Live data from Hacker News

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

sciencemag.org

381–390 of 436 posts

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

#381
post #310
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…

Officials have been going on about how this is the fastest vaccine ever produced and distributed. Then they backpedal slightly on that when the populace verbalizes legitimate concern that it was too fast to guarantee safety. Meanwhile, people like myself (and I assume you) are on the opposite side; this was too slow . This virus could have been much, much worse. Not to be insensitive, we (as a species) got off easy w…

Regarding #2 and #3, I don't think there is a way to speed this up. The only way they are testing these vaccines is by looking at the percentage of people who get infected who either got the vaccine or placebo. One of the reasons that these vaccines have been able to be produced so fast is that COVID is rampant, especially in the US, making it much quicker to hit the N-number of cases necessary to test.

There was talk early on about doing "challenge trials", where'd they vaccine a sub-group and the purposely infect them with the virus. There are huge ethical issues with this, especially for a virus with which we don't clearly know if someone will range from asymptotic to death. We certainly have statistics on likelihood, but there have been many reports of perfectly healthy, young, people dying from the disease. Given that unknown, I don't think it's possible for anyone to give informed consent for this kind of trial.

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

#382
post #104

The null hypothesis (people with symptomatic covid are as likely to get severe symptoms, regardless of whether they received the vaccine) predicts this many cases with severe symptoms: 30 / 185 * 11 = 1.7 1.7 ~= 0, so the sample size is too small to support the headline.

If you take a Beta(1,1) distribution as your prior, then the control group's risk-of-severe-covid-given-symptoms posterior is Beta(31,156), and the experimental group's conditional risk posterior is Beta(1,12). Drawing 100,000 samples from these distributions (`betarnd` function in matlab) gives an 87.8% sampled likelihood that the intervention reduces the conditional risk (intervention(i) This is suggestive (but not…

I find an interesting related item to be the ~30% of people in the AZD1222 (AstraZeneca) study who got COVID after being vaccinated. They reported that in this subgroup, there were no severe infections, nor any hospital visits, confirming the parent's hypothesis that some people might not get full immunity, but still benefit from the vaccine.

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

#383
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I'm not sure what you mean by x-0, but if there is no risk for young healthy people, then they don't need the vaccine? I understand there are other arguments to be had but this 100% invalidates at least on of them

EDIT: After re-reading I understood the sentence, my bad.

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

#384
post #36

> No one developed severe Covid-19 > No one developed severe adverse effects (yet) There is a reason vaccine trials normally take several years. I'll wait until we're a few years into phase IV trials, thankyouverymuch.

The main reason vaccine trials normally take years is money. Normally you wouldn't start manufacturing a vaccine before you know it at least works in animals. You also wouldn't _simultaneously_ vaccinate the 30000 people needed for phase 3 data. The Moderna study has over 100 study locations [1]. A normal vaccine trial might have 10-20. With that number, it takes much longer to get the same number of people in the study. Given the virtually unlimited financial resources coming from the government, they were able to conduct the study, as well as begin manufacturing, in record time.

All the vaccine trials are following participants for over 2 years, at which point many of the 1-in-10000 effects should be known. If you look at previous problematic vaccines [2], most rare side effects (> 1-in-100000) were only seen after MILLIONS of innoculations, meaning you only see them in Phase 4 (post-approval) studies as they are extremely rare. Given the high case fatality rate of COVID-19 [3], the risk of an unseen extremely rare reaction is much lower than the risk of dying from COVID-19, so general speaking, you should get vaccinated.

[1] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04470427#contactlocat...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history....

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid

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

#385
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not everyone can get the vaccine. But the proportion of people who are both at risk and can't get the vaccine (and alternatives) must be small (from intuitive maths, I actually haven't looked into this). Why would this vaccine be mandatory while plenty of other aren't? E.g. I've never got flu-tested before a concert/the flu shot, even though it could pass to other people/kill people. I'm wondering where's the line b…

From https://www.goodrx.com/blog/flu-vs-coronavirus-mortality-and... 2017-2018 Flu 2018-2019 Flu COVID-19 as of August 27, 2020 Cases 45 million 35 million 5 million Deaths 61,000 34,157 180,000+ Further reading on how the flu and COVID-19 differ: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm

You're missing my point. These deaths will be insanely reduced once we get the vaccine out to the people that need it. I wasn't saying they are the same; i was saying they are similar in the way they are infectuous and we don't seem to be doing much for young people for most other diseases.

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

#386
post #317
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not everyone can get the vaccine. But the proportion of people who are both at risk and can't get the vaccine (and alternatives) must be small (from intuitive maths, I actually haven't looked into this). Why would this vaccine be mandatory while plenty of other aren't? E.g. I've never got flu-tested before a concert/the flu shot, even though it could pass to other people/kill people. I'm wondering where's the line b…

You've mentioned "Low risk" a few times. You're right, the risk for young people is low. That doesn't mean no-risk though. There are plenty of examples of young people suffering harm because of covid. A TIA at 23 isn't a trivial thing. https://twitter.com/RileyBehrens/status/1333230792206553089?... At the moment we think covid is at least ten times more lethal than flu. If you're comparing numbers of people killed yo…

It is possible, but from my understanding, a lot of diseases can have extreme cases. And even so, being free to take on that risk is what I'm refering in when I talk about one own's body.

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

#387
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably being downvoted because this information is easily looked up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine

Honestly, it seems a tad reckless to make the first attempt at vaccination with this method one that targets the entire world population.

Given the desperate times, it actually seems like an ideal time. Even if there is some unknown side-effect, it only has to be less worse than the current situation to still be a net benefit.

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

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Vaccines are like 99.999% safe.. but we do give them to more than 100k people per year, so some people do suffer some unfortunate side effects including and up to seizures and brain damage. We've decided as a society that the benefits of widespread vaccination outweigh the legal rights of those harmed by their administration, so we've legislated away the ability to sue vaccine manufacturers for good-faith efforts at…

If the possibility of “unfortunate side-effects” is so low then why remove the ability for legal recourse?

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

#389

Is COVID real? Yes! Is is really that bad as everyone makes it out to be? No! If it was that deadly of a virus, 9 out of 10 people would be dead by now. Do you need a vaccine? Nope, unless you want to take one and die. I have only been sick one time, and that was during Dec to Feb of 2019 when every human being was exposed to COVID. Have I wore a mask this entire time? No! Have I went and got tested? No! Will I go ge…

Is this GPT-3, trolling, or just honest stupidity? I'm having a hard time seeing the difference these days.

Could be honest, based on their comment history

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

#390

RNA vaccines have a huge potential in treating cancer as well. Basically, you can whip up a personalized vaccine which wakes the immune system up to the fact that it has a growing tumor on its hands. So far, the success rate is very far from 100 per cent, but the therapy sometimes works even in patients with severe late stage metastatized cancer and, in all likelihood, we will learn how to use it better in coming yea…

Yes i read some interesting article aswell regarding mRNA vaccines, but from my understanting mRNA vaccine aren't yet tested in humans right? Only animals or am i mistaken? EDIT: what my question is: is there another mRNA type vaccine out there fully developed (i'm not suggesting that they are bad!)? EDIT2: Guys, i will never ask question again in here. Begin downvoted for a genuine question.

I have found that sometimes it's necessary to say "this is an honest question, I honestly don't know the answer". Otherwise people infer a negative intent
Post reply on HN