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It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

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

#161

Post by Barrin92 »

renewiltord wrote: post #106
djohnston wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being downvoted but the point is valid. To say that this was built in two days is to completely ignore the near decade of investment into mrna vaccines. Total nonsense.

That's not relevant. The point is that Moderna had a low-latency solution when the moment showed itself. It isn't that it's easy. It offers some thinking that their technology is revolutionary and that perhaps we need to revisit our calculations to see if the risk/reward means we should attempt earlier roll out. We know, this time with hindsight, that it would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of…

> if the risk/reward means we should attempt earlier roll out

you still need to make sure the vaccine actually works in trials and has no severe side effects. It takes one, and only one minor vaccine scandal to completely blow the trust of the public in public health.

There is no linear risk/reward when it comes to vaccines. You need to be incredibly confident that they are safe or else you're going to screw yourself possibly for decades.

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

#162

Post by themaninthedark »

carabiner wrote: post #132
oblio wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet? :-)

The internet was a mistake.

>Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

The internet is great, how we use it may not be.

I don't have twitter, rarely delve into comment on most news sites and Youtube. Browse and sometime comment on Reddit and here. I prefer here, less shouty.

When you are able to talk to thousands or millions of people without having to have connections, its a wonderful thing. The friction arises from a number of things; contrarians who love to argue, trolls, governments/companies who are trying to influence opinion but also people who have a genuine different opinion and are unwilling to listen to the other side.

I did enjoy the internet more when it was younger but at the same time, there was a less diverse population on it then.

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

#163

Post by NoodleIncident »

bluGill wrote: post #49
tzs wrote: post #24

Suppose an mRNA vaccine is developed for some virus, but it fails to clear phase 1 safety testing. Question: what would be the likely reasons for that? In particular, is it almost certainly going to be due to whatever carries the mRNA, or could the mRNA itself be the problem? If it is the carrier in which potential safety issues lie, does that mean that once we have one successful safe mRNA vaccine for virus A, then…

Phase one is about dosage at least as much as safety. The most likely reason to fail is probably that it doesn't produce an immune response at any reasonable dosage.

Is there any risk of a "doesn't produce immune response" failure that would make it unsafe to start giving to healthcare workers immediately? Could it make later vaccines ineffective?

I'm sure that it would ruin the data for later vaccines, but if high-risk people just take each new vaccine as it starts trials, their data doesn't have to count towards the actual trial.

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

#164

Post by hcknwscommenter »

xienze wrote: post #148
lostlogin wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and why were the shutdowns done? If you compare what happens with uncontrolled covid spread to a those of a flu season, they aren’t really all that similar. Even with the lockdowns, the deaths have been considerably more than tens of thousands.

So remember that’s tens of thousands of annual deaths with a vaccine. And what good have lockdowns really done? The virus seems to spread regardless. Look at all those European countries the US was compared to during the summer as an example of how to “do it right.” Not sitting so pretty right now...

The lockdowns in Europe worked. Full stop. Case rates dropped dramatically.

Some of those countries are "not sitting pretty right now" because they ended their lockdowns.

The answer is not "lockdowns don't really do any good." The answer is "don't prematurely end your lockdowns." Now that can be burdensome. You can do a middle ground (limited re-opening). That works too, but you have to be very careful and keep a close eye on case numbers and shut down totally as soon as cases ramp up. California tried to do that in the latest surge, but was a little late in implementing the newly stringent measures and even further So. Cal. "resisted" the newly stringent measures and are now suffering mightily.

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

#165

Post by brandmeyer »

mywittyname wrote: post #128
zbrozek wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it even be a problem if they did? Like presumably people are generally free to do things to themselves. If they self-administered and they were allowed to consume the resource (e.g., it wasn't theft) who was harmed?

I wouldn't personally mind. I mean, these researchers are, presumably, the most informed people in the world on the subject.

Hopefully they would be well-informed enough to wait on the trial results. Remember AstraZenica?

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/astrazenecas-best-co...

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

#166

Post by ckdarby »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #135
jwilk wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it obvious?

What this class of vaccine does is make a bunch of foreign proteins for your immune system to attack in your arm without actually infecting you with the disease. So you get inflammation and soreness at the injection site, and this is not from the physics of having an injection. The placebo arm injects with a saline solution, so there's no immune response, and you miss those symptoms.

Do you think people could perceive having "false" inflammation? I'm thinking that if during the double blind trial they told those not getting the real dose that they should expect inflammation that many of them would believe they're having some form of inflammation.

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

#167

Post by closeparen »

mrits wrote: post #71
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.

Or we would have mounted a testing and tracing program, and not gotten into a situation where we need people to stay home for 2-3 years.

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

#168

Post by DanBC »

jdminhbg wrote: post #147
causality0 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every person who dies of COVID, nineteen people are hospitalized. Eighteen of those will have permanent heart damage. Ten will have permanent lung damage. Three will have strokes. Two will have neurological damage leading to permanent muscular disability. Two will have neurological damage leading to cognitive impairment. Don't be afraid of covid killing you. Be afraid of it turning you into a mentally disabled cr…

I often wonder how many people actually believe things like this, versus are willing to say them loudly in the hopes that they'll make others take the virus more seriously. Because none of this is remotely evidence-based.

It's well known that respiratory diseases cause permanent damage. We see it with flu and we see it with covid-19. "Damage" covers a huge range though.

In June estimates were that 1 in 5 people who needed intensive care for covid were left with permanent damage.

> People infected with the coronavirus may be left with permanent lung damage. Doctors are reporting growing numbers of people who still have breathlessness and coughing months after falling ill with covid-19, and whose chest scans show evidence of irreversible lung scarring.

> The numbers of people affected aren’t yet known, but estimates are as high as one in five of those who needed intensive care treatment for covid-19. Permanent damage is sometimes seen after other kinds of chest infections that can cause similar lung inflammation to the coronavirus, such as flu and pneumonia.

> In a study in Italy, which was one of the first European countries to be hit by the coronavirus, doctors are scanning the lungs of people three months after they fell ill. Although the full results aren’t yet in, Paolo Spagnolo at the University Hospital of Padua estimates that 15 to 20 per cent of those treated in intensive care at his hospital for covid-19 have scarring. “We have to be prepared in the future to manage these patients.”

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2247086-the-coronavirus...

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

#169

Post by jhayward »

tzs wrote: post #24

Suppose an mRNA vaccine is developed for some virus, but it fails to clear phase 1 safety testing. Question: what would be the likely reasons for that? In particular, is it almost certainly going to be due to whatever carries the mRNA, or could the mRNA itself be the problem? If it is the carrier in which potential safety issues lie, does that mean that once we have one successful safe mRNA vaccine for virus A, then…

Much of the danger of vaccine development is the possibility of activating antibody response to an off-target cell that expresses the same feature the vaccine is expressing. You can't really find those reliably without human trials.

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

#170

Post by eli_gottlieb »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #135
jwilk wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it obvious?

What this class of vaccine does is make a bunch of foreign proteins for your immune system to attack in your arm without actually infecting you with the disease. So you get inflammation and soreness at the injection site, and this is not from the physics of having an injection. The placebo arm injects with a saline solution, so there's no immune response, and you miss those symptoms.

I got muscle aches, fatigue, and headaches, but my arm never felt more than a little hot. I still have no idea which branch I'm in.
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