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> A bad batch could essentially equal to purposefully infecting people with the disease, for example. Nope, impossible. mRNA based vaccines don't use a weakene

> 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.

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.