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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
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…
Vaccines are similar: vaccinating the world will be logistically very very hard. But vaccinating first-world countries is a lot easier, and supply of vaccine in rich countries absolutely is a problem that can be solved with more money and resources. The fact that we've had so much trouble solving it is a political problem.
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?
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
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.
> In principle one can run a similar antibody test on a mucus sample, but I'd really like to know what those reasons are. It seems like a pretty important detail.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quality control. Precision. Repeatability. Certification. Knowledge. Distribution. Efficacy. Evidence. It's like the difference between heroin and opioids
It's kind of funny, pharmaceuticals have similar economics to software now that I think about it: extremely high upfront fixed costs, minimal marginal costs.
The only difference is that the researcher's limit for not understanding the code might be 150,000 lines, but only 50 atoms for not understanding the molecule. :)
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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 follo…
This is false.
Put another way, the very fact that we run such massive tests on them before deploying them is itself evidence that the wrong ones can be very dangerous. (Mostly, as I understand it, "very dangerous" to a small set of people who will have very large reactions, even if most people are fine. The ones that are very dangerous to everyone never gets past the initial phases at all, of course.) We're not doing that because vaccines are all perfectly safe under all conditions, but we just want to hold them back for a year for no reason. We're doing it because we need to be very careful with them.
Though I'd also observe a non-trivial component of that danger is also because we're injecting them. Bypassing the body's co-evolved with the environment's defenses is not to be done lightly. This sort of inhaled vaccine is likely to be much less dangerous. I won't say "safe", but less dangerous; the body already has to deal with essentially arbitrary small amino acid sequences being inhaled all the time. I'd still be a bit worried about sythesizing things that we haven't co-evolved with.
(If you don't know what co-evolution is, I'd suggesting taking a moment to learn about it: https://www.britannica.com/science/coevolution It's a very important part of understanding the disease landscape holistically.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It would be quite possible for it to clearly be informed consent also, at least to the extent the disease was characterized at that point in time.
The reason people keep bringing it up is that the consequences of the pandemic have been much worse than the consequences of allowing a few thousand people to intentionally expose themselves to an infection in a controlled setting¹. It's not guaranteed that challenge trials would have mitigated the pandemic, but it's weird to just outright circumscribe the possibility when the ongoing downside is huge.
1. I use the odd phrasing here because lots of people pretty much choose to expose themselves to the infection anyway; maybe not explicitly, but close enough.
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?
They exposed their nasal tissues to peptides from the virus. You could call it an inoculation. I think it is okay to reserve 'vaccine' for something a bit more fine tuned and tested.