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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

#181

Post by bluGill »

NoodleIncident wrote: post #163
bluGill wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't downplay the safety. Phase 1 can fail because of lack of immune response OR safety concerns. Phase 2 and 3 trials are also about safety, and both of them somewhat often fail because of safety issues.

A vaccine can make a disease worse by priming the immune system to overreact and attack the entire body when a single cell is infected.

The more we know about a vaccine the more confident we are. The flu vaccine is changed every year without long safety studies: we have learned enough about how people response to the flu vaccines in use to not need them anymore. When the same process is used to make a non-flu vaccine though we still have to start over because there isn't any way to be sure.

You are quickly getting beyond my area of knowledge though. I didn't answer all of your questions because I don't know.

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

#182

Post by kart23 »

ebiester wrote: post #178
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From what I've heard from one of the trials, they used a meningitis vaccine that actually does hurt. (Its side effects are known but minor.) That was hearsay, though, and I don't have access to the internal protocol.

No, the trial procedure is publicly available. They used a saline solution as the placebo.

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

#183

Post by jdminhbg »

DanBC wrote: post #168
jdminhbg wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Of course we know that respiratory infections can cause long-term effects. That is almost certainly true also of covid.

What is not shown at all is that it turns you into a “mentally challenged cripple.”

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

#184

Post by aidenn0 »

chrononaut wrote: post #150
jayrot wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this pandemic has been described as the perfect middle ground for politicization, denialism, and just laissez-faire attitudes. Any more deadly (like Ebola) it becomes incredibly scary and people likely do whatever it takes when they see people around them dropping like flies (especially in horrific ways). Any less deadly (basically the yearly flu) and it becomes easy to ignore and just becomes part of the backgr…

> This was not a good "training pandemic". Was it not though? I assume you'd want a pandemic deadly enough for that convinces a majority of the populace that it's a serious event (to encourage downstream change to better prepare for a worse pandemic), while at the same time not causing people to drop like flies. As you stated, anything less severe would be taken less seriously. To have something to be taken more seri…

MERS (which didn't reach the US) was probably a better "training pandemic" because of the high rate of symptoms early on in the infection. One could take drastic measures to isolate the infected and prevent many deaths.

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

#185

Post by jdminhbg »

hcknwscommenter wrote: post #156
jdminhbg wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You seem so confident, but cite nothing (just like the comment you are referring to). However, I do note that all the symptoms noted in the comment above are actual symptoms found in survivors of severe COVID. I'm not sure about the proportions though, but is it a stretch to believe that patients who are hospitalized (by definition, severely impacted by COVID) very often have long-term damage?

There are millions of survivors of Covid, so every conceivable bad health outcome will be present in that population.

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

#186

Post by kart23 »

Does anyone know the specific differences between the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines? I know the quoted reason is that its something to do with the structure of the delivery method, the lipid nanoparticles. And I've seen news articles saying that this information is proprietary and won't be released. Is that really an acceptable excuse for the first mRNA vaccine to be used on a massive scale and with about 6 months of trials?

I think this information should be made open so that other countries/companies can produce vaccines with the higher temperature requirement, not to mention that the public should know these differences and why they exist. There's gotta be more factories that have the necessary equipment, but the plans just aren't available.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/17/9355633...

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

#187

Post by matz1 »

lostlogin wrote: post #145
andylynch wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am certain GDP has been nobody’s primary concern in NZ during this time, but -2.2 % is not bad considering how international NZ’s economy is. For comparison, UK is at -9.6 for the same period US -2.9 with a far higher human cost.

There are many who argue against lockdowns, but I haven’t yet seen an argument for that approach with an example of how it could look (for death toll and the economy). Has any country managed both those things without a lockdown? A hand waving “that approach could never work in X country because it’s so different there” seems the standard response to any strategy that has been proven to work.

Sweeden is one example, the death toll is still manageable and the life is pretty much still normal.

Not a country: florida, it is one of the state in the usa that has the least covid related restriction. They are doing very well. Went there myself to visit recently.

Its not hard to see why lockdown is not worth it. According to cdc, covid has very very low ifr :

0-19 years: 0.00003

20-49 years: 0.0002

50-69 years: 0.005

70+ years: 0.054

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

#188

Post by inglor_cz »

tialaramex wrote: post #18
kemiller2002 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the silver lining for this pandemic. Covid-19 is lethal, I'm not discounting that, but in terms of real lethality, this was a good test run to show that this approach works. (At least in my lay person's knowledge.) What really scares me are the highly lethal flu strains (I think H5N5?) The fact that we can produce a vaccine this quickly now gives me hope when we encounter a scenario like out of the mo…

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…

"High lethality is often associated with reduced transmissibility. Which makes sense - dead people certainly aren't going to cough on you."

The worst case I can think of is an ubiquitous animal vector (rats? mice?) that only gets a mild form of the disease but can spread it, while people fall dead all around.

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

#189

Post by ashtonkem »

soperj wrote: post #87
ashtonkem wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read what I said more carefully before replying. You’re largely reiterating what I’ve already said. Yes, 1% CFR is a lot of deaths, which is why ~3k Americans are dying per day. But 1% of personal risk is perceived as a low risk thing, hence the low compliance. Transmissibility is also a factor, of course.

I don't think Americans would align more to stop it if it were deadlier is my point. There would be the same stupid outcry. Look at the history of the Spanish flu. It's the same crap.

Yeah, that’s fair. There were mask protests during the Spanish Flu, which had a much higher CFR.

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

#190

Post by brandly »

adventured wrote: post #97
jiveturkey wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why is this being downvoted? completely on point.

> completely on point. It's not. They can't. Not even remotely close. They're so far off the claim it's embarrassing they even said it. They couldn't write 1% of Twitter in a weekend. Twitter circa 2006, they could clone the basics of it. And only because someone else already showed them what to do so they don't have to burn much time thinking very much or go through many learning iterations.

...that's the point.
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