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Making Vaccine

lesswrong.com

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Re: Making Vaccine

#141

Post by Spooky23 »

jerf wrote: post #58
fabian2k wrote: post #47

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…

End of the day, we evolved and are bred to recognize patterns and project outcomes based in what we see. The problem in modern society is these instincts make us vulnerable to poor risk management.

The relationship between “crazy” antivax people and the actual attributes of a vaccine are not correlated. Antivax is a con game. Bad actors take advantage of natural instincts (ie protect your children), project false qualification and leverage ignorance to push their narrative, and usually product.

Re: Making Vaccine

#142

Post by refurb »

jcul wrote: post #111
1970-01-01 wrote: post #48

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 idea of personal science reminds me of Alexander Shulgin and his experiments in PHiKAL. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHKAL

A little different no? Shulgin was a formally trained scientist (Harvard, Berkeley, UCSF), did research at major academic and private institutions.

Re: Making Vaccine

#143

Post by Uhhrrr »

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…

Super-dumb question: Could you try it out on a rat or a vial of your own blood first?

Re: Making Vaccine

#144

Post by refurb »

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?

Yes, except there is zero proof this “vaccine” works so until that time, it’s all just conjecture.

Re: Making Vaccine

#145

Post by shuckles »

flr03 wrote: post #46
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.

This is unnecessarily dismissive. IIRC, Josiah Zayner home brewed a vaccine which led to a positive antibody test, which is in and of itself a pretty impressive outcome given the resources he had available to deploy.

Re: Making Vaccine

#146

Post by Imnimo »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #82
Imnimo wrote: post #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 actuall…

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…

I would grant that it has a lot of the trapping of the scientific method, and uses a lot of the terminology. But I think we're kidding ourselves if we pretend that there's much knowledge to be gained here. It's a non-controlled trial with n=2 using ingredients of uncertain purity and a loose experimental protocol ("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."). I'd certainly put the net contribution to scientific knowledge below that of someone who just signs up for a clinical trial.

It's like a scientific method LARP.

Re: Making Vaccine

#147

Post by sirsar »

Many of the negative comments here seem to have missed something important:

> Consider this a pre-registration. I intend to share my test results here.

How about, instead of totally dismissing this - in classic HN fashion - with "this can never work" or "this is magical thinking", we let the guy share his results?

If it works, that will be a massively important result. If not, it won't be surprising, but _at least he will have tried_. I for one think the expected value leans overwhelmingly in favor of at least one person actually trying.

Re: Making Vaccine

#148

Post by gwittel »

While interesting, even if anti-bodies are detected in the end we have an N=1. The average random person doesn't get this. A single result is not generalizable. It kind of reminds me of the @justsaysinmice twitter account [1] which replies to relevant studies with "IN MICE".

So many factors can confound this type of work. Some big ones:

1) Does this work in general population?

2) How long does the antibody response last?

3) Does this work on variants?

4) Are there cases when this should not be used?

I remember a reference to one of the early SARS vaccines. It was promising, until they found it caused immune responses resulting in lung damage on people who had SARS (can’t find the exact paper but [2] highlights some of the concerns then and now).

[1] https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7318931/#!po=2....

Re: Making Vaccine

#149

Post by airstrike »

sirsar wrote: post #147

Many of the negative comments here seem to have missed something important: > Consider this a pre-registration. I intend to share my test results here. How about, instead of totally dismissing this - in classic HN fashion - with "this can never work" or "this is magical thinking", we let the guy share his results? If it works, that will be a massively important result. If not, it won't be surprising, but _at least he…

> How about, instead of totally dismissing this - in classic HN fashion - with "this can never work" or "this is magical thinking", we let the guy share his results?

Sure. How about instead of sharing wishful thinking covered in "this will work because science" OP waits until there are actual results before posting?

Anyone can make a vaccine candidate. Few can make a vaccine. Even fewer can make a safe vaccine.

Re: Making Vaccine

#150

Post by jpttsn »

Imnimo wrote: post #146
ChuckMcM wrote: post #82

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…

I would grant that it has a lot of the trapping of the scientific method, and uses a lot of the terminology. But I think we're kidding ourselves if we pretend that there's much knowledge to be gained here. It's a non-controlled trial with n=2 using ingredients of uncertain purity and a loose experimental protocol ("We’ll add the other three peptides, take another few weeks of boosters, maybe adjust frequency and/or d…

On the other hand, while the sample size is small, you can’t beat the representativeness of their sample.

Self experiment, not in order to generalize conclusions to the rest of the world, but to find useful conclusions for own use.

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