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Making Vaccine

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Re: Making Vaccine

#291

Post by Ar-Curunir »

austinjp wrote: post #276
vasco wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree this is dangerous and wouldn't work in a large scale, but I abhor this attitude of "only the experts can speak". He did it on himself and showed what he did, how do you think things actually get made, by sitting around waiting for experts to show up? How did they become experts?

In this domain, in an ideal world, things "get made" through transparency, collaboration and scrutiny. Expertise is earned, not declared. You don't have to "wait", but you do need to trust. These people exist, and nearly anyone can join their ranks. It is indeed hubris to suggest expert-level ability is possible without the experience to back it up. Expertise in one domain does not confer expertise in another. Side n…

In this context he was simply following a protocol developed by established experts. No hubris involved, unless you think the experts also have hubris.

Re: Making Vaccine

#292

Post by concordDance »

bawolff wrote: post #107
wegs wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? In many cases, the hard part isn't so much making a working vaccine, as proving it works, scaling manufacturing, etc.

Because if all it took to make a vaccine for a respiratory disease was stick some peptides up your nose, we would havev a lot more vaccines (and i dont mean just for covid.). Even if the other parts are harder (not sure if thats true. The reason proving things work is hard is because most initially promising candidates dont actually), it doesn't follow that every single vaccine candidate works.

Vaccines are sufficiently easy to make that people in the 19th century could make them.

The hard part isn't making a vaccine, it's making one that's safe and reliably effective. Using 19th century techniques will kill you an unacceptably high proportion of the time (well, unacceptable unless it's something like widespread smallpox or, debateably, covid) and also often won't work.

Re: Making Vaccine

#293

Post by casefields »

pron wrote: post #274
vasco wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree this is dangerous and wouldn't work in a large scale, but I abhor this attitude of "only the experts can speak". He did it on himself and showed what he did, how do you think things actually get made, by sitting around waiting for experts to show up? How did they become experts?

> How did they become experts? Definitely not like that.

True, because you might win a Nobel prize: https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank...

Re: Making Vaccine

#294

Post by wegs »

bawolff wrote: post #107
wegs wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? In many cases, the hard part isn't so much making a working vaccine, as proving it works, scaling manufacturing, etc.

Because if all it took to make a vaccine for a respiratory disease was stick some peptides up your nose, we would havev a lot more vaccines (and i dont mean just for covid.). Even if the other parts are harder (not sure if thats true. The reason proving things work is hard is because most initially promising candidates dont actually), it doesn't follow that every single vaccine candidate works.

Non-rhetorically, I'd encourage you to look at which vaccines we're missing and why. Do any of those apply to COVID19?

Early vaccines were made in the scientific equivalents of modern basements and worked adequately well. Influenza vaccines come out each year like clockwork. There are plenty of vaccines which just aren't rocket science, including for virtually all major historical viral diseases which wiped out or crippled large numbers of people.

And then there are ones like AIDS.

With COVID19, as far as I can tell, virtually all reasonable vaccine candidates DID work, and it was mostly a question of how quickly and how well. I'm much more excited about a 95% effective shot than a 60% effective one. The Moderna one was developed, quite literally, overnight. Once Moderna had the sequence, they had a (later proven working) vaccine candidate more-or-less instantly, in January, long before they'd seen the virus live, let alone had a way to check that it worked.

Did you see many /failed/ COVID19 vaccines? I saw a few /worse/ vaccine candidates. A couple failed in some populations (e.g. Sanofi worked well for younger people, but not older). Some didn't have competitive effectiveness (e.g. Merck, presumably, but they didn't release enough to know when I last looked). Some had side effects (UQ/CSL would cause people to fail AIDS tests later). Etc. I think all of these will compete for some of the logistics chains as the winners, so it doesn't make sense to push with /less effective/ vaccines.

My general impression is that COVID19, at least unmutated, is not hard to make effective vaccines for. There are questions about longevity and mutations, but for now, I can see the sticking-peptides-up-nose approach potentially working. I mean, compare that to early vaccine efforts like variolation (which worked), or the whole flu of 1918 vaccine effort (which didn't).

Disclaimer: Not an MD or biologist.

Re: Making Vaccine

#295

Post by concordDance »

Imnimo wrote: post #146
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…

I would grant that it has a lot of the trapping of the scientific method, and uses a lot of the terminology. But I think we're kidding ourselves if we pretend that there's much knowledge to be gained here. It's a non-controlled trial with n=2 using ingredients of uncertain purity and a loose experimental protocol ("We’ll add the other three peptides, take another few weeks of boosters, maybe adjust frequency and/or d…

He's not really Doing Science in the manner you are describing, nor is that the intent as far as I can tell. The aim is not to contribute to the body of knowledge but to inatead to experiment (yes, it is literally LARPing, but that's a perfectly fine hobby) and hopefully reduce chance of getting covid.

Re: Making Vaccine

#296

Post by wegs »

visarga wrote: post #225
bawolff wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if all it took to make a vaccine for a respiratory disease was stick some peptides up your nose, we would havev a lot more vaccines (and i dont mean just for covid.). Even if the other parts are harder (not sure if thats true. The reason proving things work is hard is because most initially promising candidates dont actually), it doesn't follow that every single vaccine candidate works.

Kind of like self driving cars, so many edge cases, so many unknowns in deployment. Got to test the shit out of it.

If my life depended on having a self-driving car ready in a year to drive me to California, I'd have a self-driving car ready in a year. It could drive me to California with perhaps only a 25% chance of an accident.

I mean, it might be driving with the emergency blinkers on the whole time, at 10 miles per hour, and flashing the horn, or crazy stuff like that, but making a basic self-driving car just isn't out-of-scope for an amateur.

DARPA urban challenge was 2007, and 6 cars finished an urban course, with the fastest averaging 14MPH, and most developed mostly by students, with professor support. Today, I can get a lot of that stuff CoTS, open source, or read papers about what they did.

I couldn't sell millions of self-driving cars, because of edge cases, manufacturing, or what not, but it's not fundamentally different from biohacking. Technology moves forward.

Disclaimer: I'm not an MD, biologist, or similar, but I am pretty good at all the stuff that goes into a self-driving car. I'm not claiming a /typical serious amateur/ could build one. I'm claiming /I/ could build one.

Re: Making Vaccine

#297

Post by concordDance »

angry_octet wrote: post #39

Even if no one dies from this, he and the contrarian happy clappers on lesswrong deserve a special recognition for ingenuity at the Darwin Awards. The field is crowded for 2020, what with HCQ and ivermectin truthers, statistical frauds, denialists and blind optimists, but there is a chance they'll dominate the anti-vaxxers in 2021.

I really don't get why some people hate the "lesswrong rationalists" so much. Such people seem to use rhetorical flushes that stretch credibility a fair bit. For inatance, the parent comment is both stating this is Darwin Award worthy and that at the same level as anti-vaxxers, frauds, etc.

Given Covid's lethality, comparing not taking a vaccine at all to making a batch following expert instructions (in addition to taking the standard mass produced vaccine) seems unreasonable to me.

Re: Making Vaccine

#298

Post by JacobSuperslav »

andy_ppp wrote: post #250
zamfi wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Underneath this post is the assumption that the author is so much smarter than everybody else because they are Rational with a capital R and can therefore harness the power of science to make a vaccine I didn't get this from the post at all -- they didn't invent the vaccine, they're just trying a protocol put together by some other biologists they seem to trust. The certifications and testing is not for show, and n…

Which is higher, the risk of the vaccine or the risk of COVID (and not just for you, for people you meet and possibly care about)?

Risk of Covid is significantly higher. just stating for others.

Re: Making Vaccine

#299

Post by Symmetry »

tim333 wrote: post #255
ascorbic wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truly rational (and ethical) way to get a vaccine early would have been to volunteer in an early-stage trial. You'd even get paid! The risk would be lower, and the likely efficacy would be higher, because even an unproven candidate is more likely to work than something you cooked up in your kitchen. In some early stages there isn't even the risk that you would be in the placebo arm. And of course there's the extr…

I don't think it was that easy to get in. There are usually only a few thousand in early stage trials and millions who would be up for it.

They want a diversity of ages and races in vaccine trials. There's a lot more competition in some categories than others.

Re: Making Vaccine

#300

Post by Symmetry »

Uhhrrr wrote: post #143
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…

Super-dumb question: Could you try it out on a rat or a vial of your own blood first?

The sites where the body evolves adaptive immune responses like antibodies and killer T cells aren't actually in the blood so that wouldn't produce any result. Rats don't have good ACE2 receptors for getting sick with Covid-19 but ferrets do so you could try testing this on them.
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