COVID-19 vaccines - are we there yet?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic, is a highly infectious human respiratory pathogen to which the global population had no prior immunity.The virus will likely continue to cause significant morbidity until there is a broadly effective vaccine.As of mid-December 2020, more than 200 COVID-19 vaccine candidates are in development and 11 have entered phase III clinical trials globally.All generate immunity to the viral spike glycoprotein.Three vaccine candidates have agreements for procurement and use in Australia if efficacy and safety requirements are met -one protein-based vaccine, one vaccine using a simian-derived adenovirus vector and one messenger RNA vaccine.The latter two vaccines have published interim analyses and efficacy results of their phase III trials.The messenger RNA vaccine is being rolled out in the UK, USA and Canada.Significant uncertainties remain.How well will some of those at highest risk of severe disease (such as older people aged >75 years and those with immunocompromising conditions) be protected by a vaccine, and for how long?Also, to what extent will vaccination protect against infection?This will determine the degree of indirect 'herd' protection needed through broad vaccine coverage of younger age groups. Vaccine developmentVaccination is only successful if vaccine development results in a product approved for use and delivered to the target population.The vaccine development process is stepwise, pyramidal and selective.5 If initial studies in the laboratory (in cell lines and experimental animals) are favourable, human vaccine trials enter the phase I stage which assesses safety, dosage and immunogenicity in small numbers of healthy people.Typically, only a small proportion of vaccine candidates progress to phase II trials, which are designed to identify optimal formulations, numbers of doses and dosing intervals.These trials require hundreds to around a thousand participants.Phase III vaccine trials evaluate protective efficacy against clinical disease as well as safety.Their study size depends on the expected number of cases but is usually many thousands.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".