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Making Vaccine

lesswrong.com

61–70 of 378 posts

Re: Making Vaccine

#61
> Doing it for ourselves doesn’t capture all the benefits - lots of fun stuff is still closed/cancelled - but it’s enough to go out, socialize, and generally enjoy life without worrying about COVID.

Yes, I look forward to having random people skirt the social distancing rules because they sniffed their own homemade vaccine over the weekend.

Re: Making Vaccine

#62

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.

Total ethical failure here. You are supposed to not make people ill.

2,000,000+ people are dead because we didn't take this path.

The risk to testers under 40 would have been negligible. I'm not being flippant about other peoples' lives -- I would have signed up myself if the compensation was high enough.

Re: Making Vaccine

#63
Why am I supposed to take this seriously? LessWrong is not exactly known for being a sane place (as much as many of them would love to believe they are smart) and this guy states it as a "fun project" which make it sound extremely suspect.

Re: Making Vaccine

#64

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 indu…

A recent attempt at a dengue vaccine faced a similar problem. The most dangerous kind of dengue fever happens when you are infected a second time, by a different variant than you were infected the first time. It turns out that the vaccine ended up having a similar effect as catching dengue for the first time. People who never had dengue and got vaccinated had a lower chance of catching the disease in the future. But if they did catch it there was a higher risk of it being the more dangerous version. The end result is that the vaccine is now only recommended for people who already had dengue before.

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

Re: Making Vaccine

#65

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.

Would it be immoral if they were offered a million dollars?Honest question, because it feels like the philosophy might not match up with common experience. It feels like an interesting question. People voluntarily risk worse for less pay in other fields, e.g. the military.

And if it wasn't immoral, what is the dollar limit?

Re: Making Vaccine

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Total ethical failure here. You are supposed to not make people ill.

2,000,000+ people are dead because we didn't take this path. The risk to testers under 40 would have been negligible. I'm not being flippant about other peoples' lives -- I would have signed up myself if the compensation was high enough.

> The risk to testers under 40 would have been negligible.

Luke Letlow (age 41) says otherwise, since he's dead. Okay, he's above 40, but he's high-profile and easy for me to remember. Plenty of sub 40 year olds have died.

Even among the survivors... plenty of young and healthy 20-30 year olds are having month-long recoveries, unable to breath at their old capacity.

Purposefully damaging the control group (who by definition, must NOT receive the vaccine) is immoral. Whether people in the control group believe in the potential harms of the disease or not.

Re: Making Vaccine

#67
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?

They could not even test themselves to see whether they developed immunity against SARS-Cov2. All we know is that someone sprayed something up their nose and hoped that it actually had the effect that they wanted. This is the catch.

But the point is, even if there's a 1% chance that this plausibly works, the government should be throwing money at bio-hackers like this. Or at the very least exempting them from the regulations that stand in their way. Very likely these moonshots won't work. But they're still dirt cheap relative to the economic impact of Covid. If there's a way to disrupt the current slow approach to vaccine production, we should be exploring it.

Find a few thousand smart, maybe insane, biohackers. Give them each a $100k grant. Give them total immunity from FDA regulation. Free them from all the bureaucratic and ethical shackles that slow down establishment science. At a cost of $300 million, even a 1% chance that one of them figures out a way to double the rate of vaccination, constitutes a 1000%+ return on investment.

Re: Making Vaccine

#68
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have suspected for much of the last year that a lot of people are running on an unexamined "Only crazy people think vaccines cause autism -> Only crazy people think vaccines are ever dangerous in any way -> All vaccines are perfectly safe" psuedo-syllogism. 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 da…

[Deleted. I didn't fully read the parents post, and responded emotionally. That was wrong of me and I apologize]

Re: Making Vaccine

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2,000,000+ people are dead because we didn't take this path. The risk to testers under 40 would have been negligible. I'm not being flippant about other peoples' lives -- I would have signed up myself if the compensation was high enough.

> The risk to testers under 40 would have been negligible. Luke Letlow (age 41) says otherwise, since he's dead. Okay, he's above 40, but he's high-profile and easy for me to remember. Plenty of sub 40 year olds have died. Even among the survivors... plenty of young and healthy 20-30 year olds are having month-long recoveries, unable to breath at their old capacity. Purposefully damaging the control group (who by def…

[deleted]

Re: Making Vaccine

#70
Without any evidence of efficacy, this article doesn't strike me as much different from "I went into the woods and gathered up some herbs and made myself an elixir that cures covid". I guess it's neat that you did all that stuff, but unless it actually helps, who cares? Doing it with science-y ingredients instead of herbs and ordered them online instead of harvesting them from plants doesn't magically mean it actually works.
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