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

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331–340 of 436 posts

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

#331
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to take away from the argument that we should vaccinate everyone (we should, at least adults. not sure if this vaccine will be approved for kids, which usually requires more stringent approvals), but your argument isn't a good one. Covid has killed 42 people from age 5-14 in the US according to the CDC, for example. That alone is really not something we should be making huge policy decisions around. It's sad, of…

>Not to take away from the argument that we should vaccinate everyone. I'm not sure if this is a concession for argument's sake, but imo it does take away from it. Why do you think it doesn't?

It doesn't take away from it because it's never been a good argument. x - 0 still equals x.

There are plenty of valid arguments to vaccinate everyone we can.

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

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"benefit of a few" meaning "allow those few that were adversely affected to sue for damages" which would have the follow-on effect of hampering vaccine development

How can a vaccine have an adverse effect? Vaccines are safe

All vaccines in the US come with informational sheets that warn of possible dangers. The one I remember is Guillain Barre syndrome.

The risks are low, and the benefits of the vaccine vastly outweigh them.

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

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to take away from the argument that we should vaccinate everyone (we should, at least adults. not sure if this vaccine will be approved for kids, which usually requires more stringent approvals), but your argument isn't a good one. Covid has killed 42 people from age 5-14 in the US according to the CDC, for example. That alone is really not something we should be making huge policy decisions around. It's sad, of…

Oh, I'm with you that vaccines should be triaged by risk factors, and that reopening should be guided both by % of high-risk population vaccinated and case statistics. I was responding to OP's assertion that we shouldn't bother to vaccinate "healthy" people at all. IIRC the IFR is ~0.2% for people in the 20-39 age bracket. I still find that risky (though I'm risk-averse), but the better argument is the lingering effe…

Sure, throw in risk factors. My lack of completeness is why I shouldn't be the one creating this policy :)

My main point is that there are sub-populations that have a small enough risk that we shouldn't stress over them too much. And talking about them is a distraction.

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

#334

I was reading about Moderna today, and I found a number of articles from 2017-18 expressing concern about their secretiveness and impatience with both safety precautions and the failures that are inevitable in drug trials, based on the experiences of former employees and science journals. I can't deny that makes me nervous. I didn't see anything about it after that time, however.

Do you have any links to these articles?

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

#335

I was reading about Moderna today, and I found a number of articles from 2017-18 expressing concern about their secretiveness and impatience with both safety precautions and the failures that are inevitable in drug trials, based on the experiences of former employees and science journals. I can't deny that makes me nervous. I didn't see anything about it after that time, however.

I recently heard an interview with their chief medical officer that directly addressed that criticism.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/vaccine/

I don't know if it will change your mind, as he basically says that it may have been valid criticism in 2015-2016, but not anymore.

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

#336

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.

In order to produce a personalized anti-cancer RNA vaccine, you need to a) do a biopsy of the tumor and some healthy tissue, which is fairly cheap, b) do genetic analysis of those samples to find the differences. This used to be prohibitively expensive, but now is fairly cheap too, the price went down six (!) orders of magnitude since 2000, c) ask specialized software to find the optimal protein set to express. This…

If a parent and child develop the same cancer, is it any more likely that the same (mRNA) drug will work for both of them? Or do cancer cells mutate so much that they're unrecognizable between patients?

It would have interesting implications if in the future a family could invest in a bank of mrna molecules for their future generations. A new form of wealth.

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

#337
post #30
post #19

FDA says Dec 17 meeting to discuss. This contradicts some earlier opinions that the reason the FDA was taking so long to review Pfizer (Dec 10 scheduled date) was that they were planning to review 2-3 candidates together. For context, scheduling the meeting to review the candidates is running at 5-10% of the development time for these vaccines. 20M vaccines represent about 1/3 the elderly population in the US, there…

>Note: I think the bar for requiring a vaccination can/should definitely be higher than the bar to lift a total ban on a vaccine. It's unlikely in the US that the federal government could require vaccination. States maybe could but only because of very old case law that might well not stand up today. Of course, private workplaces, schools, government offices, airlines, etc. could to the degree that it might be quite…

> It's unlikely in the US that the federal government could require vaccination.

But the IRS could give you a tax credit for being vaccinated -- or is that crazy? :D

Indeed, it might even make sense to give a credit on social security taxes for vaccination, as it reduces the liabilities medicare is likely to incur in the future.

Personally, I doubt the US will do any such thing.. nor will it be necessary, at first we won't have enough vaccines anyways.

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

#338
post #293

I was reading about Moderna today, and I found a number of articles from 2017-18 expressing concern about their secretiveness and impatience with both safety precautions and the failures that are inevitable in drug trials, based on the experiences of former employees and science journals. I can't deny that makes me nervous. I didn't see anything about it after that time, however.

Combined with their legal immunity from any liability, that can be concerning.

Plus the fact that they want us to let them hack our DNA.

It's a bit like giving them root to the OS of my being.

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

#339
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Combined with their legal immunity from any liability, that can be concerning.

Plus the fact that they want us to let them hack our DNA. It's a bit like giving them root to the OS of my being.

No, mRNA is not DNA.

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

#340
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but are there any vaccines out there that protect against disease but don’t prevent transmission? I thought that’s what herd immunity was all about.

You're asking if there are vaccines that do not lead to sterilizing immunity? Yes. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7296151/

As per the article, the flu vaccine looked at didn’t provide sterilizing immunity, but did significantly lower viral titre in the lungs.

So I guess the question is - even if not sterilizing immunity, would these vaccines significantly reduce (but not eliminate) transmission?

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