might once have been. But given that, the relative caution beyond the actual spin shows the real difficulties we face.
Barring a jackpot hit in the next few weeks, there ain’t going to be a vaccine this year or the first half of next — something the government’s advisers may have told it and which may have triggered the surprise announcement that the JobSpin-name programs will be going all the way to March.
The Morrison government may have also quietly conceded that New South Wales is about to blow up, and was simply lagging Victoria in the resurgence of the first wave. Other states would follow, their resurgence delayed simply because nobody wants to go there.
Governments running high-volume, high-demand, high-velocity capitalist societies are doing one of two things: retreating into absolute fantasy, as in the United States or Brazil, or reluctantly facing the fact that this event is going to change the structure of social life in Western societies.
The dimwitted among us haven’t realised this because they haven’t seen a series of permanent qualitative changes implemented. But quantitative change becomes qualitative change, and we got a lot more quantitative coming.
‘Pattern maintenance’ demanded
Even if this was all over tomorrow, so much has been interrupted that to simply resume it would be a declarative act in itself. Society’s smooth reproduction demands what the American sociologist Talcott Parsons called “pattern maintenance”: to guard against the notion that everything is arbitrary and absurd.
Take something as simple as commuting. Before COVID-19, the trains that went through my station — three stops from the city — were ludicrously crammed from 7am to 9am, the core rush hour having spread out as people went earlier and later to avoid it.
Sometimes I’d watch one of these trains go by — people in jumpers and jeans, puffer jackets and T-shirts, tapping their phones, buds in their ears — and have the vision of the same train decades earlier: everyone in suits, dresses or overalls, 40 copies of The Age or The Sun in each carriage, one or two people wearing a newfangled Walkman headset.
The difference was, of course, they all had to get in at the same time, be in the same place, for an office to work, for the city to function. What was remarkable, and onerous, about the miserable current rush-hour commute was that it was entirely unnecessary for 90% of the people on it.
Office coming and going could be staggered: home, workspace and office working could be combined. The whole thing could have been consciously abolished about a decade ago.
Will it simply now come back? The idea that you stand inside someone’s armpit for 12 stations, or idle on the freeway listening to Shazza and the Gob on KAK FM, just to get into an office to Whatsapp the person who’s sitting three hot desks from you? Or will a sufficient interruption break the power of the current ensemble of capital and life to smoothly reproduce?
So much of what was hitherto required now seems absurd and unnecessary. So much was so easily abolished. They could still put it all back in place right now. They are desperate to do so.
But that presumes no second wave, no third wave, no rolling series of interruptions. It presumes no COVID-25 in five years. Or COVID-21. Or an entirely different virus borne on a single global system.
For better and worse — it would be really great if one shop other than Amazon were here in six months — this virus is slowly building the material of a revolution in everyday life which could give the great transformations of the 20th century a run for their money (cashlessly, of course).
So the hope for the fast arrival of a vaccine — which would be, unquestionably, a great event — has a lot riding on it.
It’s not just our bodies they’re trying to save. The aim is to restore a system immunised against change, a whole body politic.
What I dislike about lockdown:
Not being able to be in the same physical space as friends and family
Not being able to go bushwalking or get out into the country
Not being able to go to Sunday brunch/dinner with friends
Not being able to attend live music venues, or theatres, or pubs etc
Being stuck in the same environment, day in, day out.
What I like about lockdown:
Life is more peaceful; slower, calmer, simpler.
It’s weeded out a lot of what had little purpose or was discretionary
It’s done wonders for my weekly expenditure
I think my carbon footprint has gone down. I’m certainly driving a lot less
It’s put focus back on what is truly important: home, family, friends, our health …
and …
I don’t catch CoVid 19.
Swings and roundabouts, really, but it would be nice if at least some of the benefits can be retained post-lockdown, if and when that time comes.
This thought keeps nibbling away- saved by pandemic interruption!
Ok for us oldies- if we survive – but what sort of life for our offspring?
Hadn’t thought about Shazza and Gob losing half their commuting audience.
Broiton property prices not looking good.
Agreed on patterns changing being something that could have been done a decade ago. But that assumes a decade ago, or even today, we had sufficient infrastructure in place to be able to work from home. With the NBN farce the Libs have us, going backwards is what will happen. Telstra will buy the Nbn for less than they were paid, if current valuations are correct, and we will be right back in 2007, with less incentive to move on.
Your confidence in this statement of negativity is as high as the Oxford vaccine makers, but more cynical in that it may seem a surer bet. But no, the reason for Oxford’s confidence is that they actually have all the experience perfect for this job–they could just plug-and-play exactly what they were doing in Oct-Dec last year because the spike protein of MERS shares a 40% to 50% similarity to the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2. It was ridiculously fortuitous timing (heck, you could easily work up a paranoid conspiracy theory around it) and is the reason why Oxford is leading the pack.
But it isn’t luck. Sarah Gilbert, and Jenner Institute director Adrian Hill, have spent the last 3 decades on optimising immune responses to difficult viruses and parasites like malaria. The T-cell response is a big thing and something neither the CanSino nor the Moderna attempts are likely to generate. (Now if you want to be cynical about Big Pharma, Moderna is yer target; it’s CEO & CMO liquidated 100% of their stockholdings–about US$55m worth–when it shot up after their premature & unpublished release of prelim trial results. Quite apart from ethics, it hardly seems a statement of confidence …)
I worked in the same institute as Gilbert and Hill (Wellcome Trust, prior to creation of the Jenner) and I was surprised by the public confidence because this is not her style. Essentially I think they know it will work, at least to a certain extent. But even if it is not the perfect knock-out blow everyone wants, even partial effectiveness is likely to be a huge game changer for the world. At the least it should turn it into a moderate flu season.
They are so confident that Oxford are almost certainly going to run a Challenge Trial, ie. in which volunteer patients will be deliberately infected. It will be run in parallel with the Phase 2/3 trial but is likely to produce more definitive evidence and possibly much quicker. Julian Savulescu, Australian bioethicist at Oxford, publicly supports the trial as do many other scientists though some fainthearts believe it is unethical.
Astra-Zeneca are running this as a not-for-profit operation (and some of the big costs in scale up have been covered by the UK govt) though of course that can mean various things. Obviously it can boost their shareprice, and probably (soto voce) lubricate FDA approvals on some of their other drugs in the pipeline etc. They have a $1.2bn deal with US BARDA to produce 300 million doses for the USA, though that will be conditional on these trials; in any case it works out to $4 a dose so no room for big profits. In the unlikely event that Moderna produce an effective vaccine, we’ll see how much they extort out of Donald Trump (who appointed Moderna’s former board member to head up “Operation Warp Speed”; typical Trump, what conflict of interest?). For a stars-and-stripes miracle cure that Trump will claim as his own, only 5 months out from an election? Priceless.
Old Trots don’t die, they are co-opted.