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Walter is completely right. Under extreme circumstances (worst pandemic in 100 years) our risk thresholds should obviously shift. You can't cut corners too m
by patrec 7y ago
Walter is completely right. Under extreme circumstances (worst pandemic in 100 years) our risk thresholds should obviously shift. You can't cut corners too much and there is an inherent serial component, because if you want to vaccinate potentially hundreds of millions or even billions of people, you need to have some confidence about the risks involved. Even if you accept higher numbers of adverse vaccination reactions than you normally would. This means several months of observation you really cannot avoid. But most of the other things that take months according to refurb seem like baroque excess in the current context. Three months to analyze results and six months to recruit? Seriously? Also you can basically run any number of trials in parallel with different thresholds and then pick where you want to be on the risk/reward scale based on the situation a couple of months down the line.
- megous 7y agoI probably wouldn't take a vaccine that was validated just by several months of observation on test subjects, especially if it's a novel[1] mRNA vaccine. Maybe a year later, after release, when the potential for harm is better known. Other people may have a different risk/reward calculation. [1] https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/7/2/37/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/7/2/37/htm
- WalterBright 7y agoI wouldn't suggest anyone being forced to take the vaccine against their will.
- patrec 7y agoI'm not sure how this would contradict what I wrote, I totally agree that the observation of the patients is the one thing where you can't really speed things up much. It's inherently serial, no matter how much money and manpower you shove at it, but I don't see how this is true of many of the other stages mentioned upthread. Do you? I wonder if the downvoters fully understand that Covid-19 is a big deal. If we don't manage to eradicate it and it becomes as common as the (various strains of) cold, we will likely take a big hit to global life expectancy. It may also evolve to become more virulent and we may yet discover various unpleasant things about it. Even if it stays exactly as it is now and we just let it run it's course and get 70-80% of world population infected, before eradicating it in say two years time with a vaccine, we will eat a huge, multi-year dip in life expectancy in the developed world. And clearly, we are not accelerating this yet in ways that are completely safe (e.g. would we have more and better volunteers faster and more regularly if we paid them more than $100 for each visit?).
- megous 7y agoI'm not trying to contradict you. Just saying that the kind of vaccine that can be perhaps ready relatively quickly is the kind that's not very common yet, and is in the stage of "new and exciting technology", atm. I'll exercise caution. There were news today that first subjects are getting the experimental vaccines already. I don't know if it's fast enough or not. But I doubt people will not try to speed things up, at all levels.