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Making Vaccine

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Re: Making Vaccine

#31

Post by rossdavidh »

lxe wrote: post #13

Just to summarize for my own understanding/fascination: this person DIY's 500 doses of nasal-spray COVID-19 vaccine for $1000 using ingredients and tools off of Amazon and easy-to-source synthesized peptides with minimal skill?

Well, if we assume that your immune system takes a look at something that showed up in your nasal membranes once, and never reproduced, and said "that looks like a big problem we should learn how to make antibodies against". It is entirely possible that your immune system is smart enough to take a look at that and say "that looks like a bunch of inert junk", and does nothing, because it doesn't need to.

Re: Making Vaccine

#32

Post by habryka »

SahAssar wrote: post #21
habryka wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, though the vaccine is likely to have substantially less efficacy than current mRNA based vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, though I think it's promising enough that some level of efficacy (like idk. maybe 50%, who knows) doesn't seem out of the question (whereas Moderna and Pfizer are likely 90%+).

> 50% efficacy doesn't seem out of the question Is there anything at all to back up that figure? Like, seriously, anything at all? I'd be very interested to hear if there was, but again, are there any hard numbers from studies of success rates of this? Or even self-reported numbers?

I suggested 50% as more of an upper bound.

My current guess is I would be very surprised if these have very high efficacy, based on a number of studies on kind of similar vaccines I remember reading. I think the most likely outcome is that these have 0% efficacy, though I also wouldn't put less than 10% probability on them having between 20% and 50%.

But yeah, these are all just random guesses. Probably some biologists have better models here that could allow them to make better predictions, but there is no hard data.

Re: Making Vaccine

#33

Post by GuB-42 »

aqme28 wrote: post #3

I'm amazed at the price here. $1k for 500 doses, and the author stated in the comments that they could have saved a lot more per dose if they bought in bulk. It seems like a failure of the system that no one is trying for FDA approval or industrialization.

They couldn't have bought in bulk "The only unusual hiccup was an email about customs restrictions on COVID-related peptides. Apparently the company was not allowed to send us 9 mg in one vial, but could send us two vials of 4.5 mg each for each peptide."

The big problems with COVID vaccines is making sure they are safe and effective, and logistics. The author doesn't do any of these. There is a scale difference of 7 orders of magnitude compared to what we need. And he is taking risks that would be unreasonable for a commercial vaccine and efficiency is "let's see if it does something".

It is an experiment and it has scientific value, maybe some of the mainstream vaccine candidates started out like this. But it cannot be compared to current widespread vaccination efforts.

As for the money, it is a common fallacy to think that throwing money at a problem will solve it. Same as an often seen argument "it will take $X billion to end world hunger". World hunger is solved with food, not money, people don't eat money. On a small scale, you just have to go to the grocery store and spend money to feed a starving person. On a large scale there simply not enough food available unless we do some major changes regarding agriculture and distribution, throwing in money will just cause price inflation. Same thing with vaccines.

Re: Making Vaccine

#34

Post by asitov »

avs733 wrote: post #24
CivBase wrote: post #22

Nations have spent thousands of dollars per person on just mitigation efforts and economic stimulus. Meanwhile we have had the ability for months to vaccinate an entire household for a measly $1k? What's the catch? Is it significantly riskier than the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines? Is it easy to make a mistake while producing this and end up with something ineffective or harmful? Is it just not particularly effective?

Quality control. Precision. Repeatability. Certification. Knowledge. Distribution. Efficacy. Evidence. It's like the difference between heroin and opioids

Are you saying you wouldn't take the heroin version of a covid vax?

Re: Making Vaccine

#35

Post by zests »

fabian2k wrote: post #15

If there is one thing I certainly wouldn't just play around with it's the immune system. It's incredibly dangerous and easily capable of causing all kinds of harm to yourself up to killing you outright. A vaccine is designed to produce an immune response of the right magnitude. Too low and it doesn't work, too high and it'll cause damage. At least one of the vaccine candidates in development was put back to the drawi…

Can you provide more information about how vaccines can cause damage?

Re: Making Vaccine

#36

Post by nostromo »

dragontamer wrote: post #30
CivBase wrote: post #22

Nations have spent thousands of dollars per person on just mitigation efforts and economic stimulus. Meanwhile we have had the ability for months to vaccinate an entire household for a measly $1k? What's the catch? Is it significantly riskier than the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines? Is it easy to make a mistake while producing this and end up with something ineffective or harmful? Is it just not particularly effective?

The mRNA vaccines were completed within a week or two with modern technology. It took nearly a year to test: prove that it was safe, prove that it was effective (preventing deaths, preventing hospitalizations, preventing symptoms). This blogpost completely ignores the difficult proof issue.

We could have tested it in two weeks with paid volunteers.

The pay for brave vaccine testers could have literally been $1m and we’d have saved several trillion bucks and potentially over a million lives. Hell, make it $10m or $100m and you'd still save a ton of money.

We've done this for several other viruses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_challenge_study

Re: Making Vaccine

#37

Post by jfjrkrkfjf »

kneel wrote: post #9

Curious whether short peptides are sufficient to generate a formidable immune response. Looking at the paper cited, it's not trivial to detect T-cell immunity so I'm not sure a general antibody test would be able to pick up an immune response. It's probably better than doing nothing, but it's not clear whether it's even in the same ballpark as a Pfizer vaccine. edit: I'm not sure about t-cell vs b-cell responses in i…

Not an expert, but I've read that the antigen presenting cells break down the antigen into short peptides too (8-20 amino acids) when creating antibodies.

One might however still ask if the body is better at selecting exactly which portions are cut and chosen than however these were selected.

Also, if the antigen is small from the start, that might have implications too (like being ignored).

Re: Making Vaccine

#38

Post by dante_dev »

zests wrote: post #35
fabian2k wrote: post #15

If there is one thing I certainly wouldn't just play around with it's the immune system. It's incredibly dangerous and easily capable of causing all kinds of harm to yourself up to killing you outright. A vaccine is designed to produce an immune response of the right magnitude. Too low and it doesn't work, too high and it'll cause damage. At least one of the vaccine candidates in development was put back to the drawi…

Can you provide more information about how vaccines can cause damage?

I think he was referring generically to any bad crafted vaccine. Not the one approved by authorities. Indeed any improvised drug can be harmful.

Re: Making Vaccine

#39

Post by angry_octet »

Even if no one dies from this, he and the contrarian happy clappers on lesswrong deserve a special recognition for ingenuity at the Darwin Awards. The field is crowded for 2020, what with HCQ and ivermectin truthers, statistical frauds, denialists and blind optimists, but there is a chance they'll dominate the anti-vaxxers in 2021.

Re: Making Vaccine

#40

Post by biggieshellz »

nostromo wrote: post #36
dragontamer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mRNA vaccines were completed within a week or two with modern technology. It took nearly a year to test: prove that it was safe, prove that it was effective (preventing deaths, preventing hospitalizations, preventing symptoms). This blogpost completely ignores the difficult proof issue.

We could have tested it in two weeks with paid volunteers. The pay for brave vaccine testers could have literally been $1m and we’d have saved several trillion bucks and potentially over a million lives. Hell, make it $10m or $100m and you'd still save a ton of money. We've done this for several other viruses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_challenge_study

We could test that it's safe, yes. Effective, no. You have to have the people out in the community, for both the vaccinated group and the control group, and then compare who gets infected in each group. The testing actually took less time than they expected due to the unfortunately-high prevalence of COVID-19 in the community.
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