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Making Vaccine

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Re: Making Vaccine

#131

Post by tomjakubowski »

koeng wrote: post #20
timerol wrote: post #2

Similar 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…

Josiah Zayner did one that looked fairly promising (believe it was either an mRNA or DNA vaccine), but unfortunately he got banned from a lot of media (like youtube) for it, so that may partially explain why you haven't seen or heard much.

Zayner's retrospective on the homemade vaccine experiment is interesting. He now thinks that testing vaccines is complicated enough to warrant large clinical trials.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-10/home-made...

Re: Making Vaccine

#132

Post by gus_massa »

maxerickson wrote: post #60
maxerickson wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They exposed their nasal tissues to peptides from the virus. You could call it an inoculation. I think it is okay to reserve 'vaccine' for something a bit more fine tuned and tested.

Revisiting this, the difference in definition between vaccine and inoculation probably isn't so big. I think colloquially it is a good difference here.

I prefer to use "vaccine candidate", so it's clear that is not a well tested vaccine that passed all the usual clinical trials.

Re: Making Vaccine

#133

Post by maxerickson »

namesbc wrote: post #118
nostromo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the testers would be directly exposed as part of the trial, which is why they'd be compensated -- as opposed to waiting around for 9 months for some percent of people to be exposed.

In order to use this method to test a vaccine for deployment to people over 65, you need people over 65 in your control group. This means you are choosing people to murder.

Do separate branches then. Use challenge trials to accelerate deployment to under 30s (or whatever) and natural infection for other age brackets.

I honestly haven't thought deeply about the ethics, but it's really concerning that it has become such a hard rule that preventing people from injuring themselves in a particular way (we don't prevent lots of other forms of injury) is somehow obviously superior to letting tens of thousands of people die for lack of information.

Re: Making Vaccine

#134

Post by ElijahLynn »

fabian2k wrote: post #92
ChuckMcM wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference however is that this article is based on the scientific method, and the go into the woods and gather herbs is based on mythology. Now the reasonableness of experimenting on yourself, even in a scientifically "valid" way, is certainly arguable. But the elements are all there; Theory of the Immune system, Hypothesis that it can be trained in this way, experiment that trains immune system in a known with…

It's hardly the scientific method when the outcome isn't actually measured. It is entirely unknown whether this whole procedure has done anything at all.

From the article (towards the end):

> If the vaccine induces an immune response in the blood, then it almost certainly induces one in the mucus lining, but the reverse does not hold. So a positive blood antibody test means it definitely works, a negative antibody test is a weak update against.

> So, we’ll do (up to) two more blood tests. The first will be two weeks after our third (weekly) dose; that one is the “optimistic” test, in case three doses is more-than-enough already. That one is optimistic for another reason as well: synthesis/delivery of three of the nine peptides was delayed, so our first three doses will only use six of them. If the optimistic test comes back positive, great, we’re done.

> If that test comes back negative, then the next test will be the “more dakka” test. We’ll add the other three peptides, take another few weeks of boosters, maybe adjust frequency and/or dosage - we’ll consider exactly what changes to make if and when the optimistic test comes back negative. Risks are very minimal (again, see the paper), so throwing more dakka at it makes sense.

> Consider this a pre-registration. I intend to share my test results here.

Re: Making Vaccine

#135

Post by maxerickson »

dragontamer wrote: post #110
nostromo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One person died" isn't a refutation, it's just an appeal to emotion. Under 40 the survival rate is 99.98% for everyone -- including the already ill. If you screened for comorbidities and gave people great healthcare, you could get that 99.999% or higher. And save millions of lives (and trillions of dollars) by doing so.

> Under 40 the survival rate is 99.98% for everyone -- including the already ill I doubt that. But I'm not entirely sure how to calculate the numbers you just said. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm I realize this page changes, so I've taken a screenshot here: https://imgur.com/0iM5FHC This is the chart of who died in January 2021. Yes, most deaths are aged 65+, but there's been deaths in all…

It lists the total population for each age group. Just the 35 to 44 age group is above 99.98% (given the death counts in younger age groups it's obviously still true if you include them in the calculation):

(1-7057/41659144)*100=99.983%

I expect the individual probability of surviving infection is not that high for each member of the group though. It's not clear if that meaning is intended anywhere above.

Re: Making Vaccine

#136

Post by maxerickson »

LinuxBender wrote: post #127
maxerickson wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They exposed their nasal tissues to peptides from the virus. You could call it an inoculation. I think it is okay to reserve 'vaccine' for something a bit more fine tuned and tested.

Reflecting back on vaccinating my own animals, several of the vaccinations involved injecting a liquid into their noses. I don't recall which vaccinations exactly, it's been a long time. This was the method tested and approved by veterinarians.

My quibble isn't with the method of administration, it's with this being essentially a one off experiment each time it's done, vs the work that goes into proving immune response and effectiveness and consistent manufacturing of commercial vaccines.

Re: Making Vaccine

#137

Post by qwertox »

fpgaminer wrote: post #85

I know some people object to biohacking like this, but I'm not convinced that we should be concerned. In general I believe that, in a free society, people should be allowed to do as they please as long as their actions don't endanger or harm others. There's a lot of nuance and caveats there, though. Perhaps this is one? I guess I don't see an inherent problem with vaccine hacking. I'm reminded of the person who bioha…

> My girlfriend and I made a batch a week ago and took our first booster yesterday.

What a tremendous coincidence that two people not only love each other, but also share the same interest in a specific area in science, and above all share the same amount of willingness to take these risks.

Somehow I believe that one of them is doing this not because he or she is convinced that this is the way to go, but because it pleases the partner. Might even have been manipulated to believe that this is good.

Re: Making Vaccine

#138

Post by passivate »

zests wrote: post #35
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…

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

Well, a vaccine is a rather vague and generic term. Are you talking about an FDA approved product? An experimental vaccine? A vaccine whose use is contra-indicated for certain people? etc. etc.

If I may - perhaps one alternative question is "Can an unapproved vaccine product cause harm?". With that re-wording, the answers become a bit more clear. Yes, chemicals used in the formulation maybe toxic, or the final vaccine might give rise to an auto-immune response, or could induce anaphylaxis in certain people. There could be cell debris/endotoxins that a purification process doesn't remove properly and causes problems. Maybe the vaccine contains an attenuated pathogen that can "revert", etc, etc.

Re: Making Vaccine

#139

Post by robocat »

jerf wrote: post #58
fabian2k wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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...

Re: Making Vaccine

#140

Post by maxerickson »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #89
1970-01-01 wrote: post #48

TLDR: I attempted to make a COVID vaccine. It was cheap. I have no proof that it worked. Other risks are unknown. The story reminds me of Barry Marshall, but with less science behind it. https://jamesclear.com/barry-marshall

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.

Peptides are amino acid chains, not RNA sequences.
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