3 ms·

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/
    - ignoramous 7y ago
      > 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). Out of curiousity, why couldn't potential auto-immune response be simulated on a computer up to a degree of confidence, if nothing? Would quantum computers drastically rid of current computing related handicaps wrt to simulating a large search space typical of such simulations? What role might yet the recent resurgence in deep-learning play for immediate future?
      - jerf 7y ago
        "Out of curiousity, why couldn't potential auto-immune response be simulated on a computer up to a degree of confidence, if nothing?" Basically every answer you could imagine to that question is true. We don't understand the system well enough to simulate it at that level of detail. We don't have the computational power to do it if we did. If we did have aliens from space deliver to us both the power and the simulation, we'd have a difficult time verifying the validity of the simulation! Quantum computing is still not well-understood enough to know if it's helpful; there's a certain barrier of "what can it actually do" that we won't really understand until we have them, and we start raising up quantum programmers. No slam against the theorists intended, it's just the difference between "the halting problem is unsolvable" and "here's a program for calculating payroll" is small in theory but large in practice. We won't really know what they can do until we work with them for a while.
      - comicjk 7y ago
        I work in computational drug discovery. With current hardware, we are basically limited to simulating single proteins for microseconds of time, and even that requires a lot of simplifying assumptions. So we can only simulate a small part of any given process. We can't develop high confidence about a complex cascading process this way. Quantum computing would definitely help if we had it. And researchers are using deep learning in many parts of the process now.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Elderly might not be able to take the vaccine, which will make it much more important for everyone else to be vaccinated. Vaccines provide immunity in aggregate as well as in person.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Adverse effects need to be considered against risk. If .01% who get the vaccine go blind is that better or worse than then taking your chances without? Tough choice, and not one that can reasonably answered. (note the .01% number was made up on the spot, I have no idea what the risk is just third hand reports that there once was a vaccination that made some people blind)
- obmelvin 7y ago
  As much as many people like to hate on the pharmaceutical industry etc, there is a reason clinical trials take time. Yes, this is a pandemic and we must move quickly, but it's important to ensure that we don't repeat the recent mistakes made with the dengue vaccine in the Phillipines [1]. That vaccine made dengue significantly worse for those who had not been previously exposed to it. Situations like this are especially bad because they erode trust in vaccines, perpetuating the idea that all vaccines are bad/malicious when in fact a properly vetted vaccine is very safe. [1] - https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/05/03/719037789/botched-vaccine-launch-has-deadly-repercussions https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/05/03/7190377...

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/
  - ignoramous 7y ago
    > 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). Out of curiousity, why couldn't potential auto-immune response be simulated on a computer up to a degree of confidence, if nothing? Would quantum computers drastically rid of current computing related handicaps wrt to simulating a large search space typical of such simulations? What role might yet the recent resurgence in deep-learning play for immediate future?
    - jerf 7y ago
      "Out of curiousity, why couldn't potential auto-immune response be simulated on a computer up to a degree of confidence, if nothing?" Basically every answer you could imagine to that question is true. We don't understand the system well enough to simulate it at that level of detail. We don't have the computational power to do it if we did. If we did have aliens from space deliver to us both the power and the simulation, we'd have a difficult time verifying the validity of the simulation! Quantum computing is still not well-understood enough to know if it's helpful; there's a certain barrier of "what can it actually do" that we won't really understand until we have them, and we start raising up quantum programmers. No slam against the theorists intended, it's just the difference between "the halting problem is unsolvable" and "here's a program for calculating payroll" is small in theory but large in practice. We won't really know what they can do until we work with them for a while.
    - comicjk 7y ago
      I work in computational drug discovery. With current hardware, we are basically limited to simulating single proteins for microseconds of time, and even that requires a lot of simplifying assumptions. So we can only simulate a small part of any given process. We can't develop high confidence about a complex cascading process this way. Quantum computing would definitely help if we had it. And researchers are using deep learning in many parts of the process now.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Elderly might not be able to take the vaccine, which will make it much more important for everyone else to be vaccinated. Vaccines provide immunity in aggregate as well as in person.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Adverse effects need to be considered against risk. If .01% who get the vaccine go blind is that better or worse than then taking your chances without? Tough choice, and not one that can reasonably answered. (note the .01% number was made up on the spot, I have no idea what the risk is just third hand reports that there once was a vaccination that made some people blind)
obmelvin 7y ago
As much as many people like to hate on the pharmaceutical industry etc, there is a reason clinical trials take time. Yes, this is a pandemic and we must move quickly, but it's important to ensure that we don't repeat the recent mistakes made with the dengue vaccine in the Phillipines [1]. That vaccine made dengue significantly worse for those who had not been previously exposed to it. Situations like this are especially bad because they erode trust in vaccines, perpetuating the idea that all vaccines are bad/malicious when in fact a properly vetted vaccine is very safe. [1] - https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/05/03/719037789/botched-vaccine-launch-has-deadly-repercussions https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/05/03/7190377...