It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by woofie11 » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 5:31 AM UTC

mrfusion wrote: post #237

xxpor wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or COVID! There's been some reports about long term damage to people's lungs and such. To be frank, that's what scares me a lot more than the acute disease as someone who's still relatively young.

Have you actually researched that though? I have yet to see a study that examined people’s lungs before they got COVID as a comparison. And it would be worth knowing the numbers before jumping on the fear wagon. Is it 1 in 10 young people or 1 in 10,000?

It seems to be at least a few percent of all cases. A majority of cases which are hospitalized have long-term effects too. It's also common enough that anecdotally -- I'm in a city hit hard and early by COVID. I can't tell you if it's 30% or 2%, but it's definitely not 1:10,000.

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

#272

Post by kelnos » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 5:34 AM UTC

DalasNoin wrote: post #10

melling wrote: post #2

The technology was years in the making. DARPA was also involved. “In October 2013, DARPA awarded Moderna up to approximately $25 million to research and develop potential mRNA medicines as a part of DARPA’s Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics, or ADEPT, program”

But it is very interesting that mRNA vaccines can be very quickly developed for new viruses. The underlying technology may have taken years, but it can be applied to new viruses as soon as the virus is sequenced.

> The underlying technology may have taken years, but it can be applied to new viruses as soon as the virus is sequenced.

My understanding is that a big part of why this one was so fast was that Moderna had experience digging into SARS previously, and that led them to immediately focus on the spike protein this time around. Without that prior experience I expect it would have taken longer? (But likely still pretty fast.)

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

#273

Post by pastrami_panda » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 5:41 AM UTC

ckdarby wrote: post #166

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.

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.

Yes, it's called nocebo effect and can be quite harmful actually.

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

#274

Post by schoen » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 5:59 AM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #181

NoodleIncident wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A complicated example of your point about "priming the immune system to overreact" is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengvaxia_controversy

Dengue fever is a strange and terrible disease where -- unlike most infectious diseases! -- contracting it once can make future infections worse through autoimmune mechanisms (if I remember correctly, you typically become immune to the particular strain that caused the first infection, but may become more susceptible to severe reactions from a later infection involving a different strain). Apparently the Dengvaxia vaccine, while effective at reducing the chance of dengue infections, also has an effect similar to surviving an infection: it increases the chance that an infection will result in severe disease. That makes it a more complicated question whether it's a good health intervention in particular circumstances, and in the Philippines there was a big scandal where a childhood immunization program using it may have reduced the total number of people who contracted dengue, but also increased the severity of the worst cases.

To my knowledge the pathogens that cause COVID-19 and dengue fever are extremely different, but it seems logically possible that there could be a COVID vaccine that greatly reduced people's chance of getting sick at all, while also increasing the chances of severe symptoms for those people who did get sick.

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

#275

Post by indolering » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 6:07 AM UTC

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…

> Any more deadly (like Ebola) .....

Ebola requires direct contact with bodily fluids, it's not nearly as easily transmittable as Covid. Note that seasonal flu levels are at historic lows [1, 2], despite Covid raging to the point where many US states' ICUs are filled to capacity.

[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/flu-season-never-... [2]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03519-3

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

#276

Post by tialaramex » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 6:33 AM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #134

matz1 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't nz had strict lockdown? Also from the article: However, Stats NZ national accounts manager Paul Pascoe said the effects of Covid-19 on different industries had varied “and for some industries these may persist for some time”. The rebound was not enough to make up for the lost activity during the lockdown period, with GDP in the 12 months ended on September 30 down 2.2 per cent on the prior year.

> Didn't nz had strict lockdown? Yes, and more than one. Community transmission was eliminated several times. The point is to compare the strategy to others.

The entire country only locked down once, starting March, reducing to milder conditions in April and totally ending (going to "Alert Level 1" which isn't the same as before COVID but it's pretty much normality in everyday life) on June 9th. But Auckland (their biggest city), locked back down after another cluster of unknown origin was detected, perhaps related to an import business, for several weeks from August, and the rest of the country was at "Alert Level 2" in that period until the first week of October.

Subsequent small outbreaks have not triggered a lockdown because their government remained confident it understood the scope of the infection although one leak got close, they asked people not to travel into central Auckland for a day or two at one point and sealed off a residential building while they tested everybody who lives there.

They anticipate continuing to have occasional small outbreaks detected, e.g. a border worker gets infected, infects a family member before a test spots it - and their plans assume they will either quickly achieve confidence they've contained the outbreak or they'll lock a region or if necessary the entire country back down to eliminate.

For example at a press conference the press basically wanted to know if the government was imagining people should prepare to pay for an extra week's accommodation on vacation in case they can't return home (obviously unaffordable to many families) but the government seemed to be more thinking about if you've left a week's cat food and instructions for a neighbour, do you have a way to tell them they need to feed your cat for an extra week? So, personal anxieties rather than population scale ones, the government can pick up a hotel bill but it can't bring your pets back to life.

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

#277

Post by addicted » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 7:07 AM UTC

FreakyT wrote: post #253

sacks2k wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China welded people into their homes, forced people into the hospital at gun point, and disappeared any doctor that actually wanted to warn the world about it back in December. There was also a recent document leaked that told us what many already suspected: they lied about their numbers. This isn't much of a surprise, since they stopped giving any updates pretty quickly into the pandemic. I have family that live in…

> Trump warned us back in January Ah yes, "warned", by assuring us that the virus was no worse than the common cold, and we were rapidly "turning a corner", and that it would just "go away on its own". > wanted to close the borders If he really wanted to, what stopped him? He was clearly fully capable of closing borders, given that he did close the border to China (too late) and Europe (also too late). Where was the…

The China border was “closed” yet we had tens of thousands of Chinese travelers enter the US straight after the closure.

And the European border “closing” was so badly managed that it almost certainly seeded the massive outbreak in the NorthEast in the initial phase by causing hundreds of super spreader events daily in airports across the northeast as people all tried to return from Europe within the same few days and the airports were completely unprepared to handle them safely.

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

#278

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 7:12 AM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #230

ashtonkem wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 particula…

I sometimes think about this in terms of warfare. Everyone who has memories of a war survived it, and this factors into deciding whether the next war is worth it or not.

Nobody asks the people who died in the war if it was worth it.

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

#279

Post by hackerbabz » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 7:49 AM UTC

wahern wrote: post #231

drcross wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Other than Australia, China, New Zealand, and Vietnam, you mean? And China managed that after it had already spread widely domestically; the others were quick on their feet.

Cambodia too. We had our first known case of community transmission three weeks ago. It topped at 41 cases and we’ve had no new ones for three days.

We have mandatory two week quarantine for all arivals, stores lose their business licenses if they let anyone in without a mask. Schools, cinemas, gyms, clubs are all closed.

We’re hoping things will open up again in two weeks.

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

#280

Post by AceyMan » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 8:02 AM UTC

woofie11 wrote: post #270

xxpor wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though it's less dangerous for young people, there's still reports that it was the top cause of death for people in their 20s or 30s this summer. The absolute numbers aren't that high, but it turns out people in their 20s and 30s don't die randomly that often either.

It also depends on how one defines danger. Would you rather die a few years earlier in your old age? Or live with reduced lung capacity for many years? And how common is that with COVID19? We're still waiting to see the fall-out of long COVID.

Vote / Reply I'll take two fewer years of lifespan, for 200, Alex.

I'm an athlete, and my cardiopulmonary bits are essential to my sense of well-being.

/Acey