Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

theness.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 339 posts

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

#291

Post by _ph_ »

seafoam wrote: post #8

I could write Twitter in a weekend.

Not sure what the point was you were going to make, but the mRNA technology is a big step in the direction of being able to address medical problems like writing a software. For a long time, pharmaceuticals were create in a trial and error process. It took science a long time to be able to reliably predict the outcome of chemical reactions, if we are talking about complex organic chemistry. I was working a very little bit on that in the mid-90ies. One very naive program I implemented was trying to predict the toxidity of a random chemical by its formula. We have come far from that. But with the mRNA technology, they could design their vaccine on a computer, also the production of the mRNA is highly automatized, so no experimenting in how to create it.

Developing the mRNA technology was of course decades of research, but now it is ready to be used. It also helped, that the SARS-virus was very well researched, so like with software, it the vaccine wasn't created "from scratch". It used the knowledge already present about these viruses. This means, while you might not get a vaccine against a random virus in two days (no HIV vaccine available yet), adjusting the vaccine for slight variations of the SARS-cov-2 virus, should be a very quick process.

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

#293

Post by owowow »

iamthemonster wrote: post #232
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.

It's just not realistic for the US to be able to match the performance of countries with advanced healthcare capabilities and resources like Vietnam.

Seriously, we can't expect to match the performance of a low income country we bombed back to the stone age just a few decades ago?

Vietnam isn't a paragon of wealth and competent administration today, there is no good reason our public health departments should not have been able to perform equally or better than their equivalents in Vietnam.

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

#294

Post by dag11 »

closeparen wrote: post #285
dag11 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a strong social benefit too. Being able to more comfortably spend time with friends and family you care about, even if they can't be vaccinated yet, seems worthwhile in itself. There's also the related consideration for dating, etc.

Unfortunately not. Being vaccinated doesn't stop you from having and transmitting the virus, only from getting sick. It won't be safe for you to see your friends until they have it too.

That's not a blanket statement that can be made, as the data is still coming in.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/12/fda-anal....

> He said the findings reflect an impact on blocking transmission and are very encouraging, hinting at mucosal immunity. "The data aren't conclusive but support this key benefit," he said.

Of course, if in the end vaccines don't prevent transmission, then they don't prevent transmission. But we don't know that they don't do that.

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

#295

Post by mixmastamyk »

chapium wrote: post #247
mrfusion wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand the lockdowns were extremely destructive on children. Loss of schools, education, parents losing jobs, domestic violence, suicides.

Honestly, kids are just fine with it. Anecdotally, they are managing far better than adults. Not oblivious to the situation, but far more adaptable to just staying at home.

Depends where and who we live with.

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

#296

Post by mixmastamyk »

Spooky23 wrote: post #259
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…

The nasty part of coronavirus is that while you are most contagious in the first 24 hours of symptoms presenting, you are also meaningfully contagious for about 48 hours prior to symptoms appearing.

Interesting, have any links to this?

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

#297

Post by shellfishgene »

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…

There are three options, the mRNA "carrier", such as the lipid particle, the mRNA itself, and of course the protein product.

The first part is hard to guess without knowing what's in those delivery methods.

mRNA, or RNA in general, can form secondary structures which in theory could affect the the cell machinery. Depending on the details this could produce side effects to the cells that take up the mRNA. This would probably be localized and a strong secondary structure may inhibit translation also, rendering the vaccine ineffective. This can be checked in silico and in vitro during design to some certainty.

The protein product I would guess is the most likely to cause problems. Essentially you can encode any protein in mRNA, so you could make the cells that take it in produce snake poison, for example, if you wanted to. Depending on how the virus protein is modified, and how it reacts with the cells/body when present apart from the rest of the virus it assembles with could bring all kinds of side effects. The severity probably depends on what exactly it interacts with, and if it's only local or it gets into the bloodstream etc.

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

#298

Post by pdpi »

jobigoud wrote: post #286
AceyMan wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You say this now but if we ask you then, the day of your death, would you rather die now or live a few more years in a diminished capacity, you might have a very different answer.

But that’s not the trade off. Rather it’s “would you rather die now, or have lived in a diminished capacity for the last few decades?”

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

#299

Post by tialaramex »

WalterBright wrote: post #278
tialaramex wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

We were mostly taught about World War I through the war poetry. They wanted our class to all memorize Wilfred Owen's poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est". I couldn't do it, got terrible marks in that class. But the Latin phrase itself sticks in your head.

Wilfred Owen did not live to see the end of that war.

It was at first astonishing to me that the same words are etched into the Arlington cemetery amphitheatre, but of course that's almost why Owen refers to them. At the time the building was constructed it would have been the thing to do - to portray death in war as a noble sacrifice.

Owen's point is that there's nothing noble about choking to death in a fog of gas, of so many dying so far from home, war is not noble or patriotic, it's horrible.

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

#300

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN