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No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

sciencemag.org

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Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#171

Post by amanaplanacanal »

totony wrote: post #108
jaywalk wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With this being the case, how does it even make sense for companies like Ticketmaster and Quantas to announce that they'll require their customers to be vaccinated? Yeah, 90-95% of your customers won't have symptoms if they get infected. But they'll still have the ability to pass on that infection to someone who wasn't vaccinated, or falls into the 5-10% of people who the vaccine isn't effective for. Obviously the va…

>With this being the case, how does it even make sense for companies like Ticketmaster and Quantas to announce that they'll require their customers to be vaccinated? This is such a weird take imo. There is no need to vaccine non-risk people afaik. I thought the whole deal with covid is how mild it is for the general population but deadly for a subset of it.

There are also some people who cannot be vaccinated. So getting enough of the population vaccinated to reach herd immunity protects those people too.

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#172

Post by [deleted] »

nobleach wrote: post #68
blhack wrote: post #48

Does anybody have a good link for a layman's overview of how mRNA vaccines work? Lot's of nervousness from people around this, and would love to be able to help quell some of that.

I'm interested in this as the only pushback I've heard has been from some Christian folks on YouTube claiming that we're no longer "human" if we hack or mix our DNA. I tend to look at it more like "right to repair". If I buy an iPhone, I should be able to hack it to my heart's content. I have no idea if that's the angle you're mentioning. I'd be really interested to hear the other potential dangers that others see.

[deleted]

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#173

Post by bodhiandpysics1 »

mnw21cam wrote: post #144
nobleach wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in this as the only pushback I've heard has been from some Christian folks on YouTube claiming that we're no longer "human" if we hack or mix our DNA. I tend to look at it more like "right to repair". If I buy an iPhone, I should be able to hack it to my heart's content. I have no idea if that's the angle you're mentioning. I'd be really interested to hear the other potential dangers that others see.

The vaccine doesn't "hack or mix our DNA". Heck, it's trying to get the body to get rid of viruses. One particular type of virus (retroviruses) do "hack or mix our DNA".

The astrozenecca vaccine does!

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#174

Post by _greim_ »

nobleach wrote: post #68
blhack wrote: post #48

Does anybody have a good link for a layman's overview of how mRNA vaccines work? Lot's of nervousness from people around this, and would love to be able to help quell some of that.

I'm interested in this as the only pushback I've heard has been from some Christian folks on YouTube claiming that we're no longer "human" if we hack or mix our DNA. I tend to look at it more like "right to repair". If I buy an iPhone, I should be able to hack it to my heart's content. I have no idea if that's the angle you're mentioning. I'd be really interested to hear the other potential dangers that others see.

My understanding is these vaccines either inject RNA into the cell (Pfizer), where it's executed like machine code causing growth of proteins which trigger an immune response, or it injects DNA into the cell nucleus (Moderna), where it triggers creation of RNA, which does the same. So, in a sense it kind of does "hack or mix" DNA. Really strikes me as a sci-fi kind of thing.

[edit] To clarify, it doesn't alter DNA, so much as co-opt DNA/RNA replication mechanisms. Does this cross some kind of "trans-human" threshold? I think so, but I also think clothing, reading glasses, and cell phones do the same. I see no reason to draw some kind of line in the sand here.

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#175

Post by Exmoor »

jaywalk wrote: post #101
officialjunk wrote: post #63

note there is not a claim this vaccine prevents infection, only lessens symptoms, meaning you are still contagious. "We all expect an effective vaccine to prevent serious illness if infected. Three of the vaccine protocols—Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca—do not require that their vaccine prevent serious disease only that they prevent moderate symptoms which may be as mild as cough, or headache." "Prevention of infec…

With this being the case, how does it even make sense for companies like Ticketmaster and Quantas to announce that they'll require their customers to be vaccinated? Yeah, 90-95% of your customers won't have symptoms if they get infected. But they'll still have the ability to pass on that infection to someone who wasn't vaccinated, or falls into the 5-10% of people who the vaccine isn't effective for. Obviously the va…

The issue here is that there's just not data on how contagious the small percentage of vaccinated people who contract COVID may be. Realistically, all the indications we have so far are that there is some correlation between how much you experience symptoms and how likely you are to infect others. It appears that people who never get symptoms (true asymptomatic carriers) are fairly rare and also really not very likely to infect others. Most of the asymptomatic "super-spreaders" which have been reported were actually pre-symptomatic. It's theoretically possible that people who are vaccinated and become infected (which looks like only a fairly small percentage) will still be able to spread the virus, but in all likelihood that ability will be greatly diminished.

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#176

Post by rflrob »

faitswulff wrote: post #31
delfinom wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly from the manufacturing process description alone, we are going to be decades away from when it's actually ...not a few million dollars per individual to treat.

An individually tailored cancer treatment is already available in the form of the CAR-T therapies, which might give an indication of how expensive it’ll be - you were pretty much right on the dot, since each treatment in a course of treatments is estimated at $375,000.

There’s a lot of reason to suspect that, once the pipeline is set up and validated, tailored RNA will be a lot cheaper than CAR-T. cell culture is hard, whereas ordering a gene length DNA construct is “only” a few hundred bucks[1]. From there, getting it to mRNA is relatively straightforward. Doing this all medical grade and at scale will be a huge challenge, but should be significantly easier than mass producing CAR-Ts.

[1] https://www.genewiz.com/Public/Services/Gene-Synthesis/Turbo...

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#177

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

chimeracoder wrote: post #116
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think (from my parents and in-laws) that immunosuppression is normally associated with current cancer treatment. So, for example, it looks like this protocol would exclude people getting chemotherapy. Happy to be proven wrong on this by someone with more information.

> I think (from my parents and in-laws) that immunosuppression is normally associated with current cancer treatment. There are other reasons a person would be considered immunosuppressed, and plenty of non-chemotherapy drugs that have immunosuppressive effects. But yes, cancer is one of them. It would make no sense to include immunosuppressed people in the initial trials for a vaccine, the purpose of which is to dete…

Yeah, agreed.

My selfish concern is then whether or not the vaccine will work for them.

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#178

Post by tbenst »

iguy wrote: post #53
faitswulff wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An individually tailored cancer treatment is already available in the form of the CAR-T therapies, which might give an indication of how expensive it’ll be - you were pretty much right on the dot, since each treatment in a course of treatments is estimated at $375,000.

What is this money spent on? Is it a real cost per dose, or just a made-up number for something made in a research lab? Maybe another way to ask is: On the scale from 400k of white-shoe lawyer-hours, to 400k of custom 7nm silicon-etching, where should I mentally place this? The former isn't going to budge, the latter will cost pennies in a generation's time.

Ha! The technology itself is cheap, fabricating a bunch of de novo mRNA is only a few hundred dollars these days. I’m not sure how much volume is needed for treatment, and there’s obviously much stricter QA/QC that must happen for human use, but still the actual manufacturing part is likely no more than single digit thousands per dose. At scale, per your semiconductor analogy, could likely be brought down to single-digit dollars with time.

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#179

Post by topspin »

SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #170
abootstrapper wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumb people like teachers, doctors, nurses, first responders, the infirm, grocery stockers? Dumb people that have to work to pay their rent, mortgage, put food on the table? I know there are a lot of idiot anti-maskers running around, but being dumb is not a prerequisite to catching covid. Not everyone has the luxury of working from home.

You are using a strawman argument here. We all very well know what the OP meant.

We do? I don't know who the OP had in mind at all.

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#180

Post by ghostpepper »

blhack wrote: post #48

Does anybody have a good link for a layman's overview of how mRNA vaccines work? Lot's of nervousness from people around this, and would love to be able to help quell some of that.

There is a good article here but unfortunately paywalled https://www.wsj.com/articles/moderna-and-pfizer-are-reinvent...
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