Making Vaccine • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Vaccine

#191

Post by throwaway2245 » Sat, Feb 06, 2021, 2:15 AM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #186

throwaway2245 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was to back up the grandparent. This is equally science as going into the woods, picking some berries and roots, grinding them and put them up your nose, doing an antibody test, and writing your conclusions up in a blog post. There's no difference. (But, yes, I think that writing hypotheses with 100% falsifiability, before challenging them practically, is quite a good definition of "scientific method", based…

> there are no circumstances whereby the author has to accept that their hypothesis was False. The author described such a circumstance, but then explained that he did not have access to the necessary lab testing to actually do so. The hypothesis is falsifiable in principle even if the researcher does not expect to have the equipment necessary to measure falsification by that outcome.

(I should clarify that I don't mean the author's opinion is important to falsifiability)

> The author described such a circumstance, but then explained that he did not have access to the necessary lab testing to actually do so.

In the parent article? Could you quote that part?

Re: Making Vaccine

#192

Post by jonas21 » Sat, Feb 06, 2021, 2:25 AM UTC

habryka wrote: post #116

fabian2k wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The author said he is going to try to do measurements to the best of what is easily possible: > 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…

And yet he titled the post "Making Vaccine". Unless you make it all the way through to the end, you might assume that he actually did make a vaccine -- and judging by the comments on HN, it looks like some people are assuming this. It all seems a bit... irresponsible?

Re: Making Vaccine

#193

Post by refurb » Sat, Feb 06, 2021, 2:27 AM UTC

bobcostas55 wrote: post #190

refurb wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little different no? Shulgin was a formally trained scientist (Harvard, Berkeley, UCSF), did research at major academic and private institutions.

>Preston Estep, Don Wang, Alex Hoekstra, Ranjan Ahuja, George Church, Brian Delaney, and over 100 others Pretty sure George Church is a "formally trained scientist"!

Dude, Pfizer can make a mRNA vaccine but that doesn't mean if I follow their directions I can.

This guy is a total amateur. He bought some proteins, diluted them then shot them in his nose. That's not science.

And I also question his methods. Simply shooting a small peptide into your nose is unlikely to elicit any major immune response. Cells in your respiratory tract excrete proteases. I'm guessing those peptides get chewed up pretty quickly. You need to develop and validate some sort of delivery mechanism.

Re: Making Vaccine

#194

Post by ntr-- » Sat, Feb 06, 2021, 2:36 AM UTC

m-ee wrote: post #108

bawolff wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For vaccines in general, i imagine it depends on the type a lot. Live vaccines for example have the obvious risk factor of maybe giving you the disease, but i dont know much about the topic. I imagine for this article the biggest risk is you make something other than you expect and poision yourself, or you just make something that does nothing. (IANAexpert)

You can actually do much worse than nothing with antibody dependent enhancement. Let's say you make something that at first glance appears similar to the virus but is a little off. Maybe you chose the wrong proteins, or maybe you used an inactivated virus and the inactivation step damaged some key part of the virus. You inject the vaccine and your body learns how to make antibodies for this particle. Now the real vir…

Isn't it possible your body would have the same response if it was exposed to a variant of a virus that it already has antibodies for?

Maybe the explanations are simplified but I don't quite understand how the immune system could fail to recognise permutations of proteins or any other differentiating factor between COVID-19, its variants and mRNA vaccines; nor what makes this specific example of vaccination riskier.

Re: Making Vaccine

#195

Post by GuB-42 » Sat, Feb 06, 2021, 2:36 AM UTC

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…

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 deadly, and the flu vaccine seems to be less effective than the covid vaccine. So most vaccines are pretty close to perfectly safe, the covid one, maybe a bit less so, but it is still worth it.

The thing is that we are biased. We will focus on the one person the vaccine has killed, but not the ten others the vaccine has saved. Just like with the trolley problem, will you throw someone under a bus if it can save five people?

Re: Making Vaccine

#196

Post by amluto » Sat, Feb 06, 2021, 2:40 AM UTC

habryka wrote: post #116

fabian2k wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The author said he is going to try to do measurements to the best of what is easily possible: > 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…

I've taken a whopping one class about immunology, so I'm not even remotely qualified. But maybe I'm just qualified enough to call this nonsense.

The author is planning to take a "test". What test? The standard lab tests are some proprietary qualitative test looking for antibodies to a specific synthetic antigen. For a (new, untested!) vaccine, this is a dubious experiment at best. The vaccine could produce an amazing antibody response that doesn't trigger the test, or it could produce a tiny, useless response that happens to trigger the test. And the test is unlikely to give numbers.

But this vaccine is using short-ish peptides. There are two (at least? I think just two) different types of T-cell receptor, and they are sensitive to different lengths of peptide. Testing for those is complicated and expensive.

I don't know how one would find a lab to do the relevant tests, but it's probably not so easy.

Re: Making Vaccine

#197

Post by timthorn » Sat, Feb 06, 2021, 2:41 AM UTC

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...

The UK regulator published the first set of data from the rollout of both the Pfizer and AZ vaccines today: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid...

> The MHRA has received 101 UK spontaneous adverse reactions associated with anaphylaxis or anaphylactoid reactions with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccination. All patients have recovered from the anaphylaxis episode. 13 reports of anaphylaxis have been received for the COVID-19 Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine to date.

> As of 24 January, an estimated 5.4 million first doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and 1.5 million doses of the Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine had been administered, and around 0.5 million second doses, mostly the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, had been administered.

Re: Making Vaccine

#198

Post by koeng » Sat, Feb 06, 2021, 2:47 AM UTC

tomjakubowski wrote: post #131

koeng wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Josiah is an interesting guy because it turns out his opinions hold quite a bit of nuance and he’s generally a good guy (not a snake oil salesman). I think he definitely had that perspective going in - the point of the experiment is partly inspirational to show it can be done.

Re: Making Vaccine

#199

Post by roywiggins » Sat, Feb 06, 2021, 2:50 AM UTC

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…

Probably the best example of this is the live oral polio vaccine. It's a bit risky (it occasionally reverts to being infectious) but in a population where polio is endemic it's much safer than letting polio keep circulating.

(In places where polio isn't endemic, you get administered a totally inactivated vaccine by injection instead. They don't give everyone that one because it's more complicated to distribute, the oral one needs much less infrastructure)

Re: Making Vaccine

#200

Post by Vecr » Sat, Feb 06, 2021, 2:56 AM UTC

ntr-- wrote: post #194

m-ee wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually do much worse than nothing with antibody dependent enhancement. Let's say you make something that at first glance appears similar to the virus but is a little off. Maybe you chose the wrong proteins, or maybe you used an inactivated virus and the inactivation step damaged some key part of the virus. You inject the vaccine and your body learns how to make antibodies for this particle. Now the real vir…

Isn't it possible your body would have the same response if it was exposed to a variant of a virus that it already has antibodies for? Maybe the explanations are simplified but I don't quite understand how the immune system could fail to recognise permutations of proteins or any other differentiating factor between COVID-19, its variants and mRNA vaccines; nor what makes this specific example of vaccination riskier.

Your immune system is not intelligent. Through natural selection it has evolved to be able to handle some things, but it can't see permutations like that, as they are not something it evolved for, it's all chemical/physical matching.