The Story behind the Science: A history of Q-VAX, the Australian human vaccine against Q fever
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Q-VAX vaccine is the only human vaccine against Q fever currently available in the world and is only available in Australia. The vaccine arose from a fruitful partnership between an American microbiologist, Richard Ormsbee, and an Australian infectious diseases doctor, Barrie Marmion. The vaccine was made in Australia from seed stock of Coxiella burnetii , originally isolated from an American soldier in Italy, the Henzerling strain. The vaccine was manufactured by a then Australian government-owned company, the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, in Melbourne, using embryonated chicken eggs, starting in 1981. It was shown to be effective and relatively safe and became available for general use in 1989. It was originally used to reduce the incidence of Q fever in Australian abattoir workers but is now used (albeit underutilized) by many other occupational groups, especially in rural and regional parts of Australia. The vaccine is highly effective with over 95% efficacy, and its protective effect appears to last for many years. However, its use can lead to side effects in persons who have already been exposed to the bacterium. This has limited its use worldwide. The vaccine is currently used in Australia and, although significantly underutilized due to the need to pretest persons before vaccination, is playing a key role in reducing the incidence of Q fever in groups of Australians at risk.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".