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Making Vaccine

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Re: Making Vaccine

#151

Post by michaelterryio »

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…

Something like that advice would have been good for Ben Franklin too. And Marie Curie. Some people want to survive and some people want to be heroes.

Re: Making Vaccine

#152

Post by boyband6666 »

Uhhrrr wrote: post #143
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?

Not a dumb question at all. In medicine we test on two different animal species before it goes close to a human. For a reason.

Re: Making Vaccine

#153

Post by mcguire »

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…

What results? Nothing happening is the expected behavior if his vaccine works or if it doesn't. Is he going to seek out an infection?

Re: Making Vaccine

#154

Post by ChuckMcM »

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…

Okay, I love "scientific method LARP"! Granted it is a bit elitist but still, conveys a solid point. As a counter point, was Edward Jenner[1] a LARPer or a scientist? Follow up question, was his net contribution to science "big" or "small"?

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/

Re: Making Vaccine

#155

Post by madrox »

Whether it's governments or corporations, there is constant tension between "move safely" and "move fast and break things." One reason why tech companies managed to dominate many fields is that they are less worried about making mistakes than their institutional competitors. Especially in western society where our medical institutions are quite old with many safeguards, the time it takes to roll out a vaccine can seem maddening, especially to readers of HN who work in fields where software bugs don't kill people. For those people, what this author did could seem like an attractive means of cutting through perceived red tape.

As has been pointed out before on HN with roll-your-own vaccine stories, it takes a week to make a covid vaccine. It takes much longer to prove it's safe and effective. We rightly live in a free society where someone can do what they like with their own bodies, but - like buying GameStop stock - I hope the naive do not get the wrong idea and do something they'll regret.

Re: Making Vaccine

#156

Post by loriverkutya »

nostromo wrote: post #80
dragontamer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For this age range, the survival rate for everyone is 99.98%. It'd be even higher if your screened aggressively for comorbidities / general health and provided everyone with top notch healthcare knowing in advance they have been exposed . I would sign up for this in a heartbeat. Not only for the cash payment -- but you'd be a local hero and you could feel good for the rest of your life about taking a small risk to sa…

So 2 person out of 10 000 dies. You would be a local hero and you would probably feel good for the rest of your life which is 2 weeks time. Also, let’s talk about long COVID. Nobody knows how long is it stay with you or if you even recover from it. You are a hero but you cannot climb the stairs anymore. And you will be forgotten in months.

Re: Making Vaccine

#157

Post by psychlops »

mcguire wrote: post #153
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…

What results? Nothing happening is the expected behavior if his vaccine works or if it doesn't. Is he going to seek out an infection?

In the article it states that he is checking using a commercial blood test result. They already had a negative result and plan to do two more.

Re: Making Vaccine

#158

Post by subrat_rout »

I completely agree with fabian2k. It's incredibly risky to throw all random sequences peptides into the blood stream for evoking immune response. What happens if a sub-sequence of peptide matches with one of our own's body proteins and our immune system starts building antibody against it? That's what happens in most of autoimmune disease.

In addition, most of the peptides that can be synthesized from a protein structures are sequential epitopes. To ELI5, imagine a string with beads that starts with A-Z letters and we take a smaller sequence A-B-C-D or B-C-D-E and throw to system to build antibody against it. Yes, the immune system can make antibodies against it. But in real life, most of the protective or virus neutralizing antibodies comes from conformational epitopes. Imagine when the protein gets folded to its natural form then the beads with letter sequences are just jumbled sequences and finding a conformational epitope is key to raise neutralizing antibodies. That is only possible when a protein's structure is fully understood using x-ray crystallography. The article does not disclose how the author was able to get those sequences and how he was sure about its efficacy.

However, the author's bold step towards the experiment is praiseworthy. But extreme caution is needs to be taken as self administering an untested drug or vaccine may fall within the boundary of law and it can invoke regulatory actions against him.

Re: Making Vaccine

#159

Post by dragontamer »

maxerickson wrote: post #135
dragontamer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Under 40 the survival rate is 99.98% for everyone -- including the already ill I doubt that. But I'm not entirely sure how to calculate the numbers you just said. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm I realize this page changes, so I've taken a screenshot here: https://imgur.com/0iM5FHC This is the chart of who died in January 2021. Yes, most deaths are aged 65+, but there's been deaths in all…

It lists the total population for each age group. Just the 35 to 44 age group is above 99.98% (given the death counts in younger age groups it's obviously still true if you include them in the calculation): (1-7057/41659144)*100=99.983% I expect the individual probability of surviving infection is not that high for each member of the group though. It's not clear if that meaning is intended anywhere above.

> 41659144

That's the total population of all 35 to 44 year olds in all of the USA.

> 99.983%

That's 0.02% of all 35 to 44 year olds have died, including those who never had COVID. IN ONE MONTH, not including the people who died two months ago, or 3 months ago.

Re: Making Vaccine

#160

Post by matthew_stone »

zests wrote: post #83
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 no doubts about the safety of vaccines in healthy people. I have some harmless curiosity about people who are not known to be healthy. How do you actually determine if someone is "too immunocompromised" for a vaccine? This must be a question with no good answer.

High-risk populations such as the immunocompromised are tested in a Phase 4 trial.
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