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Making Vaccine

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Re: Making Vaccine

#361

Post by concordDance »

bawolff wrote: post #349
concordDance wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They didn't just stick something up their nose and assumed it worked with no further investigation. Good thing that's not what the article author has done, ey?

But it is. The author has made no attempt to test whether he is immune to covid as of this writing. He talks vaugely about future blood tests, but its unclear what test specificly, if a positive result would actually mean he is immune, if a Negative test would mean he is not, so its basically a test that tells us nothing, and he hasn't even done it yet. If your experiment is not falsifiable, you are not doing science…

He explicitly has not "assumed it worked", nor has there been "no further investigation" (there has been some and will be more).

Both parts of the great grandparent's sentence are false. I don't think saying false things for rhetorical effect is good for the health of hackernews discourse.

Re: Making Vaccine

#362

Post by dcposch »

reilly3000 wrote: post #251

Rough comments here... I admire the spirit of DIY in his project. He asked for and received good data, consumed the process and risk, and proceeded. He wasn't trying to save the world, he took a calculated risk on himself, and wrote a blog post about it. I'm most happy to have the process demystified for me. I don't think the world would be a better place if more people made their own vaccines unless there was some u…

The negativity might be warranted if they had encouraged other people to follow, or if they were trying to DIY-vaccinate others.

But that's not what happened here. These are two capable adults experimenting strictly on themselves and being transparent about it. That deserves respect. You might think "that seems like a stupid risk, I would never do that", and that's a fine take. But don't judge.

Where's the "hacker" in hacker news if everyone immediately reaches for admonishment and appeals to authority.

A lot of people in these comments overestimate how clean and linear and officially-sanctioned scientific progress is, especially in biomed.

In the 1980s, an Australian doctor suspected that ulcers are caused by a specific kind of bacterial infection. At the time, the medical consensus was that ulcers came from stress and diet. His ideas and evidence were ignored. So he drank a beaker of H. pylorii culture, got an endoscopy before and two weeks later, and demonstrated convincingly that he'd given himself ulcers this way.

He ended up winning a Nobel prize.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall

Re: Making Vaccine

#363

Post by tzs »

will4274 wrote: post #351
namesbc wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

You still need the phase I trial to determine that it is somewhat safe, the phase II trial to determine that it is somewhat effective for some people, and the phase III trial to see if it is safe and effective on a large diverse population and to characterize side effects.

If you were dealing with a disease that is rare so that it might take a long time for enough people in phase II or III to get exposed to it naturally, an HCT might be able to cut the amount of time you need for phase II and maybe phase III.

With COVID, there should be enough people getting exposed naturally to make that unnecessary in phase III and probably in phase II.

What an HCT might do for a COVID vaccine is let you figure out early that your vaccine does not work. That might let you abandon an ineffective vaccine during phase II instead of not finding out it doesn't work until after you have spent a lot of time and money on phase III.

Re: Making Vaccine

#364

Post by GuB-42 »

xorcist wrote: post #359
GuB-42 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Monthly-Counts-of-Deaths-by-Select...

Right now, covid is the leading cause of death. It wasn't the case in 2020, but now, it is.

For the "roughly doubles", it is, as I said a rough idea in a high income country, something I forgot to mention. It is probably less overall but not by a huge amount. It is relatively consistent with a 1% IFR. It is age dependent but surprisingly not by that much, simply because older people are more likely to die of any cause.

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

That question is meaningless. The nature of probabilities is that you don't know. For example, if you are playing Russian roulette, just before you press the trigger, you can estimate your chances of death quite accurately to be 1/6. But there is no intrinsic value to that number. To someone who can see the bullet in front of the hammer, it is closer to 100%, and to someone who knows the gun is jammed, it is closer to 0%.

Re: Making Vaccine

#365

Post by tim333 »

pell wrote: post #341
tim333 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of but not really. I'm an odd case as I had covid in April. I put my name with the NHS anyway in case they still want to try stuff on us survivors.

How's your health been since the infection if you don't mind the question?

I've been fine. I was one of the lucky ones who was almost asymptomatic.

Re: Making Vaccine

#366

Post by GuB-42 »

loveistheanswer wrote: post #355
GuB-42 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

The thing with covid is the younger/healthier you are, the less likely you are to die from it, but you are also less likely to die from anything. So the relative risk does not change much.

In Africa, the population is much younger than in the US and life expectancy is lower. People die from other causes like malaria, malnutrition, violence, etc... much more often than in the US, so mechanically, the relative risk of dying from covid is lower.

In rich Asian countries like Japan, I haven't heard of a significant difference in infection fatality rate compared to western countries. They have less deaths overall because they have less cases, certainly because they manage the pandemic better. In poor Asian countries, it is essentially like Africa.

As for obesity, it is actually worse in northern Africa than in Europe, and closer to the US. And southeast Asia is getting close to Europe as these countries develop.

Re: Making Vaccine

#367

Post by Kim_Bruning »

mattmaroon wrote: post #352
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's so strange to see people switch to the other side in an open source/hacking debate, when it comes to hacking systems that are not 'traditional' computers.

Of course in this case the systems in question are actually most definitely Turing complete on many levels; and much, much older.

'Life' is ultra-advanced (non-artificially) intelligent (non-alien) nano-technology. If that doesn't seem totally fascinating and something people might want to hack... what on earth does?

Re: Making Vaccine

#368

Post by labawi »

fpgaminer wrote: post #43
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…

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…

> train your immune system to self destruct

Might be a nitpick, but the immune system destroying itself would be a different, still possibly dangerous outcome of probably losing your defenses.

An over-sensitized response would be a hyper-sensitive trigger-happy paranoid all-hand-on-deck general-mobilization fight-or-die this-is-the-end immune response, of various scale, possibly similar to but not exactly the same as a bad case of covid.

Re: Making Vaccine

#369

Post by loveistheanswer »

GuB-42 wrote: post #366
loveistheanswer wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 f…

The thing with covid is the younger/healthier you are, the less likely you are to die from it, but you are also less likely to die from anything. So the relative risk does not change much. In Africa, the population is much younger than in the US and life expectancy is lower. People die from other causes like malaria, malnutrition, violence, etc... much more often than in the US, so mechanically, the relative risk of…

>The thing with covid is the younger/healthier you are, the less likely you are to die from it, but you are also less likely to die from anything. So the relative risk does not change much.

Exactly my point. Covid is a negligible risk to young healthy people compared to elderly, sick, obese people. This will have an effect on their risk calculations determining if they should take a vaccine which was rushed through safety trials or to take on a virus naturally which their immune systems can easily defeat, according to the data.

>In rich Asian countries like Japan, I haven't heard of a significant difference in infection fatality rate compared to western countries.

If you look at the data, you'll see the significant difference.

The US has 139.30 deaths per 100,000 people from covid.

Japan has 4.88 deaths per 100,000.[1]

>As for obesity, it is actually worse in northern Africa than in Europe, and closer to the US. And southeast Asia is getting close to Europe as these countries develop.

Indeed, if you look at the obesity map and the covid map of the world, you'll see the same correlation of obesity and larger relative covid risk in northern Africa.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rate...

Re: Making Vaccine

#370

Post by loveistheanswer »

GuB-42 wrote: post #364
xorcist wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Monthly-Counts-of-Deaths-by-Select... Right now, covid is the leading cause of death. It wasn't the case in 2020, but now, it is. For the "roughly doubles", it is, as I said a rough idea in a high income country, something I forgot to mention. It is probably less overall but not by a huge amount. It is relatively consistent with a 1% IFR. It is age dependent but surprisingly not by that much…

>Right now, covid is the leading cause of death. It wasn't the case in 2020, but now, it is.

Are you implying you think covid will kill more americans than heart disease in 2021 based on this incomplete data set?

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

>That question is meaningless.

It is not meaningless for people who care to take personal responsibility for their own health, and who want to make informed decisions based on a data driven risk analysis.

However, most Americans do not care to take personal responsibility for their health, so you're right that such people are not concerned with such information.

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