Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

theness.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 339 posts

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#71

Post by mrits »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #47

I’m glad to see this and we need to concentrate on speeding this process up. This isn’t the last pandemic and all things considered this one was a pretty benign one to have to fight. The next one might not just kill mainly the old and weak and might need much more than a mask (that we still can’t get people to wear!) to prevent its spread. Hopefully before then, we can work to get everyone more on the same page and h…

To get worse than COVID you'd need a virus that takes a long time to develop symptoms and then has a high death rate. In that scenario there would be a lot more public fear and we'd have an easier time keeping people at home. So I'm still of the opinion it's harder to have a worse situation than COVID.

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#72

Post by davidw »

ashtonkem wrote: post #46
tialaramex wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High lethality is often associated with reduced transmissibility. Which makes sense - dead people certainly aren't going to cough on you. In a Sci Fi movie maybe the virus has a long delay, you're infectious for a month with no symptoms, then drop dead in seconds. But in the real world that's less likely the more extreme it gets. One thing that did make this virus more dangerous was that many humans became infectious…

In many ways, this was a worst case scenario for countries without a history of fighting respiratory diseases. It’s lethal enough to rack up a significant body count, but “safe” enough for large portions of the population to disregard the risk and potentially transmit it. Oh, and it’s airborne and you’re infectious before you have symptoms. Ironically, a disease with a much higher case fatality rate probably would’ve…

Yeah, this was something 'interesting' to learn about people's behavior. If it had been deadlier, more people would take it more seriously. It hits a "sweet spot" where it's lethal... but not quite enough to terrify everyone into staying home. So it keeps ebbing and flowing.

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#73

Post by OJFord »

dontreact wrote: post #51
causality0 wrote: post #6

I wonder if any, or if many, Moderna employees have been walking around off-the-books immunized since January. I know I would've been tempted.

A friend of mine has a partner who works for them. She said that employees don't get a free vaccine. Obviously take this rumor with a grain of salt.

A corporate gifting of one to every rank and file employee like some sort of morally questionable bonus is a bit different from, what I assume GP meant, folks in the lab actually working on it pricking themselves to test, or because they believe in it, can't resist, etc.

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#74

Post by blackbear_ »

tehjoker wrote: post #20

I don't know how Moderna was made, but the Pfizer vaccine is a modified spike protein: they use two edits to lock it in a pre-fusion conformation. Maybe this is easy to model in software, but I suspect that does take a little bit of trial and error to confirm it works in vitro too.

Moderna did that too [1]. I have no clue how they found the mutation but it was already known for a few years [2,3]

[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/lookup/doi/10.1101/2020.06.11.145920

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6200764/

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5223232/

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#75

Post by phreeza »

tehjoker wrote: post #23
causality0 wrote: post #6

I wonder if any, or if many, Moderna employees have been walking around off-the-books immunized since January. I know I would've been tempted.

Probably not since January, but maybe after the phase 1 trials and the dosing schedule was figured out. To be honest, if it doesn't come out that they were using it off the books, either they're suckers or we are.

> if it doesn't come out that they were using it off the books, either they're suckers or we are.

Or it doesn't come out because they are good at keeping it secret.

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#76

Post by jeofken »

causality0 wrote: post #6

I wonder if any, or if many, Moderna employees have been walking around off-the-books immunized since January. I know I would've been tempted.

What’s the death rate of COVID-19 compared to for example common flu for working age people (30s, 40s)?

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#77

Post by djsumdog »

bluGill wrote: post #57
superbaconman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, Moderna is working on an hiv vaccine using similar tech. Sounds like they're pretty early on in testing though.

There are many working on HIV vaccines. The virus mutates so fast that all previous attempts have failed. I wish them luck, but I'm not confident that it is possible. Time will tell.

I don't think that's the issue. With any virus, your immune system grows countermeasures exponentially (memory t-cells, antibodies, protein complements) to stop it. These stick around after the virus is gone. It's an immune system "memory"

In another infection, your cells still get infected, but the infection is just stopped very quickly. HIV has inscription and reverse transcription enzymes in it, so it can actually glue its sequence into your DNA. It changes your DNA enough to replicate it, but not enough that your cells change their structure so your immune system can't recognize them as infected (and those changes can cause your immune system to fail over time: AIDS).

Even if your body is primed to deal with HIV infections, if the infection happens, it's already too late.

I'm not sure who antiviral drugs like PREP work, but you'd need something like that permanently in your system.

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#78

Post by brodie »

fat-chunk wrote: post #38
tialaramex wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High lethality is often associated with reduced transmissibility. Which makes sense - dead people certainly aren't going to cough on you. In a Sci Fi movie maybe the virus has a long delay, you're infectious for a month with no symptoms, then drop dead in seconds. But in the real world that's less likely the more extreme it gets. One thing that did make this virus more dangerous was that many humans became infectious…

It makes me wonder how the world would cope today with a Bubonic Plague or Spanish Flu, those two I reckon would probably be more similar to your hypothetical Sci-Fi disease.

There's a sci-fi example of this in the TV show Counterpart. Kind of surreal watching it and then becoming a part of a real life pandemic.

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#79

Post by soperj »

ashtonkem wrote: post #69
soperj wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got over 18000 people a week dying in the US from Covid-19. How many more people do you need?

What a weirdly accusatory tone. For the record, I’m staying at home and I wear a mask. Save your accusations for those who actually advocate for behavior you disagree with. My point is entirely that the perception of risk has had a huge impact on compliance for social distancing and mask wearing. The fact that 99% of those infected survive (age dependent) has had a negative impact on compliance. If this had been a pa…

1% is a huge amount of people dying. Death rate doesn't matter so much as the number of people getting it, why is why SARS with a much high death rate killed far fewer people than Covid-19.

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#80

Post by brodie »

phreeza wrote: post #75
tehjoker wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not since January, but maybe after the phase 1 trials and the dosing schedule was figured out. To be honest, if it doesn't come out that they were using it off the books, either they're suckers or we are.

> if it doesn't come out that they were using it off the books, either they're suckers or we are. Or it doesn't come out because they are good at keeping it secret.

Would they need to keep it a secret? Could their own employees have entered the trials?
Post reply on HN