111–120 of 378 posts
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
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
The science is in the whitepaper: https://radvac.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/White-Paper-SA... That said, the interesting bits are: #1) Vaccine design at home. This is an application of what is known colloquially as "bio-hacking" and as a topic group is no less impactful than "computer hacking." #2) You can do something for Interesting stuff indeed.
I've TLDR'd most of them here for everyone:
-Immune tolerance: diminished immunity resulting from exposure to an antigen
-Vaccine-enhanced disease (VED): A small number of injected vaccines have led to enhancement of disease, meaning that infectivity is enhanced, or the disease is made more serious in people who have been vaccinated.
-Adjuvant hyperstimulation or toxicity: ..certain adjuvants have caused hyperstimulation and other serious side effects. For example, alum produces a robust Th2 immune response, but an unbalanced ratio of Th2:Th1. A Th2 polarized response, and alum in particular, have been implicated in immunopathology, including ADE. Adjuvants can also be toxic. As one example, the intranasal use of a detoxified mutant form of Escherichia coli Heat Labile Toxin has resulted in transient Bell’s palsy, or facial nerve paralysis.
The whitepaper then argues the following: "And it becomes clear why the formulation described here has not been used in a commercial product; it is not lack of safety or efficacy, but other factors.."
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?
Want a good laugh? Here's the research team: https://radvac.org/researchers-map/
See how many obviously fake identities you can find.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 b…
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
The science is in the whitepaper: https://radvac.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/White-Paper-SA... That said, the interesting bits are: #1) Vaccine design at home. This is an application of what is known colloquially as "bio-hacking" and as a topic group is no less impactful than "computer hacking." #2) You can do something for Interesting stuff indeed.
It's way less impactful. An amateur playing with computers might not achieve what a pro can, but it obviously has some effect. Computer programs are rarely a placebo.
Little these so-called bio-hackers do is known to be effective. That's almost by definition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference however is that this article is based on the scientific method, and the go into the woods and gather herbs is based on mythology. Now the reasonableness of experimenting on yourself, even in a scientifically "valid" way, is certainly arguable. But the elements are all there; Theory of the Immune system, Hypothesis that it can be trained in this way, experiment that trains immune system in a known with…
It's hardly the scientific method when the outcome isn't actually measured. It is entirely unknown whether this whole procedure has done anything at all.
> So, we’ll do (up to) two more blood tests. The first will be two weeks after our third (weekly) dose; that one is the “optimistic” test, in case three doses is more-than-enough already. That one is optimistic for another reason as well: synthesis/delivery of three of the nine peptides was delayed, so our first three doses will only use six of them. If the optimistic test comes back positive, great, we’re done.
> If that test comes back negative, then the next test will be the “more dakka” test. We’ll add the other three peptides, take another few weeks of boosters, maybe adjust frequency and/or dosage - we’ll consider exactly what changes to make if and when the optimistic test comes back negative. Risks are very minimal (again, see the paper), so throwing more dakka at it makes sense.
> Consider this a pre-registration. I intend to share my test results here.
Pre-registration for this kind of thing seems pretty good, and I am looking forward to seeing the results.
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.
Reality shows that’s not always true, witness for instance the death of the irreplaceable technologies Internet Explorer and Flash.
Argue all you want but these vaccines have been taken by hundreds of people with no ill effect already. So for the people in the article the risks are not worse than the people in the trials for the commercial vaccines.
I don’t know about the scarcity of the ingredients in this vaccine but if I was in government I’d have directed an institute to run a report on theoretic safety and then a trial on volunteers. That’s a better option than locking up the population for over a year while we wait for the commercial vaccines.
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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.
This means you are choosing people to murder.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No mention of blood test results in the post.
Yeah, the results aren't in yet. > Consider this a pre-registration. I intend to share my test results here. Of course, without checking/testing this would be a completely useless exercise. Or if you test in the wrong way, like a nose swab after doing nose spray vaccination. OP instead will do blood tests and does seem to have thought this through to an extent that I find reasonable. However, henceforth considering y…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The science is in the whitepaper: https://radvac.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/White-Paper-SA... That said, the interesting bits are: #1) Vaccine design at home. This is an application of what is known colloquially as "bio-hacking" and as a topic group is no less impactful than "computer hacking." #2) You can do something for Interesting stuff indeed.
>as a topic group is no less impactful than "computer hacking." It's way less impactful. An amateur playing with computers might not achieve what a pro can, but it obviously has some effect. Computer programs are rarely a placebo. Little these so-called bio-hackers do is known to be effective. That's almost by definition.
Still, it's hacking molecular nanotechnology. Possible developments are far more interesting than what we do with computers now. Let's give it some time.