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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

#211

Post by Gibbon1 »

gravypod wrote: post #201
mrits wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another possibility: something that generates mild cold/flu symptoms but does long term damage that you won't notice right away. This would cause the "Bob had it and he's fine!" mentality to spread as it currently is. An example of this may be HIV.

Not lost on me that despite being a rare disease I know five people that have had guillain barre syndrome[1]. And I know about ten people who appear to have some sort of chronic malaise. I suspicious those are the result of viral infections.

There is also the minority opinion that some forms of dementia are due latent viral infections.

[1] You don't guillain barre syndrome takes years to recover and is absolutely traumatic.

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

#212

Post by ska »

matz1 wrote: post #187
lostlogin wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the death toll is still manageable and the life is pretty much still normal.

It's probably worth noting that this statement is currently contentious both inside and outside Sweden.

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

#213

Post by heavyset_go »

vonmoltke wrote: post #144
fat-chunk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the Spanish Flu specifically, the evidence indicates most people who died were killed by secondary bacterial infection, not the virus itself[1]. This was the result of a combination of poor hygienic conditions and lack of antibiotics. Considering that, I think what we are witnessing with SARS-CoV-2 is about what the Spanish Flu would look like today. [1] https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/196/11/1717/886065

Bacterial pneumonia has a 30% death rate these days.

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

#215

Post by ur-whale »

opwieurposiu wrote: post #42
tzs wrote: post #31

The layman's explanation I've seen about how these mRNA vaccines work is that they get some of your cells to manufacture a protein that is characteristic of the virus, which the cells release and the immune system takes care of. Then later if you get the virus, the immune system already recognizes that protein and takes care of the virus. Question: why do we need to have our cells make the protein? Couldn't we synthe…

1. In 40 years, there have only been 20 protein drugs approved. 2. Yes the cells go back to to normal after the mRNA degrades. The mRNA does not last long, it is like data in ram vs data on a hard drive. See this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4-DMKNT7xI

Wow, this video is really good.

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

#216

Post by undersuit »

xjlin0 wrote: post #214

The title is somewhat misleading. A better title would be " It took two days to design Moderna’s vaccine with available technologies and data." Another analogy would be something like "It took X days to design Blue Origin's New Glenn".

OK but what would X be? Would I be impressed by the number?

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

#217

Post by waterhouse »

aidenn0 wrote: post #184
chrononaut wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It didn't cause billions of people to gain experience in stocking up on supplies, learning how to live while locked down and the problems it entails, and wearing masks and taking other precautions. Therefore, it didn't serve as a training pandemic, except maybe for a small group. (It seems it did serve as training for vaccine developers, at least.)

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

#218

Post by adewinter »

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…

"more deadly" does not necessarily mean more deaths in this case. If it kills like ebola more folks could take it seriously ultimately resulting in lower transmission and death rates.

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

#219

Post by asutekku »

xjlin0 wrote: post #214

The title is somewhat misleading. A better title would be " It took two days to design Moderna’s vaccine with available technologies and data." Another analogy would be something like "It took X days to design Blue Origin's New Glenn".

Everything has always been done with ”available technologies and data”. That the vaccine was made in two days is pretty impressive in itself.

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

#220

Post by hobom »

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.

The AstraZeneca trial was the one to use the meningitis vaccine.
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