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FDA grants authorization to Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine

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Re: FDA grants authorization to Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine

#151

Post by superkuh »

tyre wrote: post #71
finolex1 wrote: post #59

Anyone knows why they insist on both doses given the limited supply of the vaccine and the marginal increase in effectiveness with the second dose? I would imagine every single day counts. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Rvzdi8RS9Bda5aLt2/covid-12-1...

From the linked article[0]: “Yes, Moderna’s vaccine prevents transmission. One dose is good for reducing infection by 63%, two by over 90%.” The number of people you need to vaccinate with a 63% effective vaccine versus a 90% effective vaccine is a huge gap. There are two issues with vaccines that staring at these numbers won’t tell you: 1. Not everyone is going to get vaccinated. 2. The number of people who will get…

As someone that has been preparing for an influenza pandemic since 2005 I can tell you that the yearly tri or tetra valent influenza vaccines each year are often, in the last decade mostly, down near 50% protective. And you don't get 2 influenza shots.

This is not something new or special. And people being ignorant should not change how things are properly done. Yes, they're going to freak, but it's because they're idiots. Don't base behavior on what they think. Accomidating them will not change their behavior at all. Their behavior does not reflect external realities.

Re: FDA grants authorization to Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine

#152

Post by neuronic »

BurningFrog wrote: post #142
tyre wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the linked article[0]: “Yes, Moderna’s vaccine prevents transmission. One dose is good for reducing infection by 63%, two by over 90%.” The number of people you need to vaccinate with a 63% effective vaccine versus a 90% effective vaccine is a huge gap. There are two issues with vaccines that staring at these numbers won’t tell you: 1. Not everyone is going to get vaccinated. 2. The number of people who will get…

This argues against only giving one dose instead of two. But no one is proposing that. The argument is that while there is a vaccine shortage, it is better to give as many as possible one dose, instead of giving only half that many people two doses, leaving the rest unprotected. When available, everyone gets the second shot, which should work just as well 6 months later.

> which should work just as well 6 months later

Do you have clinical evidence for that? I doubt it. OP still has a more valid point. Public trust in the vaccine and its apparent effectiveness ASAP after the vaccination campaign begins will be gigantic factors in its success.

We all know that a hard lockdown brings down the new-infection numbers WEEKS after beginning the lockdown, yet there are still a lot of people on Twitter, YT and at demonstrations (at least here in Germany) where folks are angry that the lockdown doesn't work 2 DAYS after its beginning.

The amount of truly wary/ignorant people out there is around 5-15% of the entire population in Germany and handing out a 63%-effective vaccine will be fuel to their bullshit stories.

I wish people would start taking this more seriously. We have a huge chunk of the population (5-15%) where discussions don't work anymore because their arguments aren't based in a common reality (e.g. "viruses exist and may pose a threat" is surprisingly often not a supported opinion).

Re: FDA grants authorization to Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine

#153

Post by meowster »

nojito wrote: post #128
bsaul wrote: post #118

i'm surprised absolutely noone here talks about the fact that we have absolutely no idea what the long term consequences of this new tech are. We've all seen people advocating new wonderful technological solutions that fail because of unknown unknowns, in every field. That's just the rules of the R&D game. In that case we're seriously thinking about injecting a new kind of drug to the whole world population based on…

That 1% have the ability to devastate the healthcare infrastructure. ICU beds are dollar for dollar the most expensive resource in healthcare today. Not to mention the rarity of qualified healthcare workers who are trained in working in the ICUs and the risk of losing them for 2+ weeks if they get infected.

> That 1% have the ability to devastate the healthcare infrastructure.

Additionally, other people will die at a higher percentage from other-than-covid reasons because covid patients are taking up all the resources, which can no longer be used to treat other patients.

Re: FDA grants authorization to Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine

#154

Post by hammock »

bsaul wrote: post #118

i'm surprised absolutely noone here talks about the fact that we have absolutely no idea what the long term consequences of this new tech are. We've all seen people advocating new wonderful technological solutions that fail because of unknown unknowns, in every field. That's just the rules of the R&D game. In that case we're seriously thinking about injecting a new kind of drug to the whole world population based on…

>is it safe enough to have it taken by everyone in the world ??

Alternative: if we don't know it's safe, better have everyone take it, or at least as many as possible. That way there's no reliable control group to compare outcomes, and no one can blame the vaccine, and it's easier to blame other external factors or say we don't know.

This is (systemically) the general approach taken with many environmental toxins. It's only when unfortunate, acute "cancer clusters" etc appear that some really nasty chemicals which are prevalent everywhere - like PFAS, etc - come to attention.

Re: FDA grants authorization to Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine

#155

Post by mensetmanusman »

kart23 wrote: post #99
gnicholas wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to NPR [1] > Moderna spokesperson Colleen Hussey explained to NPR in an email that its vaccine doesn't need to be kept so cold because of its particular "lipid nanoparticle properties and structure," and because the company has learned from experience — it's developed ten mRNA vaccine candidates already. "Now we don't need [ultra-cold conditions] as the quality of product has improved and [it] doesn't need…

Read in between the lines for a moment. They're saying that the differences are secret, and they're not gonna release the specific structure of the LNPs and why the differences are there. The equivalent of having two proprietary binaries that both accomplish the same task, but have different code, and the reasons why are secret as well. And we're accepting this on the first mRNA vaccine ever to be used on a massive s…

Nation states have responded to this ambiguity by directing well financed hacker groups to steal this information.

Their ethics say the ends justify the means.

Re: FDA grants authorization to Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine

#156

Post by BurningFrog »

neuronic wrote: post #152
BurningFrog wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argues against only giving one dose instead of two. But no one is proposing that. The argument is that while there is a vaccine shortage, it is better to give as many as possible one dose, instead of giving only half that many people two doses, leaving the rest unprotected. When available, everyone gets the second shot, which should work just as well 6 months later.

> which should work just as well 6 months later Do you have clinical evidence for that? I doubt it. OP still has a more valid point. Public trust in the vaccine and its apparent effectiveness ASAP after the vaccination campaign begins will be gigantic factors in its success. We all know that a hard lockdown brings down the new-infection numbers WEEKS after beginning the lockdown, yet there are still a lot of people o…

> Do you have clinical evidence for that?

I'm no epidemiologist, but I understand this is the how booster vaccine shots typically work.

I care less about public trust and the PR angle, and more about getting as many people protected as possible. If dumb people say dumb things matter much less.

Re: FDA grants authorization to Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine

#157

Post by mensetmanusman »

cm2187 wrote: post #92
tyre wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the linked article[0]: “Yes, Moderna’s vaccine prevents transmission. One dose is good for reducing infection by 63%, two by over 90%.” The number of people you need to vaccinate with a 63% effective vaccine versus a 90% effective vaccine is a huge gap. There are two issues with vaccines that staring at these numbers won’t tell you: 1. Not everyone is going to get vaccinated. 2. The number of people who will get…

Also the “I don’t trust a vaccine approved by the Trump administration” crowd. It was hugely irresponsible to politicise the vaccine.

To be fair, the type of people that vacation in Martha’s Vineyard might also be anti vax / anti gmo.

Re: FDA grants authorization to Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine

#158

Post by MrAlex94 »

CyanLite4 wrote: post #66
cameldrv wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If every single day counted, they would have done challenge trials. What counts is following the FDA's process, and the FDA's process says that you have to administer it in the same way as the trial. No one at the FDA is going to go out on a limb just to save a few thousand lives.

Challenge trials don’t work when 40% of infected are asymptomatic. And challenge trials especially don’t work when 15% of cases require hospitalization and ICU beds are already maxed out.

> Later, a vaccine candidate that has been proven safe in clinical trials could be given to a group of healthy adults in this age range, who are then exposed to the virus in a controlled environment. They would then be closely monitored by medics and researchers to see if the vaccine is successful in preventing infection, as well as identifying any side effects.

> https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...

I imagine they will do what they did for the vaccine candidate ChAdOx1 nCoV-2019 and swab at least every week to test for infection.

Do you have any source to back up your claim that a challenge trial wouldn’t work for SARS-CoV-2?

Re: FDA grants authorization to Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine

#159

Post by nerdponx »

marvin wrote: post #123
bsaul wrote: post #118

i'm surprised absolutely noone here talks about the fact that we have absolutely no idea what the long term consequences of this new tech are. We've all seen people advocating new wonderful technological solutions that fail because of unknown unknowns, in every field. That's just the rules of the R&D game. In that case we're seriously thinking about injecting a new kind of drug to the whole world population based on…

Okay, we've researched mRNA medicine since the 90s. But have similar medicines been given to a million people? Have those been tracked for three decades? We're talking about scaling that up by a factor at 10-100+, and giving it to millions of healthy people with many decades of life ahead. What if some serious adverse reaction happens ten years later, to 0.1% of the 20-year olds who take it today? Worth it? The effic…

I'm somewhat offended that this post has downvotes. It's not like this is some anti-vax bullshit.

If we never questioned ourselves we'd still be using bloodletting as medical treatment.

Re: FDA grants authorization to Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine

#160

Post by bsaul »

rimliu wrote: post #133
bsaul wrote: post #118

i'm surprised absolutely noone here talks about the fact that we have absolutely no idea what the long term consequences of this new tech are. We've all seen people advocating new wonderful technological solutions that fail because of unknown unknowns, in every field. That's just the rules of the R&D game. In that case we're seriously thinking about injecting a new kind of drug to the whole world population based on…

Ok, what the mechanism for the long term consequences would be? mRNA itself is gone in days. All what's left is antibodies and some immune memory which should be the same as if you had real COVID. Is that more dangerous than catching covid which may affect your body in many more ways than vaccine which makes your cells to produce a particular protein? I do not know what the long term effects of the glass of water I j…

I wonder what field you’re working on, but it seems that you’ve never experienced the difference between theory and practice.
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