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Making Vaccine

lesswrong.com

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Re: Making Vaccine

#301

Post by Symmetry »

robocat wrote: post #139
jerf wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

“According to the CDC, in the United States as of January 19 there were 45 cases of anaphylaxsis with the Pfizer shot out of the several million given.” https://www.wtkr.com/news/gloucester-resident-dies-within-ho...

Thankfully that's a rare side effect and one that the nurses giving the injection can recognize and deal with. No fun for the recipient but nobody has died or suffered lasting injury. This is, however, why we don't conscript people to give vaccine injections.

Re: Making Vaccine

#302

Post by Symmetry »

fabian2k wrote: post #47
zests wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide more information about how vaccines can cause damage?

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…

That's true in general but I'd be very surprised if an inhaled rather than injected vaccine that didn't use any adjuvants or live virus was going to cause a serious problem.

Re: Making Vaccine

#303

Post by mattmaroon »

JacobSuperslav wrote: post #298
andy_ppp wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Risk of Covid is significantly higher. just stating for others.

Well, if you’re talking homemade vaccines, depending on your age and underlying conditions it could easily be that.

Re: Making Vaccine

#304

Post by d0mine »

d0mine wrote: post #282
zamfi wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There are no safety/effectiveness guarantees for the vaccine https://radvac.org/faq/

Here's direct quote from the link: "we cannot guarantee safety"

Re: Making Vaccine

#305

Post by eyko »

mattmaroon wrote: post #303
JacobSuperslav wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Risk of Covid is significantly higher. just stating for others.

Well, if you’re talking homemade vaccines, depending on your age and underlying conditions it could easily be that.

Homemade vaccines are not contagious (just stating the obvious).

Re: Making Vaccine

#306

Post by logicchains »

eyko wrote: post #305
mattmaroon wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you’re talking homemade vaccines, depending on your age and underlying conditions it could easily be that.

Homemade vaccines are not contagious (just stating the obvious).

This is obviously false in the case that an error is made in the process. E.g. someone vaccinates themselves with a live virus, or possibly accidentally engineers an even more virulent strain.

Re: Making Vaccine

#307

Post by krsdcbl »

mysterypie wrote: post #75
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.

Not forcefully. He said paid volunteers. Why does the idea of challenge trials cause a furious reaction? Let's compare it to the space shuttle: 135 missions with 2 missions in which everyone died. That's a case fatality rate of 1.5% -- in the neighborhood of the Covid CFR. And I'd expect a challenge trial on young healthy volunteers to have a much lower CFR. Why is risking people for the shuttle OK, but risking peopl…

There's two big issues with this approach:

1) death is but only the worst outcome. Being on the space shuttle does bring risk, yes, but not a 50/50 chance of a significant impact to your general health.

2) you'll end up testing the vaccines largely on marginalized population and people with heavy financial problems, misrepresenting the population at large and showing biased result.

Re: Making Vaccine

#308

Post by tibbetts »

logicchains wrote: post #306
eyko wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homemade vaccines are not contagious (just stating the obvious).

This is obviously false in the case that an error is made in the process. E.g. someone vaccinates themselves with a live virus, or possibly accidentally engineers an even more virulent strain.

If you are making your vaccine from artificial peptides that are a hundred times shorter than a live virus, this seems unlikely. There was no way for live virus to be introduced into this process.

Re: Making Vaccine

#309

Post by jonathanstrange »

chillee wrote: post #242
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…

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.

The Director of CDC has to be right for the right reasons, not just by coincidence, and carries the whole weight of the responsibility about his decision, both politically and in drastic cases maybe even legally. That is a completely different business than voicing your opinion, and apparently the blogger you cite completely misses that point.

Organizations like WHO and CDC make their recommendations based on studies which are in turn based on evidence. If you compare that procedure to 2 bloggers who happen to be right about the same topic among 98 other bloggers who happened to be wrong, selection bias alone may make those 2 outliers appear like genuises. That doesn't mean or show anything.

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