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Making Vaccine

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Re: Making Vaccine

#231

Post by hardwaregeek »

This is an impressive amount of hubris. Does the author assume that all the certifications and testing stages were for show?

I don't hold the highest view of LessWrong and the whole rationalist shtick. This post exemplifies why. Underneath this post is the assumption that the author is so much smarter than everybody else because they are Rational with a capital R and can therefore harness the power of science to make a vaccine[^1]. Again, that's an incredible amount of hubris. If there's one universal truth about science, it's that it is extremely specialized. Just because someone knows a lot about chemistry doesn't mean they're qualified to talk about biology. There is no magic Rationality that can have amateurs making vaccines a good idea. Unless you are an expert in vaccines a priori, you cannot suddenly become one in a few weeks.

Heck, I'm skeptical of doctors who are not infectious disease experts giving advice. I still hear a lot of "well my sister's neighbor's brother is a pediatrician and he said XYZ". Doctors are certainly more educated than the average person, and if this was a minor medical problem I'd certainly take a random doctor's advice. But this is a pandemic with a novel disease. Listen to the infectious disease experts.

[1]: Quite honestly this feels like a plotline from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Re: Making Vaccine

#232

Post by crazydoggers »

crazydoggers wrote: post #222

Inhaling peptides is not a vaccine unless they are using an adjuvant. You need something to kick off the immune response and recognize the peptides as associated with a pathogen, otherwise you’d be getting immune responses to everything you inhale in the environment (like when you cook). And if they are using adjuvants, well then as others have posted.. autoimmune issues can be real. It’s not that it’s not possible..…

So much downvoting on HN for factual content that simply isn’t what people want to hear. It’s getting sad.

Re: Making Vaccine

#233

Post by [deleted] »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #231

This is an impressive amount of hubris. Does the author assume that all the certifications and testing stages were for show? I don't hold the highest view of LessWrong and the whole rationalist shtick. This post exemplifies why. Underneath this post is the assumption that the author is so much smarter than everybody else because they are Rational with a capital R and can therefore harness the power of science to make…

[deleted]

Re: Making Vaccine

#234

Post by bawolff »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #224
wegs wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? In many cases, the hard part isn't so much making a working vaccine, as proving it works, scaling manufacturing, etc.

Have you made a successful vaccine to a major virus before in your basement?

Tbf, (live) rabies and smallpox vaccines can be made by hand fairly easily. Of course if you screw it up you die.

Re: Making Vaccine

#235

Post by bawolff »

michaelterryio wrote: post #151
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.

Those people tested their theories, did experiments. They didn't just stick something up their nose and assumed it worked with no further investigation.

Re: Making Vaccine

#236

Post by refurb »

sanxiyn wrote: post #230
refurb wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, Pfizer can make a mRNA vaccine but that doesn't mean if I follow their directions I can. This guy is a total amateur. He bought some proteins, diluted them then shot them in his nose. That's not science. And I also question his methods. Simply shooting a small peptide into your nose is unlikely to elicit any major immune response. Cells in your respiratory tract excrete proteases. I'm guessing those peptides ge…

He used chitosan nanoparticle as delivery mechanism, which has been validated in multiple clinical trials.

Ahh.. that’s what it’s for. Going on the radovac site there is no validation of nanoparticle formation? Just mix, shake a bit and it’s good?

This is so far from any resemblance to an actual therapeutic vaccine it’s just scary. Reminds me of the recipes for making meth on the web. Sure, it theoretically works, but nobody seems to check the final product.

Re: Making Vaccine

#237

Post by tinus_hn »

matthew_stone wrote: post #209
tinus_hn wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a nice analogy to the people who in software propagate the ‘enterprise’ mindset. In their minds, their way is the only way and everyone should and will just conform to their needs. 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 alre…

> I’d have directed an institute to run a report on theoretic safety and then a trial on volunteers. Commonly known as “pre-clinical development” and “clinical trials”

Except you can skip steps because volunteers have already tested the vaccine for safety and at the end of the story there’s a vaccine that you can make as much as you want of. Instead of a vaccine controlled by a single company that, surprise surprise, has production issues that according to them surely can’t be overcome by using production capacity at other facilities.

Re: Making Vaccine

#238

Post by monkeypizza »

_Microft wrote: post #114
dcolkitt wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Everyone loves an underdog but I can not imagine that this could possibly work. Why do you think bio-hackers could come up with something that thousands of smart people in the industry could not? The money would almost certainly be better spent on upgrading production facilities in advance and starting vaccine production long before approval. This has the risk that they might need to trash everything if the trial is…

Your argument may be too strong - you're suggesting that big companies or the professional class of responsible people always does things better. But HN is founded on many examples of that not being true.

i.e. if your argument applies word for word against Semmelweis (who advocated hand-washing) or doubters against other earlier amateur vaccines, it it will fall victim to what we now know about those older cases, when the at-the-time experts were wrong.

In this case I wouldn't say that the reason this kind of research is valuable is anything related to medicine per se - but more that it can show the value of the much lower liability level he operates in, and how it means that amateurs can make massive cuts in preparing and defending from lawsuits. Example: if a company realized that only food-quality ingredients were required, not lab-quality, would it be worth it for them to justify that to the FDA and spend millions on it? probably not. My hypothesis for what's going on in general in medicine is this effect times a thousand, at every stage of development.

Re: Making Vaccine

#239

Post by centimeter »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #231

This is an impressive amount of hubris. Does the author assume that all the certifications and testing stages were for show? I don't hold the highest view of LessWrong and the whole rationalist shtick. This post exemplifies why. Underneath this post is the assumption that the author is so much smarter than everybody else because they are Rational with a capital R and can therefore harness the power of science to make…

Experts are usually mired in procedure and politics (sometimes for good reason, sometimes not). A smart outsider who isn't constrained in the same way often has a pretty good shot at beating out the established experts. That's not hubris; it's just a viable strategy.

Re: Making Vaccine

#240

Post by zamfi »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #231

This is an impressive amount of hubris. Does the author assume that all the certifications and testing stages were for show? I don't hold the highest view of LessWrong and the whole rationalist shtick. This post exemplifies why. Underneath this post is the assumption that the author is so much smarter than everybody else because they are Rational with a capital R and can therefore harness the power of science to make…

> Underneath this post is the assumption that the author is so much smarter than everybody else because they are Rational with a capital R and can therefore harness the power of science to make a vaccine

I didn't get this from the post at all -- they didn't invent the vaccine, they're just trying a protocol put together by some other biologists they seem to trust.

The certifications and testing is not for show, and no one serious is claiming that. Asking an entire population to vaccinate is a huge responsibility; if you're making claims to the public that an injection is safe you'd better be as sure as you can reasonably be that it's true.

If you're just experimenting on yourself, the bar is lower: as here, you just need to convince yourself that your risk of adverse outcomes is very low.

An individual may be willing to accept a 0.1% risk of severe adverse outcome. A society that asks 300 million people to take that risk will experience 300,000 severe adverse outcomes.

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