“The key problem is how to check that the vaccine worked”
The first rule of DIY vaccine club is that you have no fucking idea what the key problems are.
Making Vaccine
241–250 of 378 posts
Re: Making Vaccine
#242This 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…
From https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...
> When [an outsider] asserts an opinion, he has only one thing he's optimizing for - being right.
> When the Director of the CDC asserts an opinion, she has to optimize for two things - being right, and keeping power. If she doesn't optimize for the second, she gets replaced as CDC Director by someone who does.
Re: Making Vaccine
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I believe GP is trying to conjure up images of flying kits in thunderstorms or walking around with radioactive material in your pocket.
Re: Making Vaccine
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
He could use the anal test introduced in China
The author is testing for the presence of antibodies, not the disease itself.
Re: Making Vaccine
#245Nations 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?
> 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?
Yes, yes and yes. This is all good fun, but isn't a super novel vaccine. The vaccines that are currently being delivered were mostly developed within weeks of Chinese researchers sharing the genome sequences in January 2020. The bits that took the time were the safety and efficacy trials, which is what this is skipping. And it's not like $1000 for a household is cheap: the Oxford/AZ vaccine costs about $3.
Re: Making Vaccine
#246This 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…
The truly rational (and ethical) way to get a vaccine early would have been to volunteer in an early-stage trial. You'd even get paid! The risk would be lower, and the likely efficacy would be higher, because even an unproven candidate is more likely to work than something you cooked up in your kitchen. In some early stages there isn't even the risk that you would be in the placebo arm. And of course there's the extra benefit that you would be helping the wider community, though I'm not sure how important that is to true Rationalists.
Re: Making Vaccine
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There's no such thing as being too dismissive of LessWrong. It is among the more useless parts of the Internet. I fell for it hook, line, and sinker when I was younger and don't want to see anyone make the same mistakes I did. Stay in school, kids. Or at least don't get your wisdom from a guy whose magnum opus is the world's worst Harry Potter fanfiction.
To the extent you are posting this as a warning to rationally inclined young people to not be seduced by the discourse on LessWrong, your warning is likely to be perceived as cranky by that audience and therefore ineffective. You may want to revisit your style, if that’s indeed your goal.
Re: Making Vaccine
#248If 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…
Homebrew seems unfair: https://radvac.org/a-homepage-section/
Trying it is IMHO a risk calculation once you've jumped the "is this credible" bar.
Re: Making Vaccine
#249Similar to the author of the post, I'm surprised that I haven't seen or heard much about bio-hacking your own vaccine. Seems like an interesting trend to follow, though I will be waiting for an FDA-approved vaccine myself. I am a little worried that https://radvac.org/vaccine/ mentions that their vaccine has "the most extreme complication in some recipients of stuffy noses." I would expect a functioning vaccine to el…
> though I will be waiting for an FDA-approved vaccine myself.
If it was July, and this post popped up, heck even November pre-US election when we were told the vaccine was months away, would that change the equation?
I feel like there are two questions here:
1. is this safe? If so, how safe?
2. Is it worth trying?
Question 1 is quantitative and verifiable, whereas question 2 is one of risk preference.
Re: Making Vaccine
#250This 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 n…
Which is higher, the risk of the vaccine or the risk of COVID (and not just for you, for people you meet and possibly care about)?