Making Vaccine • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Vaccine

#41

Post by wiml » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:12 PM UTC

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?

Some vaccines in the past have been withdrawn for causing autoimmune disorders, eg arthritis.

Re: Making Vaccine

#42

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:12 PM UTC

habryka wrote: post #32

SahAssar wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 biologis…

[deleted]

Re: Making Vaccine

#43

Post by fpgaminer » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

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…

I recall a researcher talking about previous attempts at creating coronavirus vaccines. How they resulted not in immunity, but in training the immune system to _over_ respond when a real infection came along.

After a bit of digging I found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/

> An early concern for application of a SARS-CoV vaccine was the experience with other coronavirus infections which induced enhanced disease and immunopathology in animals when challenged with infectious virus

I didn't dig deep enough to see if any experimental vaccines caused similar issues, but it definitely appears to be a concern.

So yeah, I'd be _very_ cautious with any homebrew vaccine. You might accidentally train your immune system to self destruct when you get exposed to a real SARS-CoV-2.

That said, I have little to no experience with biology, so it's entirely possible that radvac based vaccinations have already been demonstrated not to have this particular problem.

Re: Making Vaccine

#44

Post by nostromo » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:15 PM UTC

biggieshellz wrote: post #40

nostromo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, the testers would be directly exposed as part of the trial, which is why they'd be compensated -- as opposed to waiting around for 9 months for some percent of people to be exposed.

Re: Making Vaccine

#45

Post by recursivedoubts » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:16 PM UTC

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?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/04/14/cutter-pol...

Re: Making Vaccine

#46

Post by flr03 » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:16 PM UTC

angry_octet wrote: post #39

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.

I'm not suprised to see this post so popular on Less Wrong/the rational community. I can easily imagine the fascination they have for crazy scientists doing experimentations on them selves, cutting all the corners and operating at fair distance of ethical concerns. I'm not very convinced by the "Motivations" section of the article by the way, but that's a nice stunt nonetheless, and quite fascinating indeed.

Re: Making Vaccine

#47

Post by fabian2k » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:19 PM UTC

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 said that the immune system can cause damage. Vaccines have a very high safety standard as they are given to large numbers of healthy people, so the tolerance for serious side effects is very low. So the development there is very careful, and anything that looks too dangerous is hopefully caught in animal experiments or at worst at phase I.

A well known example of how dangerous the immune system can be is the following phase I trial:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa063842

That drug caused a cytokine storm in the participants in the phase I trial.

Allergies are another example of how dangerous the immune system can be if it is triggered against the wrong targets.

Re: Making Vaccine

#48

Post by 1970-01-01 » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

TLDR: I attempted to make a COVID vaccine. It was cheap. I have no proof that it worked. Other risks are unknown.

The story reminds me of Barry Marshall, but with less science behind it. https://jamesclear.com/barry-marshall

Re: Making Vaccine

#49

Post by bawolff » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:21 PM UTC

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?

For vaccines in general, i imagine it depends on the type a lot. Live vaccines for example have the obvious risk factor of maybe giving you the disease, but i dont know much about the topic.

I imagine for this article the biggest risk is you make something other than you expect and poision yourself, or you just make something that does nothing. (IANAexpert)

Re: Making Vaccine

#50

Post by dragontamer » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:23 PM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #44

biggieshellz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, the testers would be directly exposed as part of the trial, which is why they'd be compensated -- as opposed to waiting around for 9 months for some percent of people to be exposed.

And the control / placebo group?

You're really going to force testers to potentially pick up the placebo, and then inject them with COVID19 forcefully? I mean yeah, it'd work, but its generally considered immoral under today's philosophy of science.