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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

#221

Post by shatnersbassoon »

michaelt wrote: post #173
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.

Unless you're in a high-risk group, getting a vaccine early is kinda irrelevant. Being able to go to concerts and sports events and theatres safely is pointless if there aren't any concerts or sports events or theatres open. If you've got elderly loved ones you want to keep safe, you'd need to vaccinate them, not yourself. And if all you want to do is go to the shops without a mask, while everyone assumes you're a du…

It's not irrelevant though. I know someone who is 39, perfectly healthy and nearly died. He now has long covid. I'm sure all of the people under fifty who died would have loved to have had the vaccine.

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

#222

Post by the-pigeon »

adewinter wrote: post #218
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…

"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.

In particular, when COVID19 was first spreading but we knew about it back in February countries could've easily contact traced to flush it out and then quarantined all incoming travelers to keep it out.

But most countries deemed those actions too extreme and economically damaging so instead let it come spread and do way more damage.

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

#223

Post by infoseek12 »

feross wrote: post #11

Key quote: > The question ultimately comes down to risk vs benefit. We need to get over our evolved but suboptimal instinct to avoid directly causing harm preferentially over passively allowing harm to occur. In the end, the amount of harm is all that matters. In a situation like this, delivering a vaccine as quickly as possible while maintaining sufficient safety and efficacy, there is a sweet spot somewhere that mi…

I think that is the key quote but I believe their conclusion about balancing risks is mistaken. People don’t statistically assess risks the way actuaries do, even the most rational people don’t think like that. There’s already a significant percent of the population that believe any number of irrational things about vaccinations. Around a third of Americans aren’t planning to get the vaccine. If there are a significant number of adverse reactions convincing people to behave rationally will become even more difficult. When assessing the risk we can’t just look at the direct effects we also need to consider the effects on how the population at large will behave.

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

#224

Post by hcknwscommenter »

xienze wrote: post #195
hcknwscommenter wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clo…

I don’t think any European country has completely lifted their lockdown restrictions. All of it is a “limited re-opening.” Perhaps respiratory viruses spread much more effectively in the winter versus the summer? Maybe that’s it? Nah, it must be that everyone in Europe has perfect hygiene and practiced social distancing perfectly in the summer and they’ve all forgotten how to do those things now.

> I don’t think any European country has completely lifted their lockdown restrictions.

True

>All of it is a “limited re-opening.”

Yes, but the issue is how limited was the limited re-opening. I live in the U.S., but ALL of my colleagues are in Europe. It's anecdotal, but my understanding is that the re-openings throughout EU were quite closer to the "unlimited" side than the "total lockdown" side of the spectrum.

>Perhaps respiratory viruses spread much more effectively in the winter versus the summer

The presence of an additional explanatory factor does not prove the absence of an alternative explanatory factor. They could both be true, and almost certainly are true. That is: lockdowns work; without lockdowns, you have Bergamo in Jan-Mar 2020 (mass death); COVID spreads better in winter.

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

#225

Post by drcross »

the-pigeon wrote: post #222
adewinter wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

In particular, when COVID19 was first spreading but we knew about it back in February countries could've easily contact traced to flush it out and then quarantined all incoming travelers to keep it out. But most countries deemed those actions too extreme and economically damaging so instead let it come spread and do way more damage.

What you're proposing is highly experimental and probably wouldn't work. There's no single country in the world that has been able to restrain the sars2 virus despite spending millions trying to do so.

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

#226

Post by hcknwscommenter »

jdminhbg wrote: post #185
hcknwscommenter wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. The question is not whether bad health outcomes exist, only the truly ignorant believe COVID is a total hoax. The question is whether COVID is significantly worse than the influenza, rhino, and corona viruses we generally get year-round. The answer, is resoundingly yes. COVID is much worse in terms of the short-term and long-term sequelae both in terms of the range of "bad health outcome[s]" and in terms of the likelihood that an infected person will have one of these "bad health outcome[s]".

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

#228

Post by starlust2 »

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…

They found covid in blood donated in December 2019. It's actually been a full year at this point.

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

#229

Post by UncleOxidant »

jayrot wrote: post #94
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.

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…

It was a good "training pandemic". Some countries did quite well (Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, New Zealand, etc.) and some countries did poorly (the US, Brazil, parts of Europe). Overall, being able to develop and deploy a vaccine within a calendar year seems like a success. Though a lack of inexpensive, quick, home administered tests seems like kind of a failure - they exist, but they haven't been backed by governments to the point where they can be manufactured in large numbers.

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

#230

Post by tialaramex »

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…

> Ironically, a disease with a much higher case fatality rate probably would’ve killed fewer Americans, since we’d be more aligned on stopping it

Not unless it was much higher, like 10% whole population fatality might do it but merely twice as much death wouldn't move the needle.

It's because of one of the most literal examples of survivorship bias. No living people have ever died as a result of taking some particular obviously unsafe shortcut, so they can rationalise it as OK, even though intellectually they know it's a very bad idea. Each time this unsafe shortcut kills somebody, all the living people still have no experience of dying from that shortcut because the one person who experienced the other outcome is now dead.

Close calls can help a little bit, gradually, but the effect is slow and unevenly distributed.

> it would have a greater tendency to burn itself out.

One reason I particularly point at elimination strategy (beyond the, in my opinion obviously related fact that it worked) is that zero cases has a categorically different impact than merely low numbers of cases that result from hoping a lower R-number will cause it to "burn itself out". You get to zero only one case at a time, tracking and tracing everything, getting right into the details, whereas these vague statistical approaches do not do that.

Lots of countries or regions have tried to "flatten the curve" but that's not actually a way out, it's just to buy time. Now, in this case if you bought enough time (maybe 18-24 months) you get a vaccine. But not all diseases are like that, and we could not be confident this was one.

Getting to zero is instead a (painful) permanent fix that allows you to really open up (within the country or region at zero). New Zealand's international tourist economy got a kick in the head, but its people are alive, much of everyday life is already how a lot of us in the North are hoping 2021 will be - its message this summer is "Make summer unstoppable" with small adjustments like wearing a mask on the plane, or tracking where you visited with QR code scanners - but otherwise a pretty normal vacation season, concerts, sports events and so on.

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