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U.S. Government official: Coronavirus vaccine trial starts Monday

332 points by filleokus 7y ago

jaaames 7y ago
I am extremely bearish on this whole global situation, but given the gravity of the situation, we're going to see the world's best institutions and minds working on vaccines and treatments with essentially unlimited funding and top priority. Even during our darkest times, we're going to see the most remarkable science and engineering capabilities exposed in the coming weeks and months, for the sake of humanity.
- troughway 7y ago
  I'm with you on this. One of the not-so-physical wonders of the world we have is a lot of scientific, capable minds paired with high technology and rapid feedback on their efforts. The timing, though it could have been better, is on our side. My one concern is once this whole thing is over there will be a long pause followed by a blame game. There are already conspiracies floating out there being pushed forward by officials in various countries.
  - lasgsf 7y ago
    I agree. We are going to go through the depths of hell but once we get past it and yes we will get past it that it will see us having resolved this.
- dmix 7y ago
  Reading about Russia sending rockets to Venus in the 1960-70s [1], then later watching a documentary about the Viking program [2], was one of the things that cheered me up the most during this whole thing. Humans have done amazing things in the face of dire odds. Nothing brings them together like these sorts of challenges. Since then I've been reading a book called "The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs" and there's been so many extinction events, yet life still bounced back each time stronger than before. Looking at life on that timescale, what humans managed to accomplish in such a short one doesn't get enough praise. We've only scratched the surface on how much better we could be as a species. I'm confident we'll be far better prepared for the next epidemic and at the very least hopefully China (and others like Vietnam) will eventually ban the wildlife trade for medicine as well, not just for food. Which is what early results by scientists are pointing to as the cause of this whole thing (Pangolins trafficked for Chinese medicine). Animal conservation plays an underrated role in epidemics, same with Ebola (monkeys) and SARS (bats). We don't need to be consuming any of this stuff. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlnM6kd3_n8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlnM6kd3_n8 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV_xPQrQEyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV_xPQrQEyc
  - bonestamp2 7y ago
    > we'll be far better prepared for the next epidemic I agree. Being in California, it's a standing recommendation to maintain extra supplies in case of impact from wildfire or earthquake. So, I thought I was pretty well prepared. I already stock and rotate extra water, toilet paper, n95 masks, canned food, etc. But, I discovered some holes in my preparedness that I will rectify when the stores are back to normal supply levels -- I will be even better prepared for the next state of emergency. I'm sure the preparedness will go wide and deep across many government and private organizations. At a minimum, I hope the CDC ensures there are plenty more ventilators ready for the next one.
    - ncallaway 7y ago
      "At a minimum, I hope the CDC ensures there are plenty more ventilators ready for the next one." My only thought here is that we don't know that "the next one" will require ventilators. While I'd certainly like to see our national stockpile of PPE and emergency equipment like ventilators improved, I'd like to see the CDC preparing to face a wider-set of the "next one". I think we should be looking at our manufacturing infrastructure and ability to rapidly ramp-up the production of any life-saving hospital equipment in the face of a sudden need. With a national stockpile that's strong enough to cover the ramp-up period.
      - yannis 7y ago
        Besides this, the world not just the US need standby health personnel in a similar fashion to armies. Soldiers do nothing unless needed, a "health workers" army can do the same.
        jfk13 7y ago
        How much extra tax do you think people will be happy to pay -- forever, not just now while we have a pandemic on our hands -- to support this?
        7y ago
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  > ... for the sake of humanity. Considering the actions of the US government in Germany, and most probably the actions of other governments, I'd say for the sake of national interests, not humanity. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, though: When a vaccine is found I'm sure the government/company behind it will make available to the world for free...
  - kathe-rine 7y ago
    Actions of governments != actions of the people
    - mytailorisrich 7y ago
      Governments and corporations are in control of this, not individuals.
      - adventured 7y ago
        Inside of governments and corporations are individuals making all of those decisions. There is a buck and it stops with an individual on a decision, or a couple of individuals at most. That's how a national emergency gets declared. The President decides to go forward with it. If California declares a state of emergency, it's the governor that has the final say: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/03/04/governor-newsom-declares-state-of-emergency-to-help-state-prepare-for-broader-spread-of-covid-19/ https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/03/04/governor-newsom-declares-s...
        mytailorisrich 7y ago
        And we're back to my first comment...
  - hans_castorp 7y ago
    > When a vaccine is found I'm sure the government/company behind it will make available to the world for free. I am pretty sure the U.S. government (or actually Trump) will not do that. He will make the world pay dearly for that.
- fuckyah 7y ago
  Why hello? This virus has a death rate of less than 0.2% in Germany. They have very good testing there. Every day 365k babies are born, humanity will be fine!
- jariel 7y ago
  I share your sentiment, this will be amazing and also a 'working together' time. But - time - is the issue. It's medical. Stuff takes a long time to develop a test, there are real ethical rules that won't get broken I think even now. 50 years ago, there would be either some brave volunteers who would be willing to get infected or some poor souls somewhere who would be unwittingly infected to see the results. No more of this. It's possible however the CCP may 'volunteer' some prisoners, or they may allow brave citizen volunteers. I can see that happening. (I can see brave volunteers coming from everywhere, but I don't see governments allowing such a program to go forward).
  - dreen 7y ago
    I dont think thats a problem. At the very least there will be doctors who are infected and there is nothing to prevent them testing the vaccine on themselves.
    - jariel 7y ago
      We need people who do not have the disease to act as guinea pigs for vaccines and other therapies, not just people who already have it. Also, we need to test drugs and therapies that have excessive, even deadly consequences. Again, dilemma. This is a huge ethical dilemma. Up to a generation ago, drug companies would run trials in Africa, away from aggressive regulation. During the Manhattan project, the US Army would run squads of soldiers right through the aftermath of test nuclear explosions, literally to see 'the effect of radiation'. Many specialist jobs entailed levels of riks unthinkable today. Remember, this is in an era where cars didn't have seat-belts. In 2020, things have changed, but it's possible totalitarian regimes will find 'volunteers'. China has been engaging in harvesting the organs of political prisoners, at scale [1]. If they're willing to put people in prison for their ethnicity, and then 'have them die' so that a rich person can get a kidney through back channels ... then absolutely they can do medical trials on these people, it may not even need to be publicized. [1] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/china-credibly-accused-of-organ-harvesting-atrocity/ https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/china-credibly-accused...
      - 7y ago
- cpv 7y ago
  Imagine if one day we find that a comet is headed directly to us. That would test and push humanity at its extremes.
  - QuotedForTruth 7y ago
    How certain would the experts have to be to get such coordinated action? With close approaches, it seems (as a layman) that there are always pretty large ranges of just how close they will be. I dont think you'd know "a comet is headed directly at us" until way too late. Instead you'd get some warning that there is a 10% chance or something. Over time that would go up to a near certainty. Maybe I'm pessimistic, but I would predict something more similar to climate change with deniers and paralysis.
  - futureproofd 7y ago
    This remark reminds me of the book, "Seveneves" by Neal Stephenson. He plays with a similar 'what if?' doomsday scenario. Around 80% of the book revolves around testing and pushing humanity at it's extremes.
- alfiedotwtf 7y ago
  > we're going to see the world's best institutions and minds working on vaccines and treatments with essentially unlimited funding and top priority. Trump was caught out trying to buy a CureVac, who are working on a vaccine, to corner the market and make it only available to America https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/germany-coronavirus-curevac-vaccine-trump-rights/2020/03/15/8d684c68-6702-11ea-b199-3a9799c54512_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/germany-coronavi... Will we see a vaccine? Maybe. At pumped up costs? Most definitely
  - CWuestefeld 7y ago
    I think it's worth noting that the corporation is trying to do the right thing, even as pushed by the US government to act unethically. Don't always expect that corporations are evil, or that governments will protect us from that.
- adamsea 7y ago
  What would be really, really nice is if after the crisis passes the world's best institutions and minds continue to get a significant amount of funding to apply those remarkable science and engineering capabilities for the sake of humanity. IMHO that is the real issue. We didn't need to be in this crisis in the first place : /.
  - epicide 7y ago
    I can’t find the source I saw the other day, but the CDC ran out of a good chunk of its budget September 2019. Right before all this started. We, especially the US, keep treating CDC like they’re responsible for fixing diseases after they spread when their focus is prevention. This has been happening repeatedly for at least a couple decades. Every time, it gets worse because we treat disease as a solved problem. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/02/cdc-funding-pandemics/552224/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/02/cdc-fundi...
- sharken 7y ago
  Darkest indeed, if you are more than 70 years or have other illnesses then you take every precaution not to get infected. The rest of the population pray that the Corona quarantine will be scaled back as soon as possible, so we don't have a financial ruin to deal with the next decade or more.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  The problem is the virus will already have done it's damage by the time the vaccine comes out. Mayhaps it will be useful for the next pandemic that comes out of Wuhan's wet markets.
forkexec 7y ago
The rationale against mass inoculation with an untested vaccine stems partially from the botched 1976 Fort Dix swine flu H1N1 outbreak and vaccine. The volunteers of successive regular clinical trial phases play Russian roulette on our behalf, and this takes time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  The dengue fever vaccine disaster on the Philippines is another good example why one should be cautious. Dengue fever is the canonical example of antibody-dependent enhancement - someone who has antibodies against a certain strain of dengue fever will show a very serious reaction when he is infected with a different strain of the virus. That's why people who are given the dengue vaccine must have been infected with dengue previously. On the Philippines, they gave the dengue vaccine to schoolchildren, a substantial number of whom were seronegative. The disease in that population was much more serious than it would have been otherwise, there were unnecessary deaths, and a good number of parents avoided the measles vaccine for their children, and a measles outbreak promptly followed.
- rrss 7y ago
  Could you clarify which elements of the response were botched?
  - yborg 7y ago
    >On December 16, a one-month suspension of the vaccination program is announced by CDC head Sencer. William Foege of the CDC estimates that the incidence of Guillain-Barré is four times higher in vaccinated people than in those not receiving the swine flu vaccine. The rushed vaccine apparently substantially increased the risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome in those receiving it. The syndrome is fatal in up to 5% of those that contract it and can cause permanent damage to the peripheral nervous system. First, do no harm.
    - Retric 7y ago
shartshooter 7y ago
key line Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine
- m0zg 7y ago
  If 100K people start dying monthly, that'll be down to 3 months, and "fully validate" will be replaced with "hail Mary" and "pray to Jesus".
  - e12e 7y ago
    You can't magically whish vaccine into working. The controls aren't there in order to maximize the delay for when vaccines can be deployed. A bad batch could essentially equal to purposefully infecting people with the disease, for example. Ed: i don't see it mentioned explicitly: while young people might reasonably volunteer to be vaccinated and exposed to the virus - we really need to vaccinate the elderly and at risk - who has a high mortality rate. We might get volunteers, but it's still different to sign up for a 50/50 shot at death, than the risk of two weeks of mild flu... And we probably do need to test for adverse effects in the at risk population too.
    - AlgorithmicTime 7y ago
      Vaccinating the young and healthy is a fine first step, though! If you vaccinate enough of them, you get a large part of the way to herd immunity, and that gives us more time to validate.
    - Someone1234 7y ago
      > A bad batch could essentially equal to purposefully infecting people with the disease, for example. Nope, impossible. mRNA based vaccines don't use a weakened version of the virus to train the body: > [0]The use of mRNA has several beneficial features over subunit, killed and live attenuated virus, as well as DNA-based vaccines. First, safety: as mRNA is a non-infectious, non-integrating platform, there is no potential risk of infection or insertional mutagenesis. Additionally, mRNA is degraded by normal cellular processes, and its in vivo half-life can be regulated through the use of various modifications and delivery methods To use a bad analogy mRNA based vaccines train the body using a "signature" of the virus, essentially skipping the first step of actual infection and jumping to the second/third steps where the body's previously exposed to antigens are generated. It is an entirely new form of vaccine that has worked in trails before. Which isn't to say it is 100% safe for other reasons. I'd say auto-immune reactions are the biggest risk (e.g. the body using the signature encoded to attack the body itself). [0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5906799/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5906799/
H8crilA 7y ago
Yeah, we don't even know if this disease is vaccine-able, meaning whether people get long term immunity post exposure. Worth noting that the SARS (v1) vaccine was abandoned after the disease disappeared. Idiotic lack of long term thinking.
- btmorex 7y ago
  You can't ethically test a vaccine once a disease has disappeared so I'm not sure what you'd expect them to do in the SARS case.
  - H8crilA 7y ago
    True. Can't you test on non-humans? Also, the vaccine was halted due to lack of funding, not ethical reasons.
    - evan_ 7y ago
      Not if the disease doesn’t infect non-humans, or affects non-humans in a different way
      - H8crilA 7y ago
        It does infect cats, dogs, and bats (at least). And it seems money/interest was the problem: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/scientists-were-close-coronavirus-vaccine-years-ago-then-money-dried-n1150091 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/scientists-were-c...
      - roywiggins 7y ago
        I believe there is or was a mouse model for SARS.
    - mellavora 7y ago
      Interestingly enough, dogs seem to have problems with chocolate (theobromine, actually). The only problem humans seem to have with chocolate are supply-related. Yes, you test on non-humans. But because biology is different, you then need to test on humans.
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
> Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine. Why?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  I'm not a professional vaccine researcher, but I can only imagine you want to validate 1. that the vaccine is effective and 2. that the vaccine doesn't cause everyone who takes it to get an aneurysm six months later. These things have to be pipelined. You don't want to inject 10k people with something you've only tested on 45. You don't want to inject 45 with something you haven't tested on animals. You don't want to stop the 10k person trial too early in case if there is a longer term side effect you missed. You don't want to start manufacturing billions of doses until your 10k trial is done. Etc.
  - refurb 7y ago
    As someone who works in the industry, you pretty much covered it. If you dose people with a new vaccine, you’ll need to monitor them 6 months at a minimum. 12 months would be better. It takes 3 months to nail down the protocol and for all the sites to be ready. Then you start recruiting and for a vaccine, you’d want a large population (reflects usage). So assume 6 months to recruit 1000 people. They don’t all start at the same time, so if you’re tracking for 6 months, it will probably take 9 monthsfor the last person to finish the trial. Then you need to analyze all the data you collected, so another 3 months. Then the FDA takes 3 months to review and approve. There is a TON of work that goes into running a clinical trial.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      But it does sound like if there's priority and fear, much time could be saved. For example, "6 months to recruit 1000 people". I suspect in this case, a week can work. > Then you need to analyze all the data you collected, so another 3 months. Help me understand this. You vaccinate 1000 people. In 6 months, the number of them that get sick is 10% of the rate of the unvaccinated. 0.1% have a bad reaction. How much more analysis do you need? > the FDA takes 3 months to review and approve How much time if that is moved to the front of the queue and all hands work on it? Given how enormously disruptive the coronavirus is, we cannot afford to not have all hands working on it.
IIAOPSW 7y ago
The same species that invented youtube also makes youtube comments. Keep that in mind.
- wtvanhest 7y ago
  Your comment is ironic on so many levels. Cheers to the OP. I think everyone needs a positive message right now. Thanks for delivering one.
- mgolawala 7y ago
  It has always been the case that 1% of humanity pulls the other 99% forward. We do not need everyone to be a genius. We just need one. We do not need everyone to be Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi, or Michelangelo, or Bach or Einstein, or Shakespeare, or Newton or Galileo we just need to be smart enough to recognize when one of them is born amongst us. We've not always been good at that.. but we've been getting better at it.
  - rjzzleep 7y ago
    > It has always been the case that 1% of humanity pulls the other 99% forward. We do not need everyone to be a genius. We just need one. This is such a ridiculous hero praising statement. It's also completely wrong. While we love to hero worship, none of these heroes worked in isolation or without correspondence with others. Be it their teacher, peers they were having letter relationships with, their partners, their students or other people.
    - gvjddbnvdrbv 7y ago
      The OP said "we just need to be smart enough to recognize when one of them is born amongst us".
    - mgolawala 7y ago
      You are entitled to your opinion, but I think you misinterpreted me there. I didn’t claim that they worked in isolation or accomplished it on their own. I was simply pointing out that the work, knowledge and understanding by the very few have always benefited the many. Look at the parent comment and you will understand the context.
user9086754 7y ago
There's another new (as in just a few years old new) and fascinating technique for making vaccines that hasn't received much publicity. It's a general technique that can be quickly applied to any pathogen. It was recently used to develop a vaccine against Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis Virus (VEEV), was used to vaccinate mice against staph, and is also being tried against new strains of polio emerging in India. Here's an excerpt from paper about VEEV summarizing the technique's mechanism: ...a disease-causing organism (pathogen) can be exposed to gamma radiation in the presence of a Deinococcus Mn complex, and rendered non-replicative (killed) by overwhelming genetic damage, but still maintain the shape of key surface proteins needed to mount a highly protective immune response. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170530122345.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170530122345.h... I think this could have the potential to develop a cure but isn't receiving any attention from our (dysfunctional) government (who also happens to own the patents on it!).
- program_whiz 7y ago
  I heard that killed virus vaccines from corona viruses can actually lead to a cytokine storm and higher mortality rate in those innoculated with it. There's a reason we don't have general vaccines for the common cold. During some previous corona related outbreaks (SARS, MERS) there was an attempt at using this method, but it actually has a backlash effect when the person is exposed to the virus.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    We do have a vaccine for the common cold. Problem is the common cold is really about 300 different viruses, and a vaccine for just one of them didn't make a statistical difference.
- jerf 7y ago
  Don't confuse "I don't hear about it in my daily news for the general public" for "nobody has considered it". You are not receiving an unfiltered medical-professional-level summary of all efforts currently underway. You're receiving a chaotically chosen, filtered-through-reporters (who mostly don't understand any of this beyond the middle-school level) subset of the news, further skewed by PR people actively trying to promote their own stuff. There could be any number of complicated biochemical reasons why this approach won't work on this particular virus.
jamesrcole 7y ago
I worry that headlines like this will lead to complacency amongst certain parts of the population. They'll think a vaccine will be here soon. I imagine their thought processes would be like: what's the big deal with this virus, why do we need to mess up the economy by social distancing, if we're going to have a vaccine quite soon?
- CivBase 7y ago
  I don't know how you can look around and seriously worry about complacency right now. Yes, complacency is very bad, but so is panic. We need to find a healthy, productive middle ground. A trip to my local grocery store is all the evidence I need to confidently say the pendulum has swung too far the other way. People are exhausting our supplies of essential hygiene products and cheap, non-perishable foods. Scalpers are re-selling the supplies online with huge markups. Hourly workers are loosing their incomes and parents are struggling to find means to take care of their kids who are suddenly without school for the foreseeable future. We need public awareness. We need people to take this matter seriously. But we also need a balanced approach to ensure we don't cause even more devastation in the long term. Frankly, I'm happy for anything that gets people to calm down for a second and just commit to good hygiene practices and avoiding crowds for a few months.
  - jamesrcole 7y ago
    Complacency and panic aren’t the only two options. Complacency is a massive problem right now. So many people are not taking social distancing seriously, and it’s going to have disastrous consequences, al la how things are currently playing out in Italy, in many countries. And compared to that, the temporary exhausting of supplies is a trifling matter. (Wait until the real panic sets in when hospitals can’t keep up). But like I said, it’s not like we have to chose between complacency OR panic. We can take it seriously and take appropriate actions.
pelasaco 7y ago
and so started the zombie Apocalypse
allovernow 7y ago
Unfortunately a vaccine is unlikely to work. This is probably being done more for optics. This virus likely has Antibody Dependent Enhancement. Same reason there's no vaccine for SARS or MERS. It's 4am and I should be sleeping but there's a paper floating around where a bunch of SARS candidates were trialed on multiple species. In ever case immunity was conferred but upon re-exposure the animals had autoimmune lung damage. This virus is far more dangerous than most people understand now. The news media has been a month late in everything since they started reporting because all of this is evolving too rapidly to confirm to journalistic standards. You have to dig for this information yourself.
- jeen02 7y ago
  You're a ML engineer, not a specialist in this area.
  - mrb 7y ago
    I hate credentialism like this. It's anti-intellectual. There are many smart people on HN who are perfectly capable of reading and understanding research literature in an area that is NOT their primary expertise, and who can make half-decent arguments and deductions. Reply to the points he raises (if you can). Don't belittle him.
    - unityByFreedom 7y ago
      Credentialism aside, there were no sources provided. I do find the point about no SARS vaccine compelling, however. Is that true? I know the flu vaccine gets updated every year or so with new viruses that are prevalent, so if there is no SARS vaccine then I wonder if that is true and if it is true it couldn't be developed. Again, multiple things thrown out there without sources which are not common knowledge, followed by "you can look this up yourself".
      - OJFord 7y ago
        I've only quickly searched, and to be honest it's a bit thick with foreign terminology for me to quickly glean much from it, but seems like this might be the paper the top-level commenter referred to: https://dx.doi.org/10.1128%2FJVI.02395-10 https://dx.doi.org/10.1128%2FJVI.02395-10 > I do find the point about no SARS [-CoV[-1]] vaccine compelling, however. Is that true? Wikipedia says so, and just gives essentially the same advice as being given for SARS-CoV-2 (or any human-transmissible virus, I imagine). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome#Prevention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
gerardnll 7y ago
I'm not sure we can wait 12-18 months... Everybody will have to put all resources onto this, because if the virus comes back in autumn, it's going to be worse according some predictions. Hope it's not tho.
kstenerud 7y ago
So Trump didn't need to try to buy a German biotech company to produce a vaccine "for the US only"? https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/president-trump-tries-to-lure-curevac-to-make-a-u-s-vaccine-but-german-government-steps https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/president-trump-tries-...
- Slartie 7y ago
  As far as I understand it, both companies use the same basic approach and are roughly comparable. But the issue, as soon as a valid working vaccine is found, will be production capacity: you cannot produce vaccine for 330mil people overnight; none of these companies can do that by itself. Hence securing eventually-needed production capacity has its value, especially if you need the vaccine to be broadly available before a certain election date happens, because otherwise you die a political death.
  - JanSt 7y ago
    CureVacs vaccine can be produced in HUGE doses almost immediatly. Their rabies vaccine CV7202 requires only two doses of 1 µg mRNA, and they hope to replicate that with the corona-virus. If corona needs approx. the same doses they claim to be able to produce billions of them soon. https://www.curevac.com/de/news/curevac-focuses-on-the-development-of-mrna-based-coronavirus-vaccine-to-protect-people-worldwide https://www.curevac.com/de/news/curevac-focuses-on-the-devel...
    - Slartie 7y ago
      What they don't say there is how long it takes to scale up and produce those "billions" of doses. I found documented claims of 10 million doses until this summer (https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/rna-vaccines-are-coronavirus-frontrunners/4011326.article#/ https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/rna-vaccines-are-coronav...) with the existing production capacities.
      - DrAwdeOccarim 7y ago
        I don't think CureVac's technology is the right choice, though we should fund everyone at the same time to scale-up at risk IMHO. Moderna and BioNTech could scale-up to hundreds of millions of doses by EOY without expanding capacity. If the US and German governmetns really hit the gas, we could expand both companies manufacturing at risk and get to hundreds of millions doses in 6 months. Then, if the clinical trials look good, we already have the material ready to go.
jussij 7y ago
From this link: https://news.yahoo.com/government-official-coronavirus-vaccine-trial-232640596.html https://news.yahoo.com/government-official-coronavirus-vacci... Even if initial safety tests go well, “you’re talking about a year to a year and a half” before any vaccine could be ready for widespread use, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. So even if these trials go well that suggests a vaccine is a long way down the road.
- ManlyBread 7y ago
  Given how serious the situation is worldwide I suspect that there will be at least an attempt to speed things out as much as possible. I would be surprised if it actually would end up being a year and a half.
  - 0xffff2 7y ago
    I'm not an expert at all, but my understanding of the articles I've read is that 1-1.5 years is sped up quite a bit. 2-3 years would be more typical.
    - partiallypro 7y ago
      It definitely is, but if the entire global economy is still at a standstill in 3 months, I have no doubt the government will speed it up even more.
  - bbeekley 7y ago
    1.5 years is already very fast for a clinical trial. The average duration of clinical trials for "breakthrough" drugs is 5.0 years [1], compared to 8.0 years for drugs without that status. Plus O(1%) of trials actually make it to approval [2]. [1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2664989 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26649... [2] https://www.fda.gov/patients/drug-development-process/step-3-clinical-research https://www.fda.gov/patients/drug-development-process/step-3...
  - foob4r 7y ago
donmb 7y ago
You had one job.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Angostura 7y ago
> Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine. About the same length of time that experts were originally saying that it would take to get it out - unless they corners, I suppose.
- mrfusion 7y ago
  I’d love to see a breakdown of the “18 months”. If nothing else let’s ramp up production in parallel with testing. If it doesn’t work out we lose some time and money which isn’t a big deal in a crisis.
  - aneutron 7y ago
    That's assuming nothing needs to be changed in the formula (I'm no chemist, excuse my ignorance). But logically, if these tests show that somehow it needs to be tweaked, you're practically throwing out funding that could otherwise go towards developing better candidates.
    - comicjk 7y ago
      If funding for these projects is the problem, our society is even more short-sighted than I thought. We should be throwing money at them. I would be more worried about underlying physical constraints, like a shortage of manufacturing throughput.
  - sp332 7y ago
    Most of the time is taken up by two trials: this safety trial of a few months, followed by an efficacy trial of about six months.
  - usrusr 7y ago
    Speculative production ramp-up must be part of the solution, as long as it's not binding equally or more important production capacity. But still, vaccines are hard because you can only test them on the healthy. But treatment drugs, their development scales with desperation. If patients with beginning pneumonia symptoms could be sent home with a drug that would put them on a painful but safe path to recovery and that drug was available at scale, concerns about medical capacity would be pretty much gone and you could basically "brit it out" the hard way. My money would be on scaling treatment candidates, not vaccines.
victorantos 7y ago
The world.
- anoonmoose 7y ago
  The virus is subsiding in China because they took massive preventative steps to prevent the spread of the disease. Not all countries are taking such extensive steps.
- jokoon 7y ago
  That virus can still kill a lot of old people and people with comorbidities.
Datpuh 7y ago
Can we please stop saying this virus came from animals? A virus can't envelope after mutation, and that's exactly what this virus does. The chances of that happening in nature and being released at the right place and at the right time, is slim, I'm talking 0.001%. So please stop spreading disinformation because Coronavirus is only a weapon, whoever released it is the enemy and must be completely eradicated from this earth.
- cdolan 7y ago
  More proof or documentation behind these claims?
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  [citation needed]
Causality1 7y ago
"Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine." That makes a lot of sense for a vaccine against, say, chickenpox, or anything else that kills a hundred or a thousand people a year. For something that, at a 3% fatality rate, is about to kill nine million people in this country alone, it's suicidally slow.
- gnulinux 7y ago
  What's the alternative? Let it pass without sufficient test and possibly kill some people?
  - Causality1 7y ago
    If you can prove it will save more people than it will kill, yes. That's difficult when you have to prove a safety margin of 99.9%. Proving a safety margin of 97% is much faster.
- bluGill 7y ago
  You say that until the vaccine is given to everybody and turns out to cause lung failure a year latter in 10% of the people who go it - thus killing 30 million people in this country alone. (adverse reaction above completely made up)
  - radu_floricica 7y ago
    I don't think we'll give the vaccine to everybody. Well, a few years from now probably, but for this particular pandemic we'll target vulnerable populations (elderly and sick) and professions at risk (like health care).
cromulent 7y ago
I found 5 trials, four of which are recruiting: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=Corona+Virus+Infection&term=vaccine&strd_s=01%2F01%2F2020&strd_e=07%2F12%2F2022&cntry=&state=&city=&dist=&Search=Search https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=Corona+Virus+Inf...
andrewla 7y ago
From the article: > There’s no chance participants could get infected from the shots, because they don’t contain the virus itself. So ... what's in the vaccine? Is it just saline? Without a viral load I don't think we could call it a vaccine in the traditional sense; if this is some crazy new technology that enables the immune system to process the virus without introducing some viral material, that's neat and all, but deserves some deeper explanation.
- a_c_s 7y ago
  Many vaccines only use parts of the virus (such as proteins from the exterior of the virus). These vaccines can't cause infection because only certain parts of the virus are included, not whole viruses.
  - andrewla 7y ago
    I was not aware of that -- I thought that all vaccines used some live/dead/weakened/attenuated viral load.
m23khan 7y ago
best of luck to USA - Hopefully coronavirus situation gets resolved ASAP. I have a feeling as humanity battles this virus, we will see the best of every nation. Good luck to all!
0xff00ffee 7y ago
This makes me wonder: what happened to the Zika, MERS and SARS vaccines? Did researches give up because the virus(es) were mitigated?
- mu_killnine 7y ago
  Basically, yes. Here's an excellent Planet Money article I heard yesterday going over this issue: https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/815307821/planet-money-why-the-market-for-emergency-vaccines-is-like-no-other https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/815307821/planet-money-why-th... At least in the US, there's a policy of 'creating' a market for vaccines for these potential outbreaks in order to incentivize industry to research and produce them.
radu_floricica 7y ago
I really hope people will take a more "effective altruism" approach to those 18 months with all the people dying. I'm guessing just with logistic and bureaucratic prioritizing we can shave 6 months (somebody mentioned above that it takes months just to set up testing with the large number of volunteers. Sure, normally it does, but definitely not today). Beyond that we can probably cut another 6 months with judicious strategizing. Have certain populations defined that are high risk and high exposure - like elderly health care professionals - and start using the vaccine before the approval is complete. You might actually mix this with early testing and have the volunteers be actual beneficiaries. This way you get efficiency results from the field - it's trivial to implement a double blind and measure infection rates. Lots of things can be done, if one is willing to look at the letter of the rule and re-think if it's applicable now.
fg6hr 7y ago
If there are about 100k infected in the US today and this number grows 10x per week, we are 1 month from the entire country being infected. With 20% requiring hospitalization, it will be a blood bath. There will be nobody to benefit from this vaccine.
- originalbryan2 7y ago
  The rate is increasing, it's slightly worse. It's looking really really really bad. The vaccine's purpose will be to stop this from happening yearly for the rest of human history.
ztjio 7y ago
One of my biggest concerns is that they mean well and rush these vaccine trials as having a vaccine very soon would be IMMENSELY VALUABLE. But the fear part is that they screw up, people get hurt, and the anti-vaxxers dominate the conversation which leads to broader fear of vaccines and a vastly worse outcome overall for the foreseeable future. I would not envy anyone who has to make such decisions right now. And I would respect the process as it is, rather than be angry at it, because vaccines are overall some of the safest medicine in the history of medicine and that's really important to getting people to use them.

332 points by filleokus 7y ago

I am extremely bearish on this whole global situation, but given the gravity of the situation, we're going to see the world's best institutions and minds working on vaccines and treatments with essentially unlimited funding and top priority. Even during our darkest times, we're going to see the most remarkable science and engineering capabilities exposed in the coming weeks and months, for the sake of humanity.

troughway 7y ago
I'm with you on this. One of the not-so-physical wonders of the world we have is a lot of scientific, capable minds paired with high technology and rapid feedback on their efforts. The timing, though it could have been better, is on our side. My one concern is once this whole thing is over there will be a long pause followed by a blame game. There are already conspiracies floating out there being pushed forward by officials in various countries.
- lasgsf 7y ago
  I agree. We are going to go through the depths of hell but once we get past it and yes we will get past it that it will see us having resolved this.
dmix 7y ago
Reading about Russia sending rockets to Venus in the 1960-70s [1], then later watching a documentary about the Viking program [2], was one of the things that cheered me up the most during this whole thing. Humans have done amazing things in the face of dire odds. Nothing brings them together like these sorts of challenges. Since then I've been reading a book called "The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs" and there's been so many extinction events, yet life still bounced back each time stronger than before. Looking at life on that timescale, what humans managed to accomplish in such a short one doesn't get enough praise. We've only scratched the surface on how much better we could be as a species. I'm confident we'll be far better prepared for the next epidemic and at the very least hopefully China (and others like Vietnam) will eventually ban the wildlife trade for medicine as well, not just for food. Which is what early results by scientists are pointing to as the cause of this whole thing (Pangolins trafficked for Chinese medicine). Animal conservation plays an underrated role in epidemics, same with Ebola (monkeys) and SARS (bats). We don't need to be consuming any of this stuff. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlnM6kd3_n8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlnM6kd3_n8 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV_xPQrQEyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV_xPQrQEyc
- bonestamp2 7y ago
  > we'll be far better prepared for the next epidemic I agree. Being in California, it's a standing recommendation to maintain extra supplies in case of impact from wildfire or earthquake. So, I thought I was pretty well prepared. I already stock and rotate extra water, toilet paper, n95 masks, canned food, etc. But, I discovered some holes in my preparedness that I will rectify when the stores are back to normal supply levels -- I will be even better prepared for the next state of emergency. I'm sure the preparedness will go wide and deep across many government and private organizations. At a minimum, I hope the CDC ensures there are plenty more ventilators ready for the next one.
  - ncallaway 7y ago
    "At a minimum, I hope the CDC ensures there are plenty more ventilators ready for the next one." My only thought here is that we don't know that "the next one" will require ventilators. While I'd certainly like to see our national stockpile of PPE and emergency equipment like ventilators improved, I'd like to see the CDC preparing to face a wider-set of the "next one". I think we should be looking at our manufacturing infrastructure and ability to rapidly ramp-up the production of any life-saving hospital equipment in the face of a sudden need. With a national stockpile that's strong enough to cover the ramp-up period.
    - yannis 7y ago
      Besides this, the world not just the US need standby health personnel in a similar fashion to armies. Soldiers do nothing unless needed, a "health workers" army can do the same.
      - jfk13 7y ago
        How much extra tax do you think people will be happy to pay -- forever, not just now while we have a pandemic on our hands -- to support this?
        7y ago
mytailorisrich 7y ago
> ... for the sake of humanity. Considering the actions of the US government in Germany, and most probably the actions of other governments, I'd say for the sake of national interests, not humanity. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, though: When a vaccine is found I'm sure the government/company behind it will make available to the world for free...
- kathe-rine 7y ago
  Actions of governments != actions of the people
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    Governments and corporations are in control of this, not individuals.
    - adventured 7y ago
      Inside of governments and corporations are individuals making all of those decisions. There is a buck and it stops with an individual on a decision, or a couple of individuals at most. That's how a national emergency gets declared. The President decides to go forward with it. If California declares a state of emergency, it's the governor that has the final say: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/03/04/governor-newsom-declares-state-of-emergency-to-help-state-prepare-for-broader-spread-of-covid-19/ https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/03/04/governor-newsom-declares-s...
      - mytailorisrich 7y ago
        And we're back to my first comment...
- hans_castorp 7y ago
  > When a vaccine is found I'm sure the government/company behind it will make available to the world for free. I am pretty sure the U.S. government (or actually Trump) will not do that. He will make the world pay dearly for that.
fuckyah 7y ago
Why hello? This virus has a death rate of less than 0.2% in Germany. They have very good testing there. Every day 365k babies are born, humanity will be fine!
jariel 7y ago
I share your sentiment, this will be amazing and also a 'working together' time. But - time - is the issue. It's medical. Stuff takes a long time to develop a test, there are real ethical rules that won't get broken I think even now. 50 years ago, there would be either some brave volunteers who would be willing to get infected or some poor souls somewhere who would be unwittingly infected to see the results. No more of this. It's possible however the CCP may 'volunteer' some prisoners, or they may allow brave citizen volunteers. I can see that happening. (I can see brave volunteers coming from everywhere, but I don't see governments allowing such a program to go forward).
- dreen 7y ago
  I dont think thats a problem. At the very least there will be doctors who are infected and there is nothing to prevent them testing the vaccine on themselves.
  - jariel 7y ago
    We need people who do not have the disease to act as guinea pigs for vaccines and other therapies, not just people who already have it. Also, we need to test drugs and therapies that have excessive, even deadly consequences. Again, dilemma. This is a huge ethical dilemma. Up to a generation ago, drug companies would run trials in Africa, away from aggressive regulation. During the Manhattan project, the US Army would run squads of soldiers right through the aftermath of test nuclear explosions, literally to see 'the effect of radiation'. Many specialist jobs entailed levels of riks unthinkable today. Remember, this is in an era where cars didn't have seat-belts. In 2020, things have changed, but it's possible totalitarian regimes will find 'volunteers'. China has been engaging in harvesting the organs of political prisoners, at scale [1]. If they're willing to put people in prison for their ethnicity, and then 'have them die' so that a rich person can get a kidney through back channels ... then absolutely they can do medical trials on these people, it may not even need to be publicized. [1] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/china-credibly-accused-of-organ-harvesting-atrocity/ https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/china-credibly-accused...
    - 7y ago
cpv 7y ago
Imagine if one day we find that a comet is headed directly to us. That would test and push humanity at its extremes.
- QuotedForTruth 7y ago
  How certain would the experts have to be to get such coordinated action? With close approaches, it seems (as a layman) that there are always pretty large ranges of just how close they will be. I dont think you'd know "a comet is headed directly at us" until way too late. Instead you'd get some warning that there is a 10% chance or something. Over time that would go up to a near certainty. Maybe I'm pessimistic, but I would predict something more similar to climate change with deniers and paralysis.
- futureproofd 7y ago
  This remark reminds me of the book, "Seveneves" by Neal Stephenson. He plays with a similar 'what if?' doomsday scenario. Around 80% of the book revolves around testing and pushing humanity at it's extremes.
alfiedotwtf 7y ago
> we're going to see the world's best institutions and minds working on vaccines and treatments with essentially unlimited funding and top priority. Trump was caught out trying to buy a CureVac, who are working on a vaccine, to corner the market and make it only available to America https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/germany-coronavirus-curevac-vaccine-trump-rights/2020/03/15/8d684c68-6702-11ea-b199-3a9799c54512_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/germany-coronavi... Will we see a vaccine? Maybe. At pumped up costs? Most definitely
- CWuestefeld 7y ago
  I think it's worth noting that the corporation is trying to do the right thing, even as pushed by the US government to act unethically. Don't always expect that corporations are evil, or that governments will protect us from that.
adamsea 7y ago
What would be really, really nice is if after the crisis passes the world's best institutions and minds continue to get a significant amount of funding to apply those remarkable science and engineering capabilities for the sake of humanity. IMHO that is the real issue. We didn't need to be in this crisis in the first place : /.
- epicide 7y ago
  I can’t find the source I saw the other day, but the CDC ran out of a good chunk of its budget September 2019. Right before all this started. We, especially the US, keep treating CDC like they’re responsible for fixing diseases after they spread when their focus is prevention. This has been happening repeatedly for at least a couple decades. Every time, it gets worse because we treat disease as a solved problem. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/02/cdc-funding-pandemics/552224/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/02/cdc-fundi...
sharken 7y ago
Darkest indeed, if you are more than 70 years or have other illnesses then you take every precaution not to get infected. The rest of the population pray that the Corona quarantine will be scaled back as soon as possible, so we don't have a financial ruin to deal with the next decade or more.
stjohnswarts 7y ago
The problem is the virus will already have done it's damage by the time the vaccine comes out. Mayhaps it will be useful for the next pandemic that comes out of Wuhan's wet markets.

forkexec 7y ago

The rationale against mass inoculation with an untested vaccine stems partially from the botched 1976 Fort Dix swine flu H1N1 outbreak and vaccine. The volunteers of successive regular clinical trial phases play Russian roulette on our behalf, and this takes time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak

HarryHirsch 7y ago
The dengue fever vaccine disaster on the Philippines is another good example why one should be cautious. Dengue fever is the canonical example of antibody-dependent enhancement - someone who has antibodies against a certain strain of dengue fever will show a very serious reaction when he is infected with a different strain of the virus. That's why people who are given the dengue vaccine must have been infected with dengue previously. On the Philippines, they gave the dengue vaccine to schoolchildren, a substantial number of whom were seronegative. The disease in that population was much more serious than it would have been otherwise, there were unnecessary deaths, and a good number of parents avoided the measles vaccine for their children, and a measles outbreak promptly followed.
rrss 7y ago
Could you clarify which elements of the response were botched?
- yborg 7y ago
  >On December 16, a one-month suspension of the vaccination program is announced by CDC head Sencer. William Foege of the CDC estimates that the incidence of Guillain-Barré is four times higher in vaccinated people than in those not receiving the swine flu vaccine. The rushed vaccine apparently substantially increased the risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome in those receiving it. The syndrome is fatal in up to 5% of those that contract it and can cause permanent damage to the peripheral nervous system. First, do no harm.
  - Retric 7y ago

shartshooter 7y ago

key line Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine

m0zg 7y ago
If 100K people start dying monthly, that'll be down to 3 months, and "fully validate" will be replaced with "hail Mary" and "pray to Jesus".
- e12e 7y ago
  You can't magically whish vaccine into working. The controls aren't there in order to maximize the delay for when vaccines can be deployed. A bad batch could essentially equal to purposefully infecting people with the disease, for example. Ed: i don't see it mentioned explicitly: while young people might reasonably volunteer to be vaccinated and exposed to the virus - we really need to vaccinate the elderly and at risk - who has a high mortality rate. We might get volunteers, but it's still different to sign up for a 50/50 shot at death, than the risk of two weeks of mild flu... And we probably do need to test for adverse effects in the at risk population too.
  - AlgorithmicTime 7y ago
    Vaccinating the young and healthy is a fine first step, though! If you vaccinate enough of them, you get a large part of the way to herd immunity, and that gives us more time to validate.
  - Someone1234 7y ago
    > A bad batch could essentially equal to purposefully infecting people with the disease, for example. Nope, impossible. mRNA based vaccines don't use a weakened version of the virus to train the body: > [0]The use of mRNA has several beneficial features over subunit, killed and live attenuated virus, as well as DNA-based vaccines. First, safety: as mRNA is a non-infectious, non-integrating platform, there is no potential risk of infection or insertional mutagenesis. Additionally, mRNA is degraded by normal cellular processes, and its in vivo half-life can be regulated through the use of various modifications and delivery methods To use a bad analogy mRNA based vaccines train the body using a "signature" of the virus, essentially skipping the first step of actual infection and jumping to the second/third steps where the body's previously exposed to antigens are generated. It is an entirely new form of vaccine that has worked in trails before. Which isn't to say it is 100% safe for other reasons. I'd say auto-immune reactions are the biggest risk (e.g. the body using the signature encoded to attack the body itself). [0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5906799/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5906799/

H8crilA 7y ago

Yeah, we don't even know if this disease is vaccine-able, meaning whether people get long term immunity post exposure. Worth noting that the SARS (v1) vaccine was abandoned after the disease disappeared. Idiotic lack of long term thinking.

btmorex 7y ago
You can't ethically test a vaccine once a disease has disappeared so I'm not sure what you'd expect them to do in the SARS case.
- H8crilA 7y ago
  True. Can't you test on non-humans? Also, the vaccine was halted due to lack of funding, not ethical reasons.
  - evan_ 7y ago
    Not if the disease doesn’t infect non-humans, or affects non-humans in a different way
    - H8crilA 7y ago
      It does infect cats, dogs, and bats (at least). And it seems money/interest was the problem: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/scientists-were-close-coronavirus-vaccine-years-ago-then-money-dried-n1150091 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/scientists-were-c...
    - roywiggins 7y ago
      I believe there is or was a mouse model for SARS.
  - mellavora 7y ago
    Interestingly enough, dogs seem to have problems with chocolate (theobromine, actually). The only problem humans seem to have with chocolate are supply-related. Yes, you test on non-humans. But because biology is different, you then need to test on humans.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago

> Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine. Why?

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
I'm not a professional vaccine researcher, but I can only imagine you want to validate 1. that the vaccine is effective and 2. that the vaccine doesn't cause everyone who takes it to get an aneurysm six months later. These things have to be pipelined. You don't want to inject 10k people with something you've only tested on 45. You don't want to inject 45 with something you haven't tested on animals. You don't want to stop the 10k person trial too early in case if there is a longer term side effect you missed. You don't want to start manufacturing billions of doses until your 10k trial is done. Etc.
- refurb 7y ago
  As someone who works in the industry, you pretty much covered it. If you dose people with a new vaccine, you’ll need to monitor them 6 months at a minimum. 12 months would be better. It takes 3 months to nail down the protocol and for all the sites to be ready. Then you start recruiting and for a vaccine, you’d want a large population (reflects usage). So assume 6 months to recruit 1000 people. They don’t all start at the same time, so if you’re tracking for 6 months, it will probably take 9 monthsfor the last person to finish the trial. Then you need to analyze all the data you collected, so another 3 months. Then the FDA takes 3 months to review and approve. There is a TON of work that goes into running a clinical trial.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    But it does sound like if there's priority and fear, much time could be saved. For example, "6 months to recruit 1000 people". I suspect in this case, a week can work. > Then you need to analyze all the data you collected, so another 3 months. Help me understand this. You vaccinate 1000 people. In 6 months, the number of them that get sick is 10% of the rate of the unvaccinated. 0.1% have a bad reaction. How much more analysis do you need? > the FDA takes 3 months to review and approve How much time if that is moved to the front of the queue and all hands work on it? Given how enormously disruptive the coronavirus is, we cannot afford to not have all hands working on it.

IIAOPSW 7y ago

The same species that invented youtube also makes youtube comments. Keep that in mind.

wtvanhest 7y ago
Your comment is ironic on so many levels. Cheers to the OP. I think everyone needs a positive message right now. Thanks for delivering one.
mgolawala 7y ago
It has always been the case that 1% of humanity pulls the other 99% forward. We do not need everyone to be a genius. We just need one. We do not need everyone to be Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi, or Michelangelo, or Bach or Einstein, or Shakespeare, or Newton or Galileo we just need to be smart enough to recognize when one of them is born amongst us. We've not always been good at that.. but we've been getting better at it.
- rjzzleep 7y ago
  > It has always been the case that 1% of humanity pulls the other 99% forward. We do not need everyone to be a genius. We just need one. This is such a ridiculous hero praising statement. It's also completely wrong. While we love to hero worship, none of these heroes worked in isolation or without correspondence with others. Be it their teacher, peers they were having letter relationships with, their partners, their students or other people.
  - gvjddbnvdrbv 7y ago
    The OP said "we just need to be smart enough to recognize when one of them is born amongst us".
  - mgolawala 7y ago
    You are entitled to your opinion, but I think you misinterpreted me there. I didn’t claim that they worked in isolation or accomplished it on their own. I was simply pointing out that the work, knowledge and understanding by the very few have always benefited the many. Look at the parent comment and you will understand the context.

user9086754 7y ago

There's another new (as in just a few years old new) and fascinating technique for making vaccines that hasn't received much publicity. It's a general technique that can be quickly applied to any pathogen. It was recently used to develop a vaccine against Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis Virus (VEEV), was used to vaccinate mice against staph, and is also being tried against new strains of polio emerging in India. Here's an excerpt from paper about VEEV summarizing the technique's mechanism: ...a disease-causing organism (pathogen) can be exposed to gamma radiation in the presence of a Deinococcus Mn complex, and rendered non-replicative (killed) by overwhelming genetic damage, but still maintain the shape of key surface proteins needed to mount a highly protective immune response. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170530122345.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170530122345.h... I think this could have the potential to develop a cure but isn't receiving any attention from our (dysfunctional) government (who also happens to own the patents on it!).

program_whiz 7y ago
I heard that killed virus vaccines from corona viruses can actually lead to a cytokine storm and higher mortality rate in those innoculated with it. There's a reason we don't have general vaccines for the common cold. During some previous corona related outbreaks (SARS, MERS) there was an attempt at using this method, but it actually has a backlash effect when the person is exposed to the virus.
- bluGill 7y ago
  We do have a vaccine for the common cold. Problem is the common cold is really about 300 different viruses, and a vaccine for just one of them didn't make a statistical difference.
jerf 7y ago
Don't confuse "I don't hear about it in my daily news for the general public" for "nobody has considered it". You are not receiving an unfiltered medical-professional-level summary of all efforts currently underway. You're receiving a chaotically chosen, filtered-through-reporters (who mostly don't understand any of this beyond the middle-school level) subset of the news, further skewed by PR people actively trying to promote their own stuff. There could be any number of complicated biochemical reasons why this approach won't work on this particular virus.

jamesrcole 7y ago

I worry that headlines like this will lead to complacency amongst certain parts of the population. They'll think a vaccine will be here soon. I imagine their thought processes would be like: what's the big deal with this virus, why do we need to mess up the economy by social distancing, if we're going to have a vaccine quite soon?

CivBase 7y ago
I don't know how you can look around and seriously worry about complacency right now. Yes, complacency is very bad, but so is panic. We need to find a healthy, productive middle ground. A trip to my local grocery store is all the evidence I need to confidently say the pendulum has swung too far the other way. People are exhausting our supplies of essential hygiene products and cheap, non-perishable foods. Scalpers are re-selling the supplies online with huge markups. Hourly workers are loosing their incomes and parents are struggling to find means to take care of their kids who are suddenly without school for the foreseeable future. We need public awareness. We need people to take this matter seriously. But we also need a balanced approach to ensure we don't cause even more devastation in the long term. Frankly, I'm happy for anything that gets people to calm down for a second and just commit to good hygiene practices and avoiding crowds for a few months.
- jamesrcole 7y ago
  Complacency and panic aren’t the only two options. Complacency is a massive problem right now. So many people are not taking social distancing seriously, and it’s going to have disastrous consequences, al la how things are currently playing out in Italy, in many countries. And compared to that, the temporary exhausting of supplies is a trifling matter. (Wait until the real panic sets in when hospitals can’t keep up). But like I said, it’s not like we have to chose between complacency OR panic. We can take it seriously and take appropriate actions.

pelasaco 7y ago

and so started the zombie Apocalypse

allovernow 7y ago

Unfortunately a vaccine is unlikely to work. This is probably being done more for optics. This virus likely has Antibody Dependent Enhancement. Same reason there's no vaccine for SARS or MERS. It's 4am and I should be sleeping but there's a paper floating around where a bunch of SARS candidates were trialed on multiple species. In ever case immunity was conferred but upon re-exposure the animals had autoimmune lung damage. This virus is far more dangerous than most people understand now. The news media has been a month late in everything since they started reporting because all of this is evolving too rapidly to confirm to journalistic standards. You have to dig for this information yourself.

jeen02 7y ago
You're a ML engineer, not a specialist in this area.
- mrb 7y ago
  I hate credentialism like this. It's anti-intellectual. There are many smart people on HN who are perfectly capable of reading and understanding research literature in an area that is NOT their primary expertise, and who can make half-decent arguments and deductions. Reply to the points he raises (if you can). Don't belittle him.
  - unityByFreedom 7y ago
    Credentialism aside, there were no sources provided. I do find the point about no SARS vaccine compelling, however. Is that true? I know the flu vaccine gets updated every year or so with new viruses that are prevalent, so if there is no SARS vaccine then I wonder if that is true and if it is true it couldn't be developed. Again, multiple things thrown out there without sources which are not common knowledge, followed by "you can look this up yourself".
    - OJFord 7y ago
      I've only quickly searched, and to be honest it's a bit thick with foreign terminology for me to quickly glean much from it, but seems like this might be the paper the top-level commenter referred to: https://dx.doi.org/10.1128%2FJVI.02395-10 https://dx.doi.org/10.1128%2FJVI.02395-10 > I do find the point about no SARS [-CoV[-1]] vaccine compelling, however. Is that true? Wikipedia says so, and just gives essentially the same advice as being given for SARS-CoV-2 (or any human-transmissible virus, I imagine). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome#Prevention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

gerardnll 7y ago

I'm not sure we can wait 12-18 months... Everybody will have to put all resources onto this, because if the virus comes back in autumn, it's going to be worse according some predictions. Hope it's not tho.

kstenerud 7y ago

So Trump didn't need to try to buy a German biotech company to produce a vaccine "for the US only"? https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/president-trump-tries-to-lure-curevac-to-make-a-u-s-vaccine-but-german-government-steps https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/president-trump-tries-...

Slartie 7y ago
As far as I understand it, both companies use the same basic approach and are roughly comparable. But the issue, as soon as a valid working vaccine is found, will be production capacity: you cannot produce vaccine for 330mil people overnight; none of these companies can do that by itself. Hence securing eventually-needed production capacity has its value, especially if you need the vaccine to be broadly available before a certain election date happens, because otherwise you die a political death.
- JanSt 7y ago
  CureVacs vaccine can be produced in HUGE doses almost immediatly. Their rabies vaccine CV7202 requires only two doses of 1 µg mRNA, and they hope to replicate that with the corona-virus. If corona needs approx. the same doses they claim to be able to produce billions of them soon. https://www.curevac.com/de/news/curevac-focuses-on-the-development-of-mrna-based-coronavirus-vaccine-to-protect-people-worldwide https://www.curevac.com/de/news/curevac-focuses-on-the-devel...
  - Slartie 7y ago
    What they don't say there is how long it takes to scale up and produce those "billions" of doses. I found documented claims of 10 million doses until this summer (https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/rna-vaccines-are-coronavirus-frontrunners/4011326.article#/ https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/rna-vaccines-are-coronav...) with the existing production capacities.
    - DrAwdeOccarim 7y ago
      I don't think CureVac's technology is the right choice, though we should fund everyone at the same time to scale-up at risk IMHO. Moderna and BioNTech could scale-up to hundreds of millions of doses by EOY without expanding capacity. If the US and German governmetns really hit the gas, we could expand both companies manufacturing at risk and get to hundreds of millions doses in 6 months. Then, if the clinical trials look good, we already have the material ready to go.

jussij 7y ago

From this link: https://news.yahoo.com/government-official-coronavirus-vaccine-trial-232640596.html https://news.yahoo.com/government-official-coronavirus-vacci... Even if initial safety tests go well, “you’re talking about a year to a year and a half” before any vaccine could be ready for widespread use, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. So even if these trials go well that suggests a vaccine is a long way down the road.

ManlyBread 7y ago
Given how serious the situation is worldwide I suspect that there will be at least an attempt to speed things out as much as possible. I would be surprised if it actually would end up being a year and a half.
- 0xffff2 7y ago
  I'm not an expert at all, but my understanding of the articles I've read is that 1-1.5 years is sped up quite a bit. 2-3 years would be more typical.
  - partiallypro 7y ago
    It definitely is, but if the entire global economy is still at a standstill in 3 months, I have no doubt the government will speed it up even more.
- bbeekley 7y ago
  1.5 years is already very fast for a clinical trial. The average duration of clinical trials for "breakthrough" drugs is 5.0 years [1], compared to 8.0 years for drugs without that status. Plus O(1%) of trials actually make it to approval [2]. [1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2664989 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26649... [2] https://www.fda.gov/patients/drug-development-process/step-3-clinical-research https://www.fda.gov/patients/drug-development-process/step-3...
- foob4r 7y ago

donmb 7y ago

You had one job.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Angostura 7y ago

> Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine. About the same length of time that experts were originally saying that it would take to get it out - unless they corners, I suppose.

mrfusion 7y ago
I’d love to see a breakdown of the “18 months”. If nothing else let’s ramp up production in parallel with testing. If it doesn’t work out we lose some time and money which isn’t a big deal in a crisis.
- aneutron 7y ago
  That's assuming nothing needs to be changed in the formula (I'm no chemist, excuse my ignorance). But logically, if these tests show that somehow it needs to be tweaked, you're practically throwing out funding that could otherwise go towards developing better candidates.
  - comicjk 7y ago
    If funding for these projects is the problem, our society is even more short-sighted than I thought. We should be throwing money at them. I would be more worried about underlying physical constraints, like a shortage of manufacturing throughput.
- sp332 7y ago
  Most of the time is taken up by two trials: this safety trial of a few months, followed by an efficacy trial of about six months.
- usrusr 7y ago
  Speculative production ramp-up must be part of the solution, as long as it's not binding equally or more important production capacity. But still, vaccines are hard because you can only test them on the healthy. But treatment drugs, their development scales with desperation. If patients with beginning pneumonia symptoms could be sent home with a drug that would put them on a painful but safe path to recovery and that drug was available at scale, concerns about medical capacity would be pretty much gone and you could basically "brit it out" the hard way. My money would be on scaling treatment candidates, not vaccines.

victorantos 7y ago

The world.

anoonmoose 7y ago
The virus is subsiding in China because they took massive preventative steps to prevent the spread of the disease. Not all countries are taking such extensive steps.
jokoon 7y ago
That virus can still kill a lot of old people and people with comorbidities.

Datpuh 7y ago

Can we please stop saying this virus came from animals? A virus can't envelope after mutation, and that's exactly what this virus does. The chances of that happening in nature and being released at the right place and at the right time, is slim, I'm talking 0.001%. So please stop spreading disinformation because Coronavirus is only a weapon, whoever released it is the enemy and must be completely eradicated from this earth.

cdolan 7y ago
More proof or documentation behind these claims?
ceejayoz 7y ago
[citation needed]

Causality1 7y ago

"Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine." That makes a lot of sense for a vaccine against, say, chickenpox, or anything else that kills a hundred or a thousand people a year. For something that, at a 3% fatality rate, is about to kill nine million people in this country alone, it's suicidally slow.

gnulinux 7y ago
What's the alternative? Let it pass without sufficient test and possibly kill some people?
- Causality1 7y ago
  If you can prove it will save more people than it will kill, yes. That's difficult when you have to prove a safety margin of 99.9%. Proving a safety margin of 97% is much faster.
bluGill 7y ago
You say that until the vaccine is given to everybody and turns out to cause lung failure a year latter in 10% of the people who go it - thus killing 30 million people in this country alone. (adverse reaction above completely made up)
- radu_floricica 7y ago
  I don't think we'll give the vaccine to everybody. Well, a few years from now probably, but for this particular pandemic we'll target vulnerable populations (elderly and sick) and professions at risk (like health care).

cromulent 7y ago

I found 5 trials, four of which are recruiting: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=Corona+Virus+Infection&term=vaccine&strd_s=01%2F01%2F2020&strd_e=07%2F12%2F2022&cntry=&state=&city=&dist=&Search=Search https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=Corona+Virus+Inf...

andrewla 7y ago

From the article: > There’s no chance participants could get infected from the shots, because they don’t contain the virus itself. So ... what's in the vaccine? Is it just saline? Without a viral load I don't think we could call it a vaccine in the traditional sense; if this is some crazy new technology that enables the immune system to process the virus without introducing some viral material, that's neat and all, but deserves some deeper explanation.

a_c_s 7y ago
Many vaccines only use parts of the virus (such as proteins from the exterior of the virus). These vaccines can't cause infection because only certain parts of the virus are included, not whole viruses.
- andrewla 7y ago
  I was not aware of that -- I thought that all vaccines used some live/dead/weakened/attenuated viral load.

m23khan 7y ago

best of luck to USA - Hopefully coronavirus situation gets resolved ASAP. I have a feeling as humanity battles this virus, we will see the best of every nation. Good luck to all!

0xff00ffee 7y ago

This makes me wonder: what happened to the Zika, MERS and SARS vaccines? Did researches give up because the virus(es) were mitigated?

mu_killnine 7y ago
Basically, yes. Here's an excellent Planet Money article I heard yesterday going over this issue: https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/815307821/planet-money-why-the-market-for-emergency-vaccines-is-like-no-other https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/815307821/planet-money-why-th... At least in the US, there's a policy of 'creating' a market for vaccines for these potential outbreaks in order to incentivize industry to research and produce them.

radu_floricica 7y ago

I really hope people will take a more "effective altruism" approach to those 18 months with all the people dying. I'm guessing just with logistic and bureaucratic prioritizing we can shave 6 months (somebody mentioned above that it takes months just to set up testing with the large number of volunteers. Sure, normally it does, but definitely not today). Beyond that we can probably cut another 6 months with judicious strategizing. Have certain populations defined that are high risk and high exposure - like elderly health care professionals - and start using the vaccine before the approval is complete. You might actually mix this with early testing and have the volunteers be actual beneficiaries. This way you get efficiency results from the field - it's trivial to implement a double blind and measure infection rates. Lots of things can be done, if one is willing to look at the letter of the rule and re-think if it's applicable now.

fg6hr 7y ago

If there are about 100k infected in the US today and this number grows 10x per week, we are 1 month from the entire country being infected. With 20% requiring hospitalization, it will be a blood bath. There will be nobody to benefit from this vaccine.

originalbryan2 7y ago
The rate is increasing, it's slightly worse. It's looking really really really bad. The vaccine's purpose will be to stop this from happening yearly for the rest of human history.

ztjio 7y ago

One of my biggest concerns is that they mean well and rush these vaccine trials as having a vaccine very soon would be IMMENSELY VALUABLE. But the fear part is that they screw up, people get hurt, and the anti-vaxxers dominate the conversation which leads to broader fear of vaccines and a vastly worse outcome overall for the foreseeable future. I would not envy anyone who has to make such decisions right now. And I would respect the process as it is, rather than be angry at it, because vaccines are overall some of the safest medicine in the history of medicine and that's really important to getting people to use them.