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It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

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Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#201

Post by gravypod »

mrits wrote: post #71
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #47

I’m glad to see this and we need to concentrate on speeding this process up. This isn’t the last pandemic and all things considered this one was a pretty benign one to have to fight. The next one might not just kill mainly the old and weak and might need much more than a mask (that we still can’t get people to wear!) to prevent its spread. Hopefully before then, we can work to get everyone more on the same page and h…

To get worse than COVID you'd need a virus that takes a long time to develop symptoms and then has a high death rate. In that scenario there would be a lot more public fear and we'd have an easier time keeping people at home. So I'm still of the opinion it's harder to have a worse situation than COVID.

Another possibility: something that generates mild cold/flu symptoms but does long term damage that you won't notice right away.

This would cause the "Bob had it and he's fine!" mentality to spread as it currently is.

An example of this may be HIV.

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#202

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

jtwaleson wrote: post #160
mrits wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To get worse than COVID you'd need a virus that takes a long time to develop symptoms and then has a high death rate. In that scenario there would be a lot more public fear and we'd have an easier time keeping people at home. So I'm still of the opinion it's harder to have a worse situation than COVID.

If the death rates in children vs. elderly were reversed with COVID, all hell would have broken loose. There is nothing people are more protective over than their kids. Behavior would have been completely different.

Yes, indeed.

I believe there's been a misunderstanding where people think COVID is more dangerous to elderly people because they just tend to be generically vulnerable to a lot of disease.

That's not the case, however. If you compare death rates within different age groups, the risk for elderly is dramatically higher, even in comparison to other diseases that tend to be worse in old age (yes, exactly, such as the flu).

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#203

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

aazaa wrote: post #34

> They identified the sequence for the spike protein, plugged that into their vaccine platform, and voila – an mRNA vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Moderna zeroed in on the spike protein thanks th large amount of previous research on SARS-CoV-1. Vaccines effective in animal models of SARS were developed based on this approach starting around 2004: https://www.pnas.org/content/101/17/6641 The article continues:…

The idea that while it may have taken only a few days, it still wasn't "easy" is probably best demonstrated by the Pfizer/BioNTech joint venture: Pfizer has tens of thousands of biologist of any stripe working for them, but they chose to partner with a comparatively tiny startup that had the expertise to design the vaccine.

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#204

Post by xxpor »

gravypod wrote: post #201
mrits wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To get worse than COVID you'd need a virus that takes a long time to develop symptoms and then has a high death rate. In that scenario there would be a lot more public fear and we'd have an easier time keeping people at home. So I'm still of the opinion it's harder to have a worse situation than COVID.

Another possibility: something that generates mild cold/flu symptoms but does long term damage that you won't notice right away. This would cause the "Bob had it and he's fine!" mentality to spread as it currently is. An example of this may be HIV.

Or COVID! There's been some reports about long term damage to people's lungs and such. To be frank, that's what scares me a lot more than the acute disease as someone who's still relatively young.

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#205

Post by xxpor »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #202
jtwaleson wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the death rates in children vs. elderly were reversed with COVID, all hell would have broken loose. There is nothing people are more protective over than their kids. Behavior would have been completely different.

Yes, indeed. I believe there's been a misunderstanding where people think COVID is more dangerous to elderly people because they just tend to be generically vulnerable to a lot of disease. That's not the case, however. If you compare death rates within different age groups, the risk for elderly is dramatically higher, even in comparison to other diseases that tend to be worse in old age (yes, exactly, such as the flu…

Even though it's less dangerous for young people, there's still reports that it was the top cause of death for people in their 20s or 30s this summer. The absolute numbers aren't that high, but it turns out people in their 20s and 30s don't die randomly that often either.

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#206

Post by ThrustVectoring »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #170
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What this class of vaccine does is make a bunch of foreign proteins for your immune system to attack in your arm without actually infecting you with the disease. So you get inflammation and soreness at the injection site, and this is not from the physics of having an injection. The placebo arm injects with a saline solution, so there's no immune response, and you miss those symptoms.

I got muscle aches, fatigue, and headaches, but my arm never felt more than a little hot. I still have no idea which branch I'm in.

you probably got the vaccine, saline injections don't do that

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#207

Post by FriendlyNormie »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #47

I’m glad to see this and we need to concentrate on speeding this process up. This isn’t the last pandemic and all things considered this one was a pretty benign one to have to fight. The next one might not just kill mainly the old and weak and might need much more than a mask (that we still can’t get people to wear!) to prevent its spread. Hopefully before then, we can work to get everyone more on the same page and h…

No post body was provided.

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#208

Post by xxpor »

michaelt wrote: post #173
causality0 wrote: post #6

I wonder if any, or if many, Moderna employees have been walking around off-the-books immunized since January. I know I would've been tempted.

Unless you're in a high-risk group, getting a vaccine early is kinda irrelevant. Being able to go to concerts and sports events and theatres safely is pointless if there aren't any concerts or sports events or theatres open. If you've got elderly loved ones you want to keep safe, you'd need to vaccinate them, not yourself. And if all you want to do is go to the shops without a mask, while everyone assumes you're a du…

What's the downside though (if you figure it's safe and effective)? Even though you still can't go anywhere and have to wear a mask, why not reduce your risk to 0? Even if you only have a mild case and there's no long term damage, being not sick is still a lot more fun than being sick.

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#209

Post by maxerickson »

matz1 wrote: post #187
lostlogin wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many who argue against lockdowns, but I haven’t yet seen an argument for that approach with an example of how it could look (for death toll and the economy). Has any country managed both those things without a lockdown? A hand waving “that approach could never work in X country because it’s so different there” seems the standard response to any strategy that has been proven to work.

Sweeden is one example, the death toll is still manageable and the life is pretty much still normal. Not a country: florida, it is one of the state in the usa that has the least covid related restriction. They are doing very well. Went there myself to visit recently. Its not hard to see why lockdown is not worth it. According to cdc, covid has very very low ifr : 0-19 years: 0.00003 20-49 years: 0.0002 50-69 years: 0…

How is 1 in 200 people between the ages of 50 and 70 "very very low"?

In the US, it would be hundreds of thousands of deaths in just that age group.

And 1 in 20 people over 70 obviously isn't low.

Re: It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine

#210

Post by eggy »

jtwaleson wrote: post #160
mrits wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To get worse than COVID you'd need a virus that takes a long time to develop symptoms and then has a high death rate. In that scenario there would be a lot more public fear and we'd have an easier time keeping people at home. So I'm still of the opinion it's harder to have a worse situation than COVID.

If the death rates in children vs. elderly were reversed with COVID, all hell would have broken loose. There is nothing people are more protective over than their kids. Behavior would have been completely different.

I was in SE Asia when H1N1pdm9 hit. There were 60m cases in the US that year, and 14,000 deaths that year in the US, and 75,000 deaths since 2009. It predominantly affected younger people[1], and barely hit elderly people. The CDC estimates it killed 150k to 500k people the first year it circulated across the world. I was wearing a mask in Macau, and my kids aged 12 and 9 years-old in the US at the time were not as almost all Americans were not wearing masks. The WHO declared an end to the pandemic in August 2010, but it causes illness, hospitalizations, and deaths each year as a seasonal flu the same way COVID-19 probably will in the coming years.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemi...

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