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Making Vaccine

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Re: Making Vaccine

#351

Post by will4274 »

namesbc wrote: post #174
dcolkitt wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven’t heard of a single one of the available vaccines being held back by regulations, only the speed at which they could go through human trials. The vaccine trials were drastically slowed down by the regulations against human challenge trials.

Not true, HCT would not have speed up the deployment of the vaccine by even one day.

Err.. why not? Not sure how asserting this without explaining why helps. From my understanding, Moderna made their vaccine in a day in early 2020 (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vac...) and HCT basically means deliberately infecting people. One day to make the vaccine, four weeks for it to take effect, infect everybody, four weeks to see who gets sick - that's 2 months to make and test a vaccine with HCT. It took us 11 months without HCT.

Re: Making Vaccine

#352

Post by mattmaroon »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #342
mattmaroon wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say your risk in taking a homemade vaccine is greater than your risk from Covid if you don’t take the homemade vaccine. The homemade vaccine is unlikely to work so it won’t decrease covid risk much to you or others. The expected value is low. It seems like it’s probably more likely to harm you, either directly because you’re shooting amateur-made chemicals up your nose, or indirectly because it might give you…

Why do you think it's a bad idea to make your own vaccine? Does your opinion change if you assume the person making the vaccine has had lab training?

I guess there would clearly be some people who would be much more likely to be successful than others. I can’t imagine it’s a good idea in our current situation, in which there are very effective vaccines that have gone through extensive testing that will soon be readily available.

Several of the vaccine candidates from a year ago have failed. So even pros with virtually unlimited budgets fail a decent amount of the time.

Perhaps there’s a case where someone for whatever reason will not be able to buy a safe vaccine soon, is at real risk of contracting covid, is demographically at high risk from covid, and has enough knowledge and access to proper materials to make their own, and for that person it is a smart move. I don’t know. Anything is possible.

I’m also defining bad idea as worse than the alternatives. It’s like riding a motorcycle. I consider that a bad idea because you have a much, much higher chance of dying than in a car. But your most likely result is neutral. Most people who try to make a vaccine will probably just lose a little money and time.

And I should note I do things that are bad ideas sometimes too. If you’re doing it for fun or education or whatever else that’s fine, you should just be realistic about the risk you are incurring.

Re: Making Vaccine

#353

Post by hardwaregeek »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #326
amelius wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem is probably that as a hobbyist you can only perform "N=1 experiments", and even without a control.

This appears to be an "open source science" project. https://radvac.org/a-homepage-section/ What you can do is conduct experiments, and report back what you find. If enough people do that, then together one can get usable n.

Will that be an acceptable experiment? You have no control over the vaccine quality, no assurance that it was given properly, no controls.

Re: Making Vaccine

#354

Post by ChuckMcM »

krsdcbl wrote: post #275
ChuckMcM wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The science is in the whitepaper: https://radvac.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/White-Paper-SA... That said, the interesting bits are: #1) Vaccine design at home. This is an application of what is known colloquially as "bio-hacking" and as a topic group is no less impactful than "computer hacking." #2) You can do something for Interesting stuff indeed.

Though to be fair, calling this "vaccine design" is like calling the assembly of IKEA furniture "carpentry".

Good point.

Re: Making Vaccine

#355

Post by loveistheanswer »

GuB-42 wrote: post #195
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…

It is all about risk/reward. Covid is very deadly right now, it is the leading cause of death in several countries, including the US. If you catch covid, it roughly doubles your chances of dying for the year, and without a vaccine, it will happen eventually. It means that even an "unsafe" vaccine, you are better off taking a shot. On the other hand, a flu shot has to be extremely safe, because the flu is much less de…

>Covid is very deadly right now, it is the leading cause of death in several countries, including the US.

This is misinformation.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US, killing around 650,000 americans each year[1]. Also note that heart disease and obesity are extreme risk factors for negative health outcomes from covid, leading to potentially 3x the risk of hospitalization.[2]

Populations suffering from prexisting obesity epidemics, such as America and Europe, have had far worse health outcomes from covid than Asia and Africa, which have no obesity epidemic.[3][4]

>If you catch covid, it roughly doubles your chances of dying for the year

Do you have a source for this? I'm assuming this is not true for young and/or healthy people.

[1]https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm

[2]https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/obesity-and-covid-19.html

[3]https://ncdrisc.org/obesity-prevalence-map.html

[4]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#Mor...

Re: Making Vaccine

#356

Post by yters »

pwython wrote: post #109
yters wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally know very intelligent and highly educated people who went to top universities who are convinced vaccines caused mental retardation in their children. They may be wrong, but I would not call them nutjobs.

> "very intelligent and highly educated people who went to top universities" Imagine trusting a "rocket scientist" to even weigh in on medical topics because they are "very intelligent" in their totally unrelated field. This is an unfortunate misconception that plagues conspiracy theory extremists who reference PhD graduates in their arguments against things like 5G brain control.... pointing to people with doctoral…

Look I am not saying they are right. My point is these are not your average stupid uneducated person. The two families in question, the one parent has multiple PhDs from Columbia and Princeton, the other took their undergrad at Caltech. You don't get those degrees by believing any random crazy thing that crosses your path. Plus they have a first hand experience with their child that for some reason makes them believe the vaccine was responsible. If it were any other topic their background and experience would lend their viewpoint more credence than dismissal as "nutjobs". What makes this topic different? Why would they have any incentive to blame the vaccine besides some sort of convincing first hand experience? Why should we in this one instance distrust their rational capacities that have allowed them to acquire intellectual credentials the vast majority of the earth's population don't have the capacity to acquire?

Re: Making Vaccine

#358

Post by ascorbic »

1996 wrote: post #273
ascorbic wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would feeling happy reduce the correctness of the decision? Isn't happiness the only utility that matters?

Many reasons - mostly that it makes you incorrectly discount the negatives, incorrectly assert some possibility, neglect some second or third order consequences etc. Check out what I think is called the depression correctness hypothesis (at least IIRC): clinically depressed people cast more accurate judgements and evaluations. I want to use the full power of that by taking decision that have the potential to increase…

If you are faced with a decision where one option gives you warm fuzzy feelings it doesn't mean that the appealing option is any more likely to be incorrect, just that you need to be more careful when deciding. Preferring the less enjoyable option is just as irrational as preferring the more enjoyable option. In fact, all things being equal, you should choose the enjoyable one because at least then you get some enjoyment from it

Re: Making Vaccine

#359

Post by xorcist »

GuB-42 wrote: post #195
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…

It is all about risk/reward. Covid is very deadly right now, it is the leading cause of death in several countries, including the US. If you catch covid, it roughly doubles your chances of dying for the year, and without a vaccine, it will happen eventually. It means that even an "unsafe" vaccine, you are better off taking a shot. On the other hand, a flu shot has to be extremely safe, because the flu is much less de…

> the leading cause of death in several countries, including the US

One good thing about living in this time is that facts are trivial to look up. All the stastistical data is publicly available.

The leading cause of death in the US is still heart disease, then cancer.

> If you catch covid, it roughly doubles your chances of dying for the year

Not according to the CDC statistics, unless you mean some specific group, such as those aged 85+.

How many people even knows what chance it is they will die this year?

Re: Making Vaccine

#360

Post by maxerickson »

namesbc wrote: post #189
maxerickson wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason to expect a challenge trial would slow down the standard branch of the trial. If it gave an earlier result, the differences would be good ones! The production would have worked through initial scaling and a bunch of people would be vaccinated. Do you think the vaccines being distributed right now were manufactured more than a few weeks ago or something?

Maybe, or you developed and scaled up production of a vaccine that only worked on young healthy adults who don't need it that much, and kills or maims everyone else. Wasting a ton of time, resources, and good will that could have been better spent saving lives instead of getting 20 year olds back to bars. Remember it wasn't a given that mRNA vaccines were going to work, we were lucky.

It's hindsight, but none of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in use have that problem, nor do several more that are likely to be approved for emergency use.

What proportion of approved vaccines in general have such radically different responses in different age groups or demographics?

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