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- Forza Motorsport pledges AI, progression, and race regulation improvements in “coming months” Eurogamer.net
- Turn 10 addresses complaints about Forza Motorsport progression, AI and race regulations | VGC Video Games Chronicle
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Charts suggest inflation could soon come down ‘substantially,’ Jim Cramer says
CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Thursday said that inflation could soon decline, leaning on charts analysis from legendary technician Larry Williams.
“The charts, as interpreted by Larry Williams, suggest that inflation could soon cool down substantially — soon — if history’s any guide,” he said.
The “Mad Money” host’s comments come after the Federal Reserve on Wednesday raised interest rates by another 75 basis points and reiterated its hawkish stance against inflation.
To explain Williams’ analysis, the “Mad Money” host first examined a chart of the current Federal Reserve sticky price consumer price index (in black) compared to the burst of inflation in the late seventies and early eighties (in red).
Williams notes that the current trajectory of sticky price inflation has closely hugged this historical pattern, Cramer said.
He added that when situated in the pattern of inflation in the late seventies and early eighties, current inflation is roughly in the 1980 point of the trajectory — which is around when inflation peaked then.
“Today, unlike back then, the Fed knows exactly how to beat inflation,— and Jay Powell has shown that he’s willing to bring the pain. That means it should peak sooner,” Cramer said.
For more analysis, watch Cramer’s full explanation below.
Vaccine-Induced Immune Response to Omicron Wanes Substantially: Federally Backed Study
A National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored study found that COVID-19 vaccine-induced antibody response to the Omicron subvariants wanes significantly over time.
The immune responses to several Omicron subvariants “waned substantially” among “all groups” of individuals who received either the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccine as well as a booster dose, or combinations of different vaccines. Neutralizing antibody levels dropped by up to five-fold three months after receiving the booster shot, the NIH said in a news release of the study earlier this week.
All vaccine combinations provided high levels of neutralizing antibodies to the initial Omicron BA.1 sub-lineage that was first reported in the fall of 2021. However, those who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and booster saw low antibody levels to BA.1, according to the NIH.
But when the Omicron subvariants BA.2.12.1 as well as BA.4/BA.5 emerged earlier this year, all vaccines performed poorly after three months as compared with the BA.1 strain, the researchers said. The vaccines provided even less protection against the subvariants than their ancestral COVID-19 strain known as D614G, they found.
“Omicron sub-lineages BA.2.12.1 and BA.4/BA.5 were 1.5 and 2.5 times less susceptible to neutralization, respectively, compared to the BA.1 sub-lineage, and 7.5 and 12.4 times less susceptible relative to the ancestral D614G strain,” NIH wrote, noting that the BA.5 subvariant is currently is the dominant variant across the United States.
More Details
The researchers, who published their findings in Cell Reports Medicine on July 19 and have received virtually no mainstream news coverage so far, said they administered COVID-19 vaccines to adults who previously got one of the three vaccines that were available to people at the time. They evaluated six separate groups with around 50 participants per vaccine group who either received the initial vaccine regimen and the same booster or who mixed and matched vaccines and boosters.
Ultimately, they concluded that the “immune response to Omicron sub-lineages show reduced susceptibility to these rapidly emerging subvariants,” according to the NIH release. “The data could be used to inform decisions regarding future vaccine schedule recommendations, including the need for variant vaccine boosting.”
Between 29 days and 91 days after getting the booster, neutralizing antibodies among all groups decreased “2.4- to 5.3-fold for Omicron and no more than 2.4-fold for the (ancestral) D614G variant,” the researchers wrote.
Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study that found the efficacy of vaccine booster doses dropped under 50 percent after four months against COVID-19 subvariants. Both Moderna’s and Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines provided just 51 percent protection against COVID-19-linked urgent care encounters, emergency room visits, and hospitalizations as the Omicron BA.2 and BA.2.12.1 variants were spreading across the United States, it found.
After about 150 days, the efficacy of the vaccines dropped to 12 percent, the study said.
COVID-19 is caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, sometimes known as SARS-CoV-2.
Vaccine protection against Covid-19 fell substantially for kids during Omicron surge
The study compared the vaccination of status of children ages 5 to 17 who were treated for Covid-19 symptoms emergency departments, urgent care centers and hospitals across 10 states between April 2021 and February 2022. Researchers reviewed records on nearly 40,000 clinic visits and 1,700 hospitalizations. The study was funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and published Tuesday in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
The new study comes just a day after new data from the New York State Department of Health also found vaccine protection against Covid-19 dropped substantially for kids during the Omicron wave.
The Pfizer vaccine is the only vaccine authorized for people younger than 18.
Children ages 5 to 11 — the youngest and most recently vaccinated group — were about 46% less likely to seek treatment for Covid-19 at an urgent care clinic or emergency room, compared to children who were unvaccinated.
That’s about half as much protection as they were expected to get after clinical trials showed the vaccines to be about 91% effective at preventing disease in this age group.
Study author Dr. Nicola Klein thinks the dropoff in vaccine effectiveness in this age group wasn’t because the dose was too low or there was a big difference in response to the vaccines by age; she says this is just the rapid evolution of the virus.
“It is a little bit disheartening, but I think we also have to keep in mind that one of the complexities here is that because children started being vaccinated late last year that coincides with when the Omicron variant began circulating,” said Klein, who is director of the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center.
Vaccinated grade schoolers continued to be less likely to be hospitalized for their infections than children who were unvaccinated, however.
Out of nearly 1,700 hospital admissions, there were 59 unvaccinated kids ages 5 to 11 admitted to the hospital after testing positive for Covid-19, and just two who were vaccinated. The study didn’t have enough cases to accurately estimate vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization in this age group.
Adolescents ages 12 through 17 — who get a dose of the Pfizer vaccine that’s three times higher than the shots for younger kids — had better protection against most circulating variants, but that protection dropped off steeply with time and the arrival of the Omicron variant.
Five months or more after a second dose, kids in this age group had no significant protection against Omicron infections warranting a trip to the urgent care or ER.
About a week after a booster shot, however, most of their protection appeared to be restored. Boosted teens ages 16 to 18, were about 81% less likely to need to see a doctor for Covid-19.
Over the entire 11 months of the study, fully vaccinated adolescents — those ages 12 through 15 — were 83% less likely to be seen for Covid-19 at the emergency room or urgent care clinic and 92% less likely to be hospitalized until about 5 months after their second dose. After 5 months, vaccine protection dropped to just 38% for ER or clinic visits and 73% for hospitalizations in this age group.
Older teens, ages 16 through 17, were 76% less likely to be seen for Covid-19 in an ER or urgent care if the first five months after their second dose and 94% less likely to be hospitalized. After 5 months, their protection dropped to 46% for clinic visits and 88% for hospitalizations.
The study was observational, meaning that the authors can’t prove cause and effect. Though the data was adjusted to try to account for meaningful differences between kids who were vaccinated and those who were not, the researchers say there could have been differences between these groups — such as the likelihood of masking or physical distancing — that might have influenced their results.
Still, the researchers note that it’s strong real-world data on how well the vaccines are protecting children. They say kids should stay up to date on their Covid-19 vaccines, including boosters for all children who are eligible. Currently, that group is adolescents ages 12 to 18 years of age.
Klein said she thinks it’s reasonable that boosters may soon be recommended for younger kids, too.
“We have pretty good evidence that the booster really increased the protection for 16- to 17-year-olds, and I think that’s shown pretty nicely in the paper, and I think it’s not unreasonable to expect that might be down the road for 5 to 11 year olds,” Klein said. “That’s certainly something that’s worth considering.”
The detailed findings come just a day after new data from the New York State Department of Health showed that vaccine effectiveness against Covid-19 infection dropped considerably for kids during the Omicron surge, falling from 68% to 12% in children ages 5 through 11, and from 66% to 51% for those ages 12 through 17. Protection against hospitalizations, even during Omicron, remained stronger. The study found younger children had a 48% lower risk of being hospitalized with Omicron, while adolescents had a 73% lower risk.
Experts who reviewed the studies but did not participate in the research said they shouldn’t cause parents to lose faith in the vaccines.
“This is what you would expect in terms of mild illness,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the vaccine education center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He pointed out that kids may catch Covid-19 even if they’re vaccinated, but the vaccines will keep them from the worst harms of the virus.
“The goal of this vaccine is to prevent severe illness,” said Offit, who says both studies show that the vaccines continue to keep kids out of the hospital.
What’s more, Offit says, these studies compare vaccinated kids to those who are unvaccinated, but they don’t account for children who may have already been infected by the virus and have some antibodies against future infection.
“So people who are considered unvaccinated may still at some level be protected, which means that your efficacy rate isn’t going to look as good,” he said. “None of these things are considered when they do these kinds of studies, so I think they tend to be falsely damning of the vaccine.”
Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine appears to substantially reduce coronavirus transmission, study shows
The rate of positive PCR tests declined by about half after two doses, according to preliminary results by researchers at the University of Oxford that have yet to be peer reviewed.
Their analysis, released as a preprint Tuesday, also supports spacing out doses and estimates good efficacy after just one shot of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
The study did not measure transmission directly — for example, by tracing contacts who were infected by study volunteers. But the researchers did collect regular nasal swabs from some participants and found that the rate of positive PCR tests fell by half after two doses of the vaccine. After one dose only, the rate of positive tests fell by 67%.
“While transmission studies per se were not included in the analysis, swabs were obtained from volunteers every week in the UK study, regardless of symptoms, to allow assessment of the overall impact of the vaccine on risk of infection and thus a surrogate for potential onward transmission,” the authors write.
If the vaccine were simply making infections milder, PCR positivity would not change, the authors argued in the preprint analysis. “A measure of overall PCR positivity is appropriate to assess whether there is a reduction in the burden of infection.”
Coronavirus vaccine trials have primarily looked at prevention of symptomatic cases of Covid-19. Previously, there has been little other public data suggesting that vaccines could prevent people from passing the infection to others.
Speaking to the UK’s Science Media Centre (SMC), Helen Fletcher, professor of immunology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the data in the study “suggest a possibility that the vaccine could have an impact on transmission but further follow-up would be needed to confirm this.”
Dr. Doug Brown, chief executive of the British Society for Immunology, told the SMC the study “hints that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine may be effective in stopping people being able to transmit the virus.”
He added: “While this would be extremely welcome news, we do need more data before this can be confirmed and so it’s important that we all still continue to follow social distancing guidance after we have been vaccinated.”
Dose spacing
The vaccine showed 66.7% efficacy against symptomatic disease starting two weeks after the second shot, researchers at the University of Oxford said.
The new analysis adds new trial sites and a month of new data to the mix, building upon earlier results announced by AstraZeneca that its vaccine had showed an estimated 70.4% efficacy.
However, the latest research also suggests the vaccine may offer substantial protection after a single shot.
The study estimates 76% efficacy up to three months following one dose. This is based on a subset of 88 symptomatic infections, split unevenly between the vaccine and placebo groups between 22 and 90 days after vaccination. The study also found relatively stable levels of antibodies during this time frame, “with minimal waning by day 90.”
Furthermore, the authors suggest there could be higher efficacy with more spaced-out doses. Among adults age 18 to 55, vaccine efficacy appeared to rise when the time between shots was spaced out from less than six weeks to more than 12. However, more information is needed to know how statistically different that finding is.
Taken together, the findings may bolster the UK’s decision to recommend spacing out doses up to 12 weeks apart, according to a statement from the chief investigator of the Oxford Vaccine Trial and co-author of the paper, Andrew Pollard.
“This is positive news as it shows that just one dose of this vaccine generates good levels of immunity and that this protection does not seem to wane in the shorter term,” said Brown, of the British Society for Immunology.
“In immunology terms, this finding is not unexpected as we know that some other vaccines confer better immunity when the doses are more spread out. Although further information is required to confirm these findings for older age groups, overall this new research should provide reassurance around the UK’s decision to offer the two doses of this vaccine 12 weeks apart.”
Similar data is not yet available on delaying the second dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to 12 weeks after the first dose, said Dr. Gillies O’Bryan-Tear, past chair of policy and communications at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine in comments to the SMC. But, he added, “most commentators agree that it is likely to be the same with that vaccine, and indeed, other two dose vaccines.”
The authors caveat that the trials were not initially designed to evaluate efficacy by dose intervals, but the data “arose due to the logistics of running large-scale clinical trials in a pandemic setting.”
The primary analysis is based on 332 symptomatic infections that occurred among more than 17,000 trial volunteers in the UK, Brazil and South Africa more than two weeks after their second dose.
AstraZeneca announced last month it had completed enrollment in its Phase 3 trial in the United States, which will serve as “the primary basis” for the company’s eventual application to the US Food and Drug Administration.
The vaccine has already been authorized in a number countries, such as the UK and India, but authorization may not come in the US until late March at the earliest, according to Operation Warp Speed’s Moncef Slaoui.