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There is a Strugatsky brothers short story, in which most of the inhabitants of a planet seem to have suddenly left via some portals, but there are a few who remain, highly armed, violent, and apparently seeking to prevent anyone else from using the portals. TFA reminds me of this story (which reminded me of the situation sketched by TFA when I had read it, except perhaps for the ratio of leavers to left behinds) but…
The article is about how (well akshually) deployment of new ideas has greater impact than the inventions themselves.
Since this is HN, there is a canonical translation of this, something like "Ideas are worth nothing, execution is everything".
There is a Strugatsky brothers short story, in which most of the inhabitants of a planet seem to have suddenly left via some portals, but there are a few who remain, highly armed, violent, and apparently seeking to prevent anyone else from using the portals. TFA reminds me of this story (which reminded me of the situation sketched by TFA when I had read it, except perhaps for the ratio of leavers to left behinds) but…
tfa?
This article is dancing around the issue; making fast progress has been made systemically illegal. Now we have evidence of exactly how damaging the regulatory state is in the the medical world. 1) Turns out those heartless capitalists could be producing vaccines in ~2 years. The tech is there, the regulators aren't ready for the level of risk in the COVID response as a routine thing. 2) Turns out that people aren't g…
Do you have any evidence to suggest mRNA research was slowed by regulation that was loosened up in the face of COVID? My understanding is 1) it builds on decades of publicly funded research, originating in military programs, and 2) it was being developed nonstop and every prior attempt had serious adverse effects (specifically serious allergic reactions).
https://media.nature.com/lw767/magazine-assets/d41586-020-03...
That doesn't have anything to do with mRNA per se, the Uk vaccine AstraZeneca was ready even faster.
The part of the article which explains how the smallpox vaccine was distributed around the world before cold storage and airplanes is just incredible. 1) Recruit 22 orphaned boys 2) Inject two of them with the cowpox virus (which is the actual smallpox vaccine) 3) Put all the boys on a ship leaving Spain for Venezuela 4) Scrape material from the two boy's pustules (appearing after a couple of days) and inject two mor…
At some point it got swapped, maybe a milk maid actually got it off a horse and assumptions were made.
No current smallpox vaccine stock is molecularly likely to come from cowpox as I understand it.
[0] https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...
The part of the article which explains how the smallpox vaccine was distributed around the world before cold storage and airplanes is just incredible. 1) Recruit 22 orphaned boys 2) Inject two of them with the cowpox virus (which is the actual smallpox vaccine) 3) Put all the boys on a ship leaving Spain for Venezuela 4) Scrape material from the two boy's pustules (appearing after a couple of days) and inject two mor…
What's even funnier is that it's horsepox[0]. At some point it got swapped, maybe a milk maid actually got it off a horse and assumptions were made. No current smallpox vaccine stock is molecularly likely to come from cowpox as I understand it. [0] https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then where are all the other mRNA vaccines? If it is a tech change rather than a regulatory exception there should be a whole bunch of other vaccines coming out by now, they've had long enough. COVID appeared in March, they had the vaccine in clinical trials by April. The technical aspects aren't a factor here - the time taken to develop a vaccine is basically instant.
I just want to confirm here that you are asserting that COVID-19 appeared in March 2020? Obviously this is not the case or it would be called COVID-20.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're completely ignoring just how big of a threat Covid was, which is a part of the risk-to-benefit ratio of a Phase III trial. The same vaccines, with the same P3 results, may well have not been approved for, say, a mild cold virus, but would have also been approved for Alzheimer's. The reality of drug approvals is that they always take into account proven benefits and risks (including some room for yet-unknown ri…
Fair enough. This may be where there is nothing more to say. But just in case - why is it necessary to centralise the decision for making risk-to-benefit ratio assessments? Everyone has different risk profiles and may have reasonable disagreements about how dangerous the risks are vs the benefits. We've learned that several widely used vaccines were more damaging than the health authorities realised, but nearly nobod…
The argument for not making this decision fully decentralized is that assessing the risk-to-benefit ratio requires a significant level of expertise, both in the subject matter itself (were the studies conducted well? what possible blind spots may they have methodologically? what plausible effects could these blind spots have on public health?), and in the more political/social side (are the doctors running these studies trustworthy? are the results being accurately reported between observation and collation? will this medicine be over-sold to patients in disregard of the studied benefits/risks? what is the cost/benefit estimate for using this in public hospitals?).
Now, it would be possible in principle for the state to provide the current centralized verification services, but then only give consultation-level opinions to the populace, doctors (and/or the public health system). But given the strength of PR and direct-to-consumer marketing, this seems to be extremely risky in terms of people ending up swindled to spend huge amounts for terrible medication sold by unscrupulous corporations (a free-for-all version of the opioid crisis).
There is a Strugatsky brothers short story, in which most of the inhabitants of a planet seem to have suddenly left via some portals, but there are a few who remain, highly armed, violent, and apparently seeking to prevent anyone else from using the portals. TFA reminds me of this story (which reminded me of the situation sketched by TFA when I had read it, except perhaps for the ratio of leavers to left behinds) but…
tfa?
"The fine article" also sounds weird to me.
