50 ms·

Moderna Covid vaccine candidate almost 95% effective, trials show

• sudhirj 6y ago
  Does all the vaccine manufacturing happen in the same fabs / factories? Moderna says they can make a billion does by next year, Pfizer says the same, so does that mean we have 2 billion doses available? Or do they share factories and we get either of them but not both? And it seems like there’s many of these companies working on this, so if we have 10 promising vaccines from 10 big pharmas we can get 10 billion doses?
  • jrochkind1 6y ago
    Good question. In a sane world, we'd be allocating the total manufacturing capacity (whatever it is) to maximize optimal vaccine production (whether that's only the most effective one, or a diversity of vaccines at certain proportions) without regard to intellectual property, but this is not a sane world. One article said the reason of these vaccines can be stored more easily than the other is they use different proprietary formulations of inactive ingredients to carry the mRNA. Again, in a sane world, the most effective one would be shared, right? In the US, this is the kind of thing the Defense Production Act could be used for (instead of keeping meat plants open!!).
    • sudhirj 6y ago
      I’d assume that the developed countries take the vaccines that require super refrigeration and give the low-drama vaccines to the developing countries, but that’s just me being naively optimistic.
      • jrochkind1 6y ago
        That would be rational, those with the least capacity to do the super refrigeration (developing countries also tend to be the hottest temperature-wise) get the one that need the least. Not unless we fight for it I think.
  • brianwawok 6y ago
    The dream of operation warp speed was to build a factory for each possible vaccine. Some npr about this. I haven’t seen a formal “here’s the 10 factories we built” picture, so not 100% sure how to confirm what happened?
    • fweespeech 6y ago
      Its mostly in the form of advanced purchases of product and grants. No one is building new factories. This is more about distribution and R&D grants than it is about factories. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/health/was-the-pfizer-vaccine-part-of-the-governments-operation-warp-speed.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/health/was-the-pfizer-vac... > In July, Pfizer got a $1.95 billion deal with the government’s Operation Warp Speed, the multiagency effort to rush a vaccine to market, to deliver 100 million doses of the vaccine. The arrangement is an advance-purchase agreement, meaning that the company won’t get paid until they deliver the vaccines. Pfizer did not accept federal funding to help develop or manufacture the vaccine, unlike front-runners Moderna and AstraZeneca. https://www.hhs.gov/coronavirus/explaining-operation-warp-speed/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/coronavirus/explaining-operation-warp-sp... > April 16: HHS made up to $483 million in support available for Moderna's candidate vaccine, which began Phase 1 trials on March 16 and received a fast-track designation from FDA. This agreement was expanded on July 26 to include an additional $472 million to support late-stage clinical development, including the expanded Phase 3 study of the company's mRNA vaccine, which began on July 27th. > May 21: HHS announced up to $1.2 billion in support for AstraZeneca's candidate vaccine, developed in conjunction with the University of Oxford. The agreement is to make available at least 300 million doses of the vaccine for the United States, with the first doses delivered as early as October 2020, if the product successfully receives FDA EUA or licensure. AstraZeneca's large-scale Phase 3 clinical trial began on August 31, 2020. > October 16: HHS and DoD announced agreements with CVS and Walgreens to provide and administer COVID-19 vaccines to residents of long-term care facilities (LTCF) nationwide with no out-of-pocket costs. Protecting especially vulnerable Americans has been a critical part of the Trump Administration's work to combat COVID-19, and LTCF residents may be part of the prioritized groups for initial COVID-19 vaccination efforts until there are enough doses available for every American who wishes to be vaccinated. The Pharmacy Partnership for Long-Term Care Program provides complete management of the COVID-19 vaccination process. This means LTCF residents and staff across the country will be able to safely and efficiently get vaccinated once vaccines are available and recommended for them, if they have not been previously vaccinated. It will also minimize the burden on LTCF sites and jurisdictional health departments of vaccine handling, administration, and fulfilling reporting requirements. > November 12: HHS and DoD announced partnerships with large chain pharmacies and networks that represent independent pharmacies and regional chains. Through the partnership with pharmacy chains, this program covers approximately 60 percent of pharmacies throughout the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Through the partnerships with network administrators, independent pharmacies and regional chains will also be part of the federal pharmacy program, further increasing access to vaccine across the country—particularly in traditionally underserved areas.
  • bluGill 6y ago
    They each have their own. So 2 billion doses. I believe that if Moderna found their vaccine didn't work they would license the Pfizer one as I assume their factories can be converted in a few months. Note that these are mRNA factories - I wouldn't expect a someone working on a different type of vaccine to be able to convert their factory. I would also expect that the process of conversion to produce a different vaccine will takes some months and cost us half a billion doses next year. This is just speculation though, there is no reason to make a license deal so we won't find out. You can assume all manufacturers are watching each other. Some of the "getting ready to enter phase one trials" vaccines will probably be canceled as there is no point. If one of the promising candidates in trials fails Pfizer and Moderna will build (or license) more factory space because there is less competition for the demand.
• cblconfederate 6y ago
  Are these companies going to release more interim data , and how safe are the margins used (~90 infections in both companies) I wonder what will be the consensus after other types of vaccines release their results.
  • Arnt 6y ago
    They're supplying regulators with more data often. At least that was reported a few months ago, that was part of the changes to accelerate the testing and approval processes.
• Roonerelli 6y ago
  Excellent news it's so high. For comparison, MMR is 88% effective on Mumps https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html#:~:text=One%20dose%20of%20MMR%20vaccine%20is%2093%25%20effective%20against%20measles,and%2088%25%20effective%20against%20mumps https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html#:~:te... "One dose of MMR vaccine is 93% effective against measles, 78% effective against mumps, and 97% effective against rubella. Two doses of MMR vaccine are 97% effective against measles and 88% effective against mumps."
  • dmurray 6y ago
    Incidentally, mumps is something that is decreasing in prevalence because of coronavirus precautions. In normal times, 88% isn't quite enough for herd immunity to mumps and there are sporadic outbreaks. I (M35) got it last year even though I was vaccinated along with almost everyone from my age cohort and younger, and everyone significantly older is immune because they contracted it in childhood. But that outbreak which began in late 2018 went away very quickly in April-May 2020 [0] [0] https://www.hpsc.ie/a-z/vaccinepreventable/mumps/ https://www.hpsc.ie/a-z/vaccinepreventable/mumps/
  • beezle 6y ago
    Yes but those are near lifetime immunities. Not said (that I'm aware of) with these two covid vaccines is how long they protect for. If it is less than a year it will be very hard to get and keep people taking it.
    • BurningFrog 6y ago
      The virus is less than a year old. The 5 year immunity level is not knowable.
      • beezle 6y ago
        That may be but they must have some indication of how strong a response those who got the vaccine are generating vs the time they entered the trial. Is there fall off? More or less than expected? How confident are they that immunity will last at least a year?
• dredmorbius 6y ago
  Numerous stories. From other dupe submissions: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/health/Covid-moderna-vaccine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/health/Covid-moderna-vacc... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54902908 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54902908 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vaccines-moderna/moderna-says-its-vaccine-is-94-5-effective-in-preventing-covid-19-idUSKBN27W1E6 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vaccin...
• yread 6y ago
  CNN has more numbers: > In Moderna's trial, 15,000 study participants were given a placebo, which is a shot of saline that has no effect. Over several months, 90 of them developed Covid-19, with 11 developing severe forms of the disease. > Another 15,000 participants were given the vaccine, and only five of them developed Covid-19. None of the five became severely ill. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/16/health/moderna-vaccine-results-coronavirus/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/16/health/moderna-vaccine-re...
  • brentis 6y ago
    What seems to be vague... They didn't contract Covid, but we're they exposed to it in a lab environment, or just set off on their way to be evaluated x months later?
    • shock 6y ago
      The latter. Exposing them willingly would be unethical since they could develop a severe form and possibly die.
      • iguy 6y ago
        I don't think they have started yet, but such trials are planned in the UK. There's no easy blanket "unethical" ruling from on high. Obviously this isn't a risk-free thing to volunteer for, but it isn't risk free for nurses to go to work either, and thankfully, they still do.
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
      • thehappypm 6y ago
        Also, you'd possibly be giving an unrealistic dose in the lab. If you give someone 1000x the viral load they'd ever get in the real world, the vaccine might not work. Or might work but send the immune system into a crazy overdrive cytokine storm.
• m0zg 6y ago
  This is great, now get some long term safety testing done or else it can't really be responsibly deployed.
  • qwerty1234599 6y ago
    It is already safety tested. 15k vaccinated with no side effects is more than enough.
    • eximius 6y ago
      I'm happy about the sample size, but are long term longitudinal studies typically required?
      • snazz 6y ago
        The long-term effects of covid itself are a far bigger concern to public health authorities.
    • impendia 6y ago
      I believe that, in different conditions, we should reasonably ask that more people be tested over a longer period of time. But Covid is wracking absolute havoc on people's health, on the economy, and on everyone's lives. Personally, I plan to take the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine as soon as it is available. There are associated risks -- but in my estimation, they are not as bad as the risks of Covid infection or the downsides of continued social isolation.
  • aphextron 6y ago
    > This is great, now get some safety testing done or else it can't really be responsibly deployed. Safety testing is done in preclinical and phase 1 testing. They wouldn't be injecting something unsafe into 30,000 people. Phase 3 is mostly about efficacy.
• fabian2k 6y ago
  With the first two vaccines above 90% efficacy, this does look very promising in general. If the other vaccines also turn out this well, this makes it look like a more optimistic timeline for vaccinating enough people to stop the pandemic is possible. Moderna is planning for 500-1000 million doses in 2021, BioNTech/Pfizer for up to 1.3 billion doses. Not sure how many more promising candidates there are that can be ready early in 2021, but I think there were a few more.
• westwing 6y ago
  I'm concerned about the safety of mRNA vaccines, but I'm not at all knowledgeable on the topic. What are the assessments of the HN crowd?
  • flakron 6y ago
    Take it with grain of salt, since I have no knowledge about this, but I found this [0] channel on youtube very helpful on covid related info. [0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF9IOB2TExg3QIBupFtBDxg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF9IOB2TExg3QIBupFtBDxg
  • bronlund 6y ago
    This vaccine is purely experimental. This technique has never been tried on humans before. It has been tried on animals and in several studies, led to severe long term side effects. Be advised.
  • Macuyiko 6y ago
    You might find this article interesting: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5906799/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5906799/ - especially under safety. I can see how some of those concerns might be present especially given that we didn't have large scale human mRNA tests.
  • dehrmann 6y ago
    It's a new type of vaccine that's never been been approved for use in humans before, was rushed through development and testing, for preventing a disease with a fatality rate between .3% and 1%. I'm worried. I hope there's a successful adenovirus vaccine.
• AlleyTrotter 6y ago
  Yes! Part of President Trump's operation warp speed
• tinus_hn 6y ago
  The important part is that 15000 apparently did not get serious side effects, so clearly much less people experience problems from the vaccine than they would from the disease. So now it’s time to stop delaying and start distributing these vaccines.
  • nabla9 6y ago
    No. Timetables can be compressed for everything else but not for safety evaluation. The number of people vaccinated is increased gradually. Even after phase III and approval, the monitoring for side effects continues and the vaccine can be withdrawn if necessary. Vaccines can cause autoimmune responses detected months later. These two vaccines are RNA vaccines never used n this scale Residual DNA risk is probably not significant, but there is small potential blowback. On positive side, RNA vaccines can open new era of programmable vaccines for viral infections and cancer treatments.
    • bryanlarsen 6y ago
      Remember that the threshold shouldn't be "fully safe", the threshold should be "better than the alternatives". If the alternative is COVID, that's a pretty low bar to clear. Given that we may have several vaccines to choose from it's worth a bit of effort to weed out any unsafe ones, but remember that every day of delay may cost thousands of lives.
      • nabla9 6y ago
        I do remember. The anti-vax nuts make discussion vaccination risks difficult because everyone pushes back to different direction just to be on the safe side. Existing vaccine testing and approval process have more or less the the right balance. Sometimes vaccines are withdrawn, in general they are safe.
        • __s 6y ago
          15000 also becomes a much smaller number as you start to consider factors which may change how someone reacts to the vaccine (gender, race, age, preexisting conditions, etc)
• refurb 6y ago
  This is a big differentiator versus the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.... "Moderna had previously said their vaccines could ship at -20 degrees, refrigerated for up to 7 days, and kept at room temperature for up to 12 hours. Now, the company says they’ve devised a formulation that can stay refrigerated for up to 30 days and kept at room temperature for up to 24 hours." https://endpts.com/moderna-says-its-vaccine-is-94-5-effective-at-preventing-covid-19-appears-to-stop-severe-disease/ https://endpts.com/moderna-says-its-vaccine-is-94-5-effectiv...
• chakintosh 6y ago
  The key takeaway here is that this one, unlike Pfizer's, appears to be easier to store as it remains stable at minus 20C for up to six months and can be kept in a standard fridge for up to a month.
  • dystroy 6y ago
    Isn't the difference more due to tests levels and announcement precautions ? Pfizer's announced temperature looks like the one for very long term ARN storage while standard fridge for a month doesn't look like it should alter ARN much. I'm not sure there's a real difference here.
    • abacadaba 6y ago
      Anyone know the difference in delivery mechanism between these two? Both are mRNA right?
      • aphextron 6y ago
        >Anyone know the difference in delivery mechanism between these two? Both are mRNA right? They're extremely similar. Both are mRNA delivered via lipid nanoparticle vector.
      • dnautics 6y ago
        Who knows. Almost all therapeutic rnas have unnatural RNA bases or base linkages that are, for example, resistant to internal phosphatases/autohydrolysis to improve half life; half life can also depend on secondary structure, and of course as a sibling comment mentioned, it can depend on the stability of the lipid nanoparticles.
    • mercurywells 6y ago
      Pfizer's can actually be stored for 5 days at normal fridge temperatures after removing it from deep-cold storage.
      • deleted 6y ago
• bryanlarsen 6y ago
  People are taking more risks because the vaccine is close[1] When the vaccine is close you should be taking fewer risks. The potential cost to those risks stays the same, you can still kill your elderly relations and/or develop "long COVID" yourself. But the benefit is much less. Going back to normal life now only nets you a few weeks of normal life with the vaccine in sight vs an indefinite time without. Also, the hope of a vaccine helps immensely with the mental stress of isolation. The end is in sight! Hang in there folks, keep being careful! 1: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/scotland/coronavirus-in-scotland-people-are-taking-risks-because-vaccine-is-close-says-john-swinney-9383rxptj https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/scotland/coronavirus-in-s...
  • cm2187 6y ago
    That’s reading people’s mind. I do my own mind reading and I say that compliance to lockdown is down because people are fed up, and because the virus turned out to be nowhere near as dangerous as initially claimed by the media (I remember a headline dated from end of April from The Times claiming covid was as deadly as ebola...)
    • andruby 6y ago
      Covid has killed more people in total than Ebola. Maybe that was what the headline was implying?
      • cm2187 6y ago
        No the headline was a very misleading statement based on the fact that people showing up in ICUs with severe forms of covid had about the same death rates than Ebola.
      • refurb 6y ago
        Ebola has a fatality rate of >80%. That's what the headline was implying.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• gtirloni 6y ago
  The type of good news we need on a Monday. I'm getting optimistic about the future again after almost a year of bad news.
  • edhelas 6y ago
    Be prepare for the next years and decades! Not sure if you can be that optimistic.
    • xiphias2 6y ago
      While you're being downvoted, I agree with you. The artificially low interest rates are a huge burden to society, so while I'm optimistic about the vaccine, I believe that getting back to a society based on savings instead of debt will be extremely painful.
      • suprfnk 6y ago
        I'd happily trade wealth for being able to meet friends and family freely again.
        • CrazyPyroLinux 6y ago
          This is a false dichotomy that you shouldn't be forced to choose.
        • jojo2333 6y ago
          I've been enjoying both.
          • tgarv 6y ago
            Wow, how are you pulling that off (the freely seeing friends and family part)?
            • deleted 6y ago
              [deleted]
• gravypod 6y ago
  Vaccine development has progressed far faster than I would have ever guessed. This might be a dumb question but what has enabled a COVID-19 vaccine to be developed in such short time? I was under the impression that developing a vaccine took on the order of 10s of years while this has been put together in 10s of months. I was also under the impression that this was because making vaccines for viruses was much harder than other treatments because interrupting the viruses reproduction chain is essentially requiring you to interrupt your cell's reproduction chain. Is there some tool that has been used here that hasn't been available in the past? I know the FDA said they would allow skipping some preliminary testing to fast track a drug. Was that a huge help?
  • neilwilson 6y ago
    There's been a ton of research on mRNA techniques. This crisis just meant that they got an open cheque book to complete the job. If these things work as they appear to do, it'll be even more impressive than putting a man on the moon.
    • yread 6y ago
      Yes, specifically for cancer. I believe both Moderna and Biontech were working on it for cancer treatment.
      • bluGill 6y ago
        BioNTech was doing various phase-one trials for cancer treatment. I don't know about Moderna.
    • aksss 6y ago
      They talk about this being entirely self-funded. I wonder about the lack of a cold vaccine - presumably the value would be enormous in terms of avoiding lost productivity. I’ve always been under the impression that a vaccine for the “common cold” is very difficult because of its rapid mutations, mRNA or not. I’m curious why COVID is going to be much different. Early on I remember an epidemiologist/virologist interviewed on JRE saying that building a point-in-time vaccine isn’t difficult, building a human-safe vaccine with long term efficacy is what’s difficult.
• xwdv 6y ago
  So what does it really mean for work from home stocks? Will valuations finally come down?
  • Avalaxy 6y ago
    They already did last week.
    • xwdv 6y ago
      They could still drop more.
  • chrisseaton 6y ago
    Why do you think companies will want people back in the office? Many have switched to work from home permanently, and the vast majority of workers won't want to go back either after having experienced it.
    • snazz 6y ago
      > the vast majority of workers won't want to go back either after having experienced it. I'm not sure how to qualify this statement without trading anecdotes. What kind of data do you have to back up this claim?
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • hndsj21 6y ago
        Maybe a good gauge is to look at studies that examine people's dislike of commuting. Google shows several results on this. For some anecdata, our 5000 person software company held a survey early in the year and 30% said they wanted to be remote. Then the company shaped policies around that to allow remote work in the future. When the time came for people to proactively request to be remote, it turned out to be around 50% (and I assume that will rise as people figure out what they want, where they want to be, how life is during non pandemic shutdowns etc.). I think what it ultimately comes down to is a significant number of people will want to continue to be remote; it's not just a few people.
• jonplackett 6y ago
  Anyone know what has happened to the Oxford Vaccine? That seemed to be way ahead for a long while.
  • ageitgey 6y ago
    They are in a similar stage - near reporting initial Phase 3 results but no exact date as to when that will happen given in public.
  • strictnein 6y ago
    They're still looking at late this year/early next year: "Late-stage trial results of a potential COVID-19 vaccine being developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca could be presented this year as the British government prepares for a possible vaccination rollout in late December or early 2021." https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britain-vaccine/britain-prepares-for-covid-19-vaccine-as-oxford-forecasts-result-this-year-idUSKBN27K1CS https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britai...
• CodeGlitch 6y ago
  Given the amount of research happening around Corona-viruses, will we see a vaccine for the Common Cold? Will the vaccination of the Common Cold eventually "pay-back" the money spent on dealing with COVID-19 as fewer people will take time off work to recover from the Cold? Pretty exciting stuff in any case.
  • jariel 6y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong but colds are a grab bag of a variety of ever mutating viruses. So we could nail one but not the other 500.
    • CodeGlitch 6y ago
      Yes I agree - but I read this [1] today, which talks about "universal" vaccines. "RNA and DNA vaccines are so far experimental, but trials have been promising and many scientists believe it could be one of those two types that will be the model that goes into mass production to protect against COVID-19. The attraction, say experts, is that they will potentially offer a step towards something that has been the holy grail of vaccine design – the universal vaccine. The vaccines being trialed by the team from Pfizer, which tests show provides protection in 90% of cases, and from Moderna, which shows efficacy of 94.5%, are RNA vaccines. If either proves to be the winner in the race for a COVID vaccine, it will represent a seismic shift in vaccine technology." [1] https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-how-vaccine-research-is-powering-a-giant-leap-in-medical-progress-11974369 https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-how-vaccine-research-...
      • JackC 6y ago
        Interesting. The next paragraph explains more what they mean by that: "Jeffrey Almond, a visiting professor of microbiology at William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford, told Sky News: 'All the current vaccines we have: diptheria, whooping cough, polio, measles, papillomavirus, you name it; all of them are very different. You don't have a generic process to make them. You have a dedicated factory, a dedicated process, very different technologies. "'What RNA and DNA offer is an escape from that. We can make the RNA by a single process in a single factory. All we have to do is change the sequence of the RNA or DNA.'" Very cool, but not necessarily "universal" in the sense you'd need to target all the different rapidly-mutating cold viruses.
• acqq 6y ago
  What we still don't know for both Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines: "A vaccine that prevents infection entirely provides indirect protection to others. If I can't get infected, I can't infect you. But it is possible to have a vaccine that prevents disease but individuals can still be infectious." (1) In that case, those at risk are only protected when they receive a vaccine, but still aren't when just those who they are in contact with received it. "Most Phase 3 trials are measuring efficacy to prevent disease as the primary analysis" (2) Not infection. The whole thread with more details, already written in September, before both announcements: https://twitter.com/nataliexdean/status/1310613702476017666 https://twitter.com/nataliexdean/status/1310613702476017666 by: "Natalie E. Dean, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at @UF specializing in emerging infectious diseases and vaccine study design. @HarvardBiostats PhD." (3) 1) https://twitter.com/nataliexdean/status/1310613711808278528 https://twitter.com/nataliexdean/status/1310613711808278528 2) https://twitter.com/nataliexdean/status/1310613708557692928 https://twitter.com/nataliexdean/status/1310613708557692928 3) https://twitter.com/nataliexdean https://twitter.com/nataliexdean
  • rich_sasha 6y ago
    It would seem at least reasonable to hope that one follows from the other. If our bodies fight the virus effectively, the viral loads we would shed ought to be lower. The period where high virus loads are found in our bodies will be shorter, requiring less hospitalisations, and thus chances to give it to other vulnerable people. There are of course lots of hypotheticals here, and things to be concerned about, but a priori surely we should be hopeful it reduces infections too?
    • acqq 6y ago
      Your assumption: > The period where high virus loads are found in our bodies will be shorter is precisely what can't be assumed in advance but must be measured, as there are known examples where the assumption doesn't hold at all (and that includes the flu vaccines). (Not to mention that just "shorter" is by definition not "sterilizing", the transmission is then obviously still possible.) If the virus is transmitted via the upper respiratory tract, and it is, it's less probable that the immune cells in blood can prevent the infection and viral shedding of the mucosa. The cells have to be first attacked and infected before the immune reaction can kick in. Even now, it is known that the highest infectiousness of SARS-CoV-2 is often before the symptoms are observable, i.e. before the immune reaction starts. That would also explain the existence of asymptotic carriers: their immune system already protects them, but they are still able to infect others.
• fallingfrog 6y ago
  This is fantastic news! There is light at the end of the tunnel. We are a very resourceful species and I hope that at the end of all this we learn to have a little faith and trust in each other. Sometimes it takes a crisis to force us to innovate but we can do it when we have to. I really think that when we get around to recognizing climate change as an actual crisis, we will deal with it as well, because we will have to, and we have always had the capacity.
• Bharath_MG12 6y ago
  It is great that mRNA research is paying off at right time. Both Pfizer and Moderna took bets on mRNA!
  • ketamine__ 6y ago
    Are there any mRNA startups raising a seed round?
  • technics256 6y ago
    Technically it was the German company BioNTech, not Pfizer who did the initial mRNA research work for that their joint vaccine.
    • svara 6y ago
      Not the "initial mRNA research", just the mRNA research. Pfizer contributed their experience in running clinical trials and manufacturing. The history of mRNA based pharmaceuticals is a fascinating one, Statnews have a great article on the topic: https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/10/the-story-of-mrna-how-a-once-dismissed-idea-became-a-leading-technology-in-the-covid-vaccine-race/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/10/the-story-of-mrna-how-a-...
    • bluGill 6y ago
      This is pretty typical. The big companies tend to invest in the little ones so that if the little one finds something good they can buy it and put the rigor of large scale manufacturing (and marketing of course) around it. If the little ones fail to find anything they can cut their losses without having the moral hit of laying people off.
      • formerly_proven 6y ago
        There is (for now) an approximately zero percent chance that Biontech can be bought by either a US or Chinese company.
        • 6y ago
• jakozaur 6y ago
  Good: + ~94.5% of individuals achieve immunity. Better than Pfizer, though we need more data to be sure. + no significant side-effects. + no special deep freezing. -20C is good for 6 month storage, -2 to -9 for 30 days comparing to Pfizer -70C all the time. Not so good: - two doses needed, 4 weeks apart, immunity after one and a half month from first dose. Slow rollout. Pfizer results were after one month. Still long-term immunity is a question for every vaccine. Luckily, if two vaccines works then likely other attempts will be successful.
  • yonixw 6y ago
    Pfizer also need 2 doses > "which consists of a 2-dose schedule" [0] [0] https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-announce-vaccine-candidate-against https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
  • elisaado 6y ago
    iirc, Pfizer results were after one month from the second injection.
• basicallydan 6y ago
  Is it just a coincidence or is Moderna’s name and stock ticker label (MRNA) intentionally supposed to reference the type of research they do? (mRNA)
  • miked85 6y ago
    Not a coincidence.
  • Doe22 6y ago
    It's intentional. The name of the company was originally spelled ModeRNA before they rebranded. They're very focused on mRNA.
    • basicallydan 6y ago
      Cool, thanks for confirming :)
    • Florin_Andrei 6y ago
      > They're very focused on mRNA. Turns out, that was an extremely good bet.
      • stirlo 6y ago
        Sure, but there's other cheaper/simpler methods of vaccinating against Covid-19. Moderna has the inside track with $2.5Bn of government funding and a wealthy country able to afford their more complex vaccine. We'll probably find that the Russian, Chinese and Indian vaccines all work in the next few months so the mRNA aspect is not essential.
        • Tepix 6y ago
          They are thinking and planning beyond Sars-CoV-2
• pluc 6y ago
  All directly because of Donald Trump
  • richardARPANET 6y ago
    Very true.
    • 24gttghh 6y ago
      true, in that we may not have needed one if he wasn't so incompetent to let it get this bad.
      • chromatin 6y ago
        This type of trolling does not belong on HN.
        • raister 6y ago
          what was true?
        • Vaslo 6y ago
          Agreed, this isn’t twitter
        • 24gttghh 6y ago
          What are you talking about? This isn't trolling. The president is a negligent menace, who, had he had any interest or capability to lead, would have done his job and enabled earlier prevention measures...
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• moralsupply 6y ago
  > The trial involved 30,000 people in the US with half being given two doses of the vaccine, four weeks apart. The rest had dummy injections. > The analysis was based on the first 95 to develop Covid-19 symptoms. > Only five of the Covid cases were in people given the vaccine, 90 were in those given the dummy treatment. The company says the vaccine is protecting 94.5% of people. Aren't those numbers way too small to make any statistically significant claims?
  • et2o 6y ago
    Not at all. That is why the N on these trials is so huge. 5/15000 vs. 90/15000 is going to be statistically significant anyway you slice it. It’s a 45-fold difference. You can approximate it yourself with a t test.
    • dannykwells 6y ago
      A Fisher test you mean. T is for continuous variables.
      • et2o 6y ago
        Haha indeed
  • MagnumOpus 6y ago
    The difference between 5 and 90 is highly significantly different from equality. And same as with the BioNTech vaccine, the testing continues until they have 160+ covid cases in one of the legs.
  • dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
    No. The full trial was on 30,000 people, every phase 3 trial picks a certain number of infections to stop at in order to draw results. Of the control group, 90 something got COVID, while only 5 of the vaccinated group got it in the same timespan. This is considered a big enough difference to call the vaccine effective (so far).
  • bitcoinmoney 6y ago
• zaroth 6y ago
  Warp Speed funded ~$800 million in R&D and $1.5 billion for Moderna to make 100 million doses — whether it is approved or not. Similarly, Pfizer received $1.95 billion to make 100 million doses whether it was approved or not. (EDIT: Pfizer’s agreement is an advance purchase but unlike Moderna’s it is contingent on FDA approval.) Warp Speed provided ~$5 billion in guaranteed prepayments which meant the companies could ramp up manufacturing without waiting for approval first in order to have a large number of doses ready by the end of the year. That’s never been done before, but the bet has certainly paid off spectacularly so far. Novavax got $1.6 billion and GSK got $2 billion for another 100 million doses each. Assuming all 4 companies produce highly effective vaccines, the US has prepaid for 400mm doses / 200mm courses of vaccine. This will save a lot of lives not just in the US but worldwide as well, because it shifts the manufacturing curve sooner until the point where several billion doses have been made.
  • coder543 6y ago
    > Similarly, Pfizer received $1.95 billion to make 100 million doses whether it was approved or not. That statement is false. See the press release: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-announce-agreement-us-government-600 https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta... "The U.S. government will pay the companies $1.95 billion upon the receipt of the first 100 million doses, following FDA authorization or approval." Approval is required to receive payment, and the product has to be delivered to receive payment as well.
    • mlindner 6y ago
      Dangling a hefty bag of gold in front of someone is a good way to get someone to invest their own money, even if the US didn't fund it directly.
      • DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
        Making it contingent on approval will make them more cautious, however.
  • deleted 6y ago
• bboygravity 6y ago
  Great news. Seems better than the Pfizer vaccine, especially because transportation of the vaccine seems easier (the vaccine can be transported at a much higher temperature, -7C instead of -80C out the top of my head). Both vaccines seem to require 2 doses a couple of weeks apart which is unfortunate but workable. But... How long does the immunity last? We now know 6 months, but what about after that? What are the long term side effects? Does it prevent spreading (read: keep wearing masks after vaccination) or does it "only" prevent symptoms? If you don't get what I'm talking about: look up asymptomatic shedding. Kids do it all the time with SARS-CoV2 [0]. Answer: we don't know. Let's not rush this. Also interesting to note: so we can develop and approve vaccines for new diseases within months? It doesn't have to take 10 years if we really want to eradicate a disease badly enough? My conclusion: we're under-funding research in microbiology. "We" as in: the entire world. In general. The Moderna press release: https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/modernas-covid-19-vaccine-candidate-meets-its-primary-efficacy https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d... The best source for all things microbiology and Covid (not just SARS-CoV2) that I know of: https://microbe.tv/twiv https://microbe.tv/twiv [0] 6-Fold Higher SARS-CoV-2 Exposure Rate than Reported Cases in Children: https://www.cell.com/med/pdf/S2666-6340(20)30020-9.pdf?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS2666634020300209%3Fshowall%3Dtrue https://www.cell.com/med/pdf/S2666-6340(20)30020-9.pdf?_retu...
  • kbuchanan 6y ago
    You may be right about funding, but it can also be attributed to incentives: has our desire to eradicate a disease ever been expressed in such an intense way, with the benefits being so enormous?
  • lbeltrame 6y ago
    > How long does the immunity last? If we consider that recovered patients are immune between 6 and 8 months at least, that timeframe seems likely. > What are the long term side effects? I keep on asking myself. What vaccines do truly exhibit long term side effects? Narcolepsy with the 2009 swine flu vaccine or the Guillain-Barré syndrome for the 1976 flu vaccine do not fit the bill, because they actually showed up in the early months after administration (although some were found out later).
• yread 6y ago
  This just goes to show how difficult a problem cancer is. These companies were working on therapies for cancer, switched direction and in 11 months developed and successfully tested a vaccine against a newish virus. What's the progress in cancer treatment in those 11 months with vastly larger resources? Is there even a 1% improvement in survival across all cancer types compared to last year?
  • konschubert 6y ago
    I have hope that the mRNA based vaccines will enable economies of scale and provide insights into delivery mechanism and safety which will then in turn speed up the development of cancer treatments.
  • ebiester 6y ago
    Consider that you can quickly get 30,000 people to sign up for a trial (which is what I saw as the AstroZeneca trial size) but you really have to work to get a sufficient sample size for the right kind of cancer. Oncology trials can take years. On top of that, teams threw their entire effort into a single vaccine because billions of people will need it, and they may need it multiple times depending on how this vaccine goes. Cancer drugs are often for one type of cancer, which has fewer people and thus less priority. If 7 billion people were at risk of developing one type of cancer, I think we'd have a better chance at developing it. Cancer is hard but that's not the only reason it's slow.
  • hobofan 6y ago
    > with vastly larger resources In a limited US-centric look, it seems like the resources are at about the same level, with funding for cancer at ~$5.6 billion for the NCI[0], and ~3.6 billion for COVID19[1] (in June, not sure if more funding has been approved since). Not sure what metric you want to consider for cancer survival, but the rough trend in 5-year cancer survival seems to be in the ballpark of improving between 0.25-1% yearly (until 2013)[2]. [0]: https://www.cancer.gov/about-nci/budget/fact-book/data/research-funding https://www.cancer.gov/about-nci/budget/fact-book/data/resea... [1]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/nih-grapples-researchers-rush-claim-billions-pandemic-research-funds https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/nih-grapples-researc... [2]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/five-year-cancer-survival-rates-by-sex-and-race?time=1963..2013 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/five-year-cancer-survival...
• exabrial 6y ago
  This vaccine is incredible because of mechanism of action! If it continues to prove to be safe, we can treat all sorts of rare diseases easily and cheaply.
  • akmarinov 6y ago
    That sounds interesting, could go more into how and why?
• unnouinceput 6y ago
  Hold on a second. The Russian vaccine has 92%? And is available for months already. WTF is happening actually? Did the governments around the world smeared Russian one on previous months mocking it and ridicule it in order to allow a Western company to achieve the same protection for the love of money? If that's the case I hope people with deaths in their families will sue their governments/health organizations to hell and back. This screams of greed for money not on back of ordinary citizen, but literally on their life.
  • belval 6y ago
    The Russian vaccine (Sputnik V) was not available and as far as I can tell still isn't. The Russian government rubber stamped it before it had gone through proper trials. See: https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/27/health/russia-coronavirus-vaccine-sputnik-v-reality-check/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/27/health/russia-coronavirus-vac... (If you dislike CNN feel free to Google "Sputnik V" for plenty of other sources on why this vaccine seems very sketchy).
    • collyw 6y ago
      The western vaccines appear to be getting emergency approval as well, no? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-pfizer-emergency-use-authorization-fda/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-pfizer-emergency-...
      • klmr 6y ago
        Emergency approval ≠ rubber-stamping. The “Western” vaccines are still going through proper (if accelerated) clinical trials. The Russian vaccine’s supposed efficacy and safety was announced before starting the phase III trials. That’s what’s rightly being mocked.
        • collyw 6y ago
          The western one is being rushed through a lot quicker than usual. We can't possibly know about long term effects.
• Aldipower 6y ago
  "No significant safety concerns have been reported, but nothing, including paracetamol, is 100% safe." Are they kidding me? They comparing apples with peaches here. Paracetamol is not 100% safe that is true, but almost every risk is known, it is used since decades. These new genetic vaccines are a total unknown in long term risk, because nobody used it so far and the third testing phase, which normally takes multiple years, hasn't started yet. When it starts it will be shortened, so it is not that safe anymore, then used to be. Especially for younger people all these vaccine has a significant unknown long term risk! Maybe it doesn't matter for older people though.
  • chki 6y ago
    What do you mean by "third testing phase"? I think that phase III of the clinical trials is actually happening right now and is where these positive results come from.
    • Aldipower 6y ago
      Normally this phase takes multiple years. You cannot shorten this. Long term effects, you guess it maybe, only show up in the long term. You can have my dose, if you like. No problem for me. Please downvote me further.
      • chki 6y ago
        I was simply asking a question because this sentence >the third testing phase, which normally takes multiple years, hasn't started yet is apparently not correct. Only trying to enhance my knowledge of vaccine testing phases, I don't want to fight you and I'm not downvoting you.
        • Aldipower 6y ago
          Yeah, sorry for that. I am just a little bit confused. Because to speed the things up, phase I and II were combined here. That's why we are actually at phase 2.5, so to say, sold as phase III.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• caeril 6y ago
  Can someone versed in immunology explain to me why both this and the Pfizer vaccines are both borderline-experimental mRNA vaccines (versus attenuated or recombinant)? I understand that bog-standard protein vaccines don't protect much beyond 3-6 months, but why didn't we pump out tons of S1/S2, N, and E protein vaccines the second this virus was sequenced? At least it would have been better than nothing, and the safety issues are very well known. I'm not anti-vax, by any means. Just trying to understand why we chose this path rather than tried-and-true. I'm sure plenty of people would be a lot less conspiracy-minded if the vaccine was just a run of the mill recombinant protein particle one, even if we needed boosters 2-3x a year.
  • mchanson 6y ago
    "I'm sure plenty of people would be a lot less conspiracy-minded" I think that is a ridiculous statement. The conspiracy-minded folks will be that way regardless of objective reality.
    • permo-w 6y ago
      Perhaps I’m wrong, but I feel like you’re slightly wilfully misunderstanding what he’s saying there. He’s not saying that it will make people less inclined towards believing conspiracies, he’s saying that people will be less likely to believe that this thing specifically is a conspiracy
  • dharmab 6y ago
    mRNA vaccines are faster to develop, despite being newer technology. This video explains the basics and has a list of citations in the description: https://youtu.be/S1l6BchEoZM https://youtu.be/S1l6BchEoZM
  • anonunivgrad 6y ago
    It is sad that you have to defend yourself by saying “I’m not anti-vax”. Anti-vaxxers are rightly criticized for denying the overwhelming decades of evidence that the standard repertoire of vaccines is safe. That’s totally different than questioning new, unproven vaccines, especially when no vaccine of the same type has ever been widely deployed. There are very legitimate concerns about genetic vaccines. And for vast swaths of the population, getting covid might be less risky than getting this vaccine.
• anonunivgrad 6y ago
  Is this also an mRNA vaccine like the Pfizer? No genetic vaccine has ever been widely deployed. As a young healthy person who could yet have more children, I’d rather get covid than take a genetic vaccine that might affect me or my offspring. DNA vaccines have never been deployed because of serious concerns about the patient’s genes being modified by the vaccine. Scientists are saying they’re “sure” that mRNA vaccines can’t do that, but that seems overly sanguine. There is still so much we don’t know about genetics. How can you possibly have that certainty when observed epigenetic effects, for example, challenge many of our preconceived notions about the body’s genetic machinery but are so poorly understood. It seems that at least some processes currently thought to be “one-way” are actually not.
  • tensafefrogs 6y ago
    > "DNA vaccines have never been deployed because of serious concerns about the patient’s genes being modified by the vaccine." This is a false statement. Here's an article debunking these kinds of claims: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-covid-19-vaccine-modify/false-claim-a-covid-19-vaccine-will-genetically-modify-humans-idUSKBN22U2BZ https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-covid-19-vaccin... From the article: "Mark Lynas, a visiting fellow at Cornell University’s Alliance for Science group, debunked the idea that a DNA vaccine could genetically modify an organism. Lynas told Reuters that no vaccine can genetically modify human DNA. “That’s just a myth, one often spread intentionally by anti-vaccination activists to deliberately generate confusion and mistrust,” he said. “Genetic modification would involve the deliberate insertion of foreign DNA into the nucleus of a human cell, and vaccines simply don’t do that. Vaccines work by training the immune system to recognize a pathogen when it attempts to infect the body - this is mostly done by the injection of viral antigens or weakened live viruses that stimulate an immune response through the production of antibodies.”"
    • anonunivgrad 6y ago
      >Vaccines work by training the immune system to recognize a pathogen when it attempts to infect the body - this is mostly done by the injection of viral antigens or weakened live viruses that stimulate an immune response through the production of antibodies Not great for that guy’s credibility that he doesn’t even know what a DNA vaccine is. He’s described the kinds of vaccines in wide use. Not genetic vaccines, which work by introducing genetic sequences that encode the antigen, as opposed to introducing the antigen itself.
• jmnicolas 6y ago
  > The analysis was based on the first 95 to develop Covid-19 symptoms. > Only five of the Covid cases were in people given the vaccine, 90 were in those given the dummy treatment. The company says the vaccine is protecting 94.5% of people. Is it me or it's incredibly light to shout victory yet and to announce any number? Unless you literally expose people to the virus in a laboratory setting you can't guarantee that both groups had equal exposure to the virus.
  • zzleeper 6y ago
    Thats why you have a lot of people in the trial, and why its a double blind
  • jeromegv 6y ago
    It's you. Vaccine development has been going on for more than a century and got extremely safe. Do you really think you just found a flaw in their process? Yes they still need to be validated by the FDA, being peer reviewed, etc but this process is already started and continuing.
  • feral 6y ago
    I haven't looked it up, but the trial will certainly be randomized. Randomized trials and statistics solve this problem.
  • tspiteri 6y ago
    The two groups would actually be the same. You can start with a number of people, randomly pick half of them to be given the vaccine, and the other half get the placebo. So there should be no difference, apart from getting the vaccine/placebo, between the two groups.
  • zyxzevn 6y ago
    The experiments were setup to pass, so we are seeing record high numbers of successes. A lot of companies are specialized in hacking the standards for testing. Depending on the company they use some of these tricks: These are all small sample sizes (around 100) picked from huge numbers of tested people (10s of thousands). They look at short term results, long term effects failed dramatically in animal testing. They use tests that can give false positives (PCR>26 cycles), and/or false negatives. Or just look at symptoms that are similar to flu. They do not have a proper (long term) placebo group (why not also use untreated patients as well). Other factors with huge impact as health, habits, food, Vitamin-D. Big pharma wants to collect "their" billions for their medicine. Which is why we cant have nice things. (Or cheap medicine that do work well).
• zyxzevn 6y ago
  That is almost as good as the 98% of Vitamin-D. I wonder if they checked for that.
  • pjc50 6y ago
    [citation needed]
• dry_soup 6y ago
  Maybe a stupid question: Is this the standard measurement of effectiveness? I.e. you give the control group a dummy vaccine, the test group the real vaccine, and you just wait for them to be infected? Why not test for antibody development?
  • mansr 6y ago
    Verifying the expected immune response (antibodies) is (part of) phases 1 and 2, if I've understood things correctly.
    • DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
      Exactly. It's a good sign if people develop antibodies, but that does not ensure protection. As I understand it, it is difficult to predict, in advance of actual testing, what immune response will actually be protective.
      • dry_soup 6y ago
        I see, thanks!
  • bewaretheirs 6y ago
    The immune system is complex and has multiple mechanisms to recognize and attack pathogens; besides antibodies I've seen mention of multiple types of T-cells and also there's apparently a dimension of mucosal immunity vs. systemic immunity. Antibodies are easy to test for (the chemistry required can be put into mass-produced home test kits), while it's more difficult to test for other responses (a recent long-term study of covid-19 T-cell response was with only ~100 subjects). A hypothetical vaccine that produced a meh antibody response but mobilized the T-cell or mucosal systems could be effective at preventing the disease but not look like much on an antibody screen.
• mlang23 6y ago
  Since someone just self-censored, I can only repeat that. As a young healthy individual, I'd much rather catch COVID then get vaccinated with a wide-spread mRNA experiment. In my childhood, I have been used by a doctor for an experiment without consent of my parents, and this cost me my remaining eye-sight. You can bash, downvote, laugh at, deminish, and in general say whatever you want about sceptics, our reasons to not want to be vaccinated are as valid as your reasons to want it are.
  • wobblyasp 6y ago
    [citation needed]
    • mlang23 6y ago
      You want a citation for my medical history? Or do you imply that I don't know about my own medical history? In any case, fuck you!
      • wobblyasp 6y ago
        No; I'm implying you have made an unverifiable statement that attempts to counter scientific evidence. It adds nothing to the conversation.
        • mlang23 6y ago
          No, I am sharing my personal experience to allow people lacking empathy like you to understand why sceptics might not be as happy with the current outlook as you are. I dont give a fuck about scientific evidence, personal experience is all that counts, for me, PERSONALLY!
          • boringg 6y ago
            I agree with your comment that while empathy is much needed especially as you had a very traumatic experience with, what sounds like, a rogue doctor. The commentator might be implying that your experience, while terrible, cannot justify denying the significant benefits accrued to the entire population. Personal experience is, of course, very important it cannot however guide general policy decisions for large populations. And, it should be noted, that if we all lived solely through the lens of personal experience we would still live in a what we would believe is a flat world and our scientific evidence would be scant.
• rs999gti 6y ago
  With COVID's 99% survival rate and the newness of this vaccine, I would treat this vaccine like LASIK - let the first adopters take it and wait 10 years for the effects. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/926089 https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/926089
  • Ensorceled 6y ago
    This is how you don't get to herd immunity and how you crash the economy for years.
    • anoncake 6y ago
      You can't expect someone to take a rushed vaccine because other people are panicking. Lockdowns are what crash the economy, not the virus.
      • earhart 6y ago
        Evidence? (My own suspicion is that the lockdowns are better for the economy in the long run, but I’m definitely not an expert.)
        • rs999gti 6y ago
          Better? Explain
          • nobody9999 6y ago
            >Better? Explain Not GP, but it seems to me that given the large consumer spending portion of GDP (~70% in the US) in developed countries, anything that will limit folks going out and spending money, like: 1. Retail sales; 2. Air/rail/bus travel; 3. Going to bars/restaurants; 4. Hospitality (hotels/cruises); 5. Theater/concerts; 6. Public transportation. Is likely to have significant negative effect on the economy as a whole until the majority of the population is convinced that they won't become sick and/or put their vulnerable loved ones at risk. As such, it seems to me that we won't be able to resuscitate the economy fully until we have some semblance of herd immunity. Whether that herd immunity comes from a vaccine or millions of deaths and tens of millions of long-term effects, or from a broadly deployed vaccine will also have significant economic impact. tl;dr: if many/most won't go to the mall, the pub or Mallorca, the economy will continue to flounder. We won't get past that until people feel safe around others.
• sul_tasto 6y ago
  The protection rate oddly correlates with the hearsay that ~95% of people testing positive experience mild to moderate symptoms. I think I’m in the wrong business.
  • wobblyasp 6y ago
    HN isn't the place for baseless conspiracy theories.
    • StavrosK 6y ago
      Not even a baseless conspiracy theory, it's such a failure of basic reading comprehension that it borders on bad faith. They gave the vaccine to a bunch of people, people in the control group got COVID 20 times more often than in the vaccine group, what's there to dispute?
  • ijidak 6y ago
    Haha. I understand what you're thinking, but from a benefit standpoint, it's not only about the 95% having fewer symptoms. It's about the 95% never being contagious. So they can't cause the disease to spread to the 5% that are at risk of death.
    • sul_tasto 6y ago
      I’m glad at least one person in the world understood the irony.
      • rimliu 6y ago
        This kind of humour is called "no sense of humour". Rare, but happens.
    • DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
      > It's about the 95% never being contagious. I don't think the study has measured whether vaccinated people are less contagious (or get infected). It's primarily measuring protection from disease.
• petre 6y ago
  Does this one also require transportation and storage at -70C?
  • anovikov 6y ago
    Nope, only -20C for up to 6 months, or -4C for up to a week. Which is a great difference.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • davidhowlett 6y ago
    From the article: "Moderna's vaccine appears to be easier to store as it remains stable at minus 20C for up to six months and can be kept in a standard fridge for up to a month."
  • dataminer 6y ago
    No, it can be safely stored at 25 degree Fahrenheit, according to Moderna as reported by npr. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/16/935239294/modernas-covid-19-vaccine-shines-in-clinical-trial https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/16/9352392...
• gpmcadam 6y ago
  As per CDC, survival rates by age group are as follows: 0-19: 99.997% 20-49: 99.98% 50-69: 99.5% 70+: 94.6% What would be the benefit for people 70 years or under taking vaccine that has "95% protection". Can anyone elaborate on what that figure actually means? For example, of the <1% of people who would die with the virus, is a vaccine that is 95% effective going to save 95% of them? Or is this just about reducing severity for the few who have more than mild symptoms?
  • someperson 6y ago
    The protection figure is the based on the comparison between the people who received the placebo and people who received the vaccine. The group who received the vaccine had 95% fewer cases. Also while improving the immune response of at-risk groups is of course important, the main goal is to reach herd immunity. Eg, if all the people _under_ 70 got the vaccine then the virus would never reach the aged care home in the first place.
    • gpmcadam 6y ago
      And if those people under 70 were exposed gradually to the virus, they'd survive in higher rates than the vaccine? So would it be more effective to expose them to the virus instead?
      • someperson 6y ago
        By "expose somebody gradually to the virus" you're describing certain vaccine technologies. Live viruses have a nasty habit of reproducing, spreading uncontrollably and killing a lot of people along the way. The people who survive do gain an immune response though. Some virus technologies use "live-attenuated" vaccine, which are weakened (but living) versions of the virus which promote an immune response without causing illness.
      • GuB-42 6y ago
        No, the virus can kill and cause long term problems to people under 70, at a rate that would be unacceptable for any vaccine. It could be a last resort solution if we had no hope of an effective vaccine, but it looks like the results are quite promising so far, so no need to go to such extremes. "get people sick in a controlled manner" is a form of vaccination. Just a particularly dangerous kind, because you are using live viruses instead of non-infectious lookalikes. It is like training soldiers by putting them in real gunfights.
• marwan-nwh 6y ago
  I hope rich countries don't make it difficult for poor countries to get the vaccine, whether it is this one or Pfizer's.
  • gautamdivgi 6y ago
    It is difficult but its not because of the price, although that's there too. It's that developing countries may not have the infrastructure to transport and store the vaccine at the recommended temperature of -70C.
    • Voloskaya 6y ago
      The moderna vaccine does not need -70c, juste -20 to be stored indefinitely (regular freezer), and even higher than that if you can ship relatively quickly (i.e weeks)
    • roywiggins 6y ago
      Developed countries don't have infrastructure for -70C distribution. The US is going to struggle to actually distribute the Pfizer vaccine. It's not like your local CVS has a freezer that goes down to -70C. Dry ice is possible but there's a shortage of that, too. Nobody has ever distributed a vaccine that needs to be stored at -70C. The Moderna one is much easier, you just need a normal freezer. Which is fine for developed countries, will still be a challenge elsewhere (but one they're used to, it's not the first vaccine that needs to be kept cold)
      • rsynnott 6y ago
        The ebola vaccine has to be held at -80C, though it hasn't been given to huge numbers of people.
        • majewsky 6y ago
          Most developed countries don't have an existing infrastructure for Ebola vaccines, though.
      • 6y ago
• T3RMINATED 6y ago
  Russia's Vaccine is 99.9% effective. I trust it more.
• Wintamute 6y ago
  The vaccine candidates are promising. But you don't need to be anti-vax to understand the game theory implications of neither vaccine undergoing a normal longitudinal study (waiting >1 years for side effects to develop), and both being based on new mRNA vaccine tech. Better for you and your family not to take the vaccine in the short term, and benefit from people around you taking it. I understand that is anti-social, but the logic cannot be denied if you're interested in optimising risk for you and yours. Taking a vaccine that no trial volunteers have lived with for more than a year is a _substantial_ risk whichever way you slice it.
  • exhilaration 6y ago
    What's the normal timeline for a new vaccine? How many years does the testing usually take?
    • isolli 6y ago
      I don't have an answer, but the normal timeline should depend on the size of the population that you intend to vaccinate. Testing a vaccine for 6 months and then deploying to hundreds of millions... seems short.
  • eli 6y ago
    Not taking the vaccine is a substantial risk. I thinks it’s irresponsible to casually discourage people from taking vaccines.
    • logicchains 6y ago
      It depends on the poster's age group. If they're not elderly or obese, getting the virus is no more dangerous than commuting to work daily or giving birth, which wouldn't normally be described as a "substantial risk".
      • ryan_j_naughton 6y ago
        Giving birth doesn't risk killing others and commuting to work by driving requires a license given the risk of killing others. If you want to risk your own life in a way that doesn't risk other's, fine by me. But don't equate that to an activity that also risks the lives of others. If you want to get natural immunity without risking the lives of others, I could imagine a service where you quarantine at home after intentionally being infected with the disease, but even then, there is the negative externality that a certain percentage of young people will need medical care, resulting in increased risk of spread and reduction of healthcare capacity. Please don't pretend like you live in a vacuum.
• fasteddie31003 6y ago
  This is great news. I've been following this vaccine since February when it was created. https://www.modernatx.com/modernas-work-potential-vaccine-against-covid-19 https://www.modernatx.com/modernas-work-potential-vaccine-ag... It's a little frustrating knowing this cure was out there so long and some of the pain from pandemic could have been reduced only if we had faster testing. IMO we needed a faster pandemic vaccine protocol. I strongly feel that the FDA should have used challenge trials where they deliberately infect healthy people with the virus after vaccinating them. The approach the FDA chose to use was maybe easier ethically for them to swallow where they just let people in experiment get sick naturally in their every day lives. Using challenge trials we would have gotten these results back weeks faster and with less error bars. Weeks with COVID-19 cost 10,000 of lives. The FDA still has not approved this vaccine. Everyday that the FDA does not approve this vaccine after results like this is SOME blood on the hands of the FDA.
  • leg100 6y ago
    Or...the USA could have followed the likes of Taiwan et al and rolled out exemplar non-pharmaceutical interventions early and thoroughly, resulting in no more than a handful of deaths. Even at this point it'll take months and months to roll it out to the population at large, over which time 10s of thousands more will most likely die.
    • maxerickson 6y ago
      10s of thousands of people will die from Covid-19 in the next couple weeks in the US. And we don't looked to be peaking anytime soon. Maybe mid December if more people recognize the situation we are in more or less immediately?
• gizmondo 6y ago
  [deleted]
  • raphaelj 6y ago
    Please explain
    • gizmondo 6y ago
      My bad, I meant to say it in the other thread which is flooded with "As a young healthy person who could yet have more children, I’d rather get covid than take a genetic vaccine that might affect me or my offspring" type of comments.
• BurningFrog 6y ago
  This also, preliminarily at least, confirms that the mRNA approach can live up to its promise. With some luck, this is the start of a new era of fast and safe vaccines for most any virus.
• Ensorceled 6y ago
  I have worked at two different companies that have been accelerated by the FDA; once during the HIV crisis for a sequencing application and at a medical imaging company that demonstrated overwhelming quality of care improvements. Acceleration is unusual but not "conspiracy level" unusual. My former colleagues in the viral research space (the HIV team above) basically flagged this type of vaccine as our best hope for an 2021 vaccine. No one I know from this space thought a 2020 vaccine was ever in the cards.
  • audiometry 6y ago
    “ No one I know from this space thought a 2020 vaccine was ever in the cards.” I’m not in science, but friends who had colleagues more involved in biological sciences said those fellows were total skeptics that anything like 6-8 months would be possible. Imagine if this would have happened ten years ago. Think we’d have any prayer for a vaccine? Wouldn’t be surprised if the technology didn’t even exist within some point in the last couple decades. So in some ways maybe we are ending up “lucky”.
    • Ensorceled 6y ago
      That was the concensus ... 2021 was possible if we get really lucky and either an existing coronavirus vaccine platform could be repurposed or a RNA vaccine works out. Just to be clear, there was a real risk that a vaccine would turn out to be impossible for this type of virus. It looks like completely dodged that bullet.
    • jlokier 6y ago
      > I’m not in science, but friends who had colleagues more involved in biological sciences said those fellows were total skeptics that anything like 6-8 months would be possible. Yes. I have an academic friend in a high-level biotech research role who said a vaccine wouldn't be possible in this timeframe, that we ultimately could only delay the spread but not save people, so to avoid economic harm on top we should let the virus "run its course" and kill however many it's going to kill. They were wrong.
      • 6y ago
• CapriciousCptl 6y ago
  These interim results are about as promising as you could expect, which is frankly amazing given it was developed in a matter of months (depending how you count, Moderna says "2 months"). Ultimately, its effectiveness depends on if and how quickly SARS-CoV-19 and its spike protein evolve resistance. That won't really be known until after widespread deployment and depends both on different factors inherent the virus' replication, its spike protein, host factors and how effectively the vaccine is rolled out. Original article-- https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2022483 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2022483
• ilrwbwrkhv 6y ago
  Hell yeah. Science bitches!
• mandeepj 6y ago
  Just watch - these Covid med pharma cos are going to cut each other by few points now - just to acclaim a top spot for themselves. Edit - grammatical fix
  • aphextron 6y ago
    >"Just watch - these Covid med pharma cos are going to cut each other by few points now - just to acclaim their top spot" It is funny to see the market reaction. MRNA spiked 15% this morning while BNTX (The Pfizer vaccine maker) tanked 13%. All over a few percentage difference in a sample size so small that it came down to the difference of one or two cases.
    • bluecalm 6y ago
      Maybe it's not about a few percentage points but about it being a legit alternative. A few days ago it looked like Pfizer is in position to milk the market and now there is competition.
      • jgidey 6y ago
        > Moderna's vaccine appears to be easier to store as it remains stable at minus 20C for up to six months and can be kept in a standard fridge for up to a month. Pfizer's vaccine needs ultra-cold storage at around minus 75C, but it can be kept in the fridge for five days. I think this is a big difference. I don't know if many hospitals and clinics, especially ones in remote locations, can have cold storage the Pfizer vaccine requires
      • Nbox9 6y ago
        It was common knowledge that Moderna’s vaccine was releasing efficiency results this week, and that the technology used to provide protection was very similar to Pfizer’s.
      • philk10 6y ago
        Also the MRNA seems easier to distribute as it doesn't need such a low temperature as Pfizer
• afjl 6y ago
  Re-paste from my comments below, because I believe people should share their experiences: I currently have coronavirus. I'm a young male in my 20s (don't want to divulge too much info), 6'1", 170 lbs, non-smoker, rarely drink, pretty healthy. Waiting on test results. Started off about 2 weeks ago, rash on my chest, lots of night sweats and chills. Didn't think it was covid at first. given the weird symptoms. I did not feel too sick, in general. Slight fever, slight cough and sore throat. For most of the time, it felt mild. Still have the rash, night sweats, and sore throat at the moment. However, 4 days ago I started having issues breathing. I felt out of breath multiple times throughout the day, and at times it was hard to even suck in air (like my diaphragm was calcified or something). I woke up a few times at night, trying to suck in air. Today was better but the difficulty breathing is still there. I realized today, that even though it's not as bad as the worst flu I've had, it involved a symptom (difficulty breathing in air) that I have never experienced. Not with strep, not with the flu. This is something to note for everyone, in my opinion. I think it's both milder AND worse than people think it is - I'm a healthy young male who exercises and eats well, and yet I'm having trouble breathing. This is a symptom that has continued for multiple days, and while it hasn't gotten worse, it's not getting much better. The rash is still there, my throat's still sore. If you are part of the obese/overweight American population (35% of us, including my family), and are a chronic smoker/drinker, and have chronic conditions (diabetes, hypertension, mental health conditions), I think you should still be careful. Unless you have a respirator, there isn't anything you can take to resolve "difficulty breathing". It's not like fever/sweats/nausea - where you can just take a Nyquil and it's all gone. Not to mention, we have antibiotics and antivirals to attack the flu/cold/strep infections as well. Covid's a bit different - difficulty breathing can only currently be helped by equipment that's located in hospitals. There isn't some magic pill that will get your diaphragm pumping up and down again. This is something to note, in my opinion. I'm not sure how much longer my symptoms will continue. The initial symptoms started 2 weeks ago, but the breathing related ones only started recently. I hope it gets resolved soon - I may provide a comment as an update. Please wash your hands, avoid touching your face/eyes with your hands, socially distance if you can, and wear a mask when in public. Having trouble breathing is no joke.
  • macspoofing 6y ago
    Thanks for sharing. These accounts are always very interesting to read. Good luck and speedy recovery.
• perardi 6y ago
  I think there’s going to be a lot of anti-vaccine agitation about this. It’s a type of vaccine that has never been approved and deployed past the research phase before, and it’s going to be super easy to wrap “modified RNA vaccine” in scare quotes like I guess I just did there. “It’s genetically modified?!” I can imagine my neighborhood Facebook group blowing up already. Me? Get it in my veins, I’m disappointed I was not selected for the trial. But I think the political climate may be toxic for this.
  • bamboozled 6y ago
    Are you a doctor or someone who actually understands these vaccines by in-depth ? Why is it so hard for people to understand that not everyone is eager to inject themselves with something foreign to them? Where’s the compassion and empathy? I’m by no means against vaccines but I don’t appreciate being made to feel like I have to take one either ?
    • meddlepal 6y ago
      Im all for setting up the equivalent of leprosy colonies for anti-vax folks that want to be left alone. They can be left to their own devices and free to live without vaccinations away from the rest of us.
      • bamboozled 6y ago
        I see you’re being immature to take such a one sided view of the problem. I wasn’t advocating people shouldn’t take it, I’m asking for patience and understanding, not everyone is ready and eager to inject medicine they don’t understand using a new vaccine technology in 5 minutes, is that so hard to believe ?
    • hoot 6y ago
      This entire HN discussion is insane. Every comment that is even slightly skeptical of mass-injecting the global population with a substance that we do not fully understand is being down-voted.
• wskinner 6y ago
  > In the analysis, 90 of the patients received the placebo with the remaining five the vaccine. Why is the trial so small?
  • zaksoup 6y ago
    The trial is quite large, it’s 95 people who have confirmed covid cases out of the tens of thousands in the trial.
  • dtjohnnyb 6y ago
    They're the number of people in the trial who contracted covid. The numbers in the trial are north of 40k if I remember right
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • rsynnott 6y ago
    The trial is big; tens of thousands of people would be normal. One problem with this sort of trial is that the sort of person who volunteers is also quite likely to be careful, so they're not getting COVID enough. Pfizer/BioNtec trial showed similar numbers.
  • 0xffff2 6y ago
    You appear to be quoting from a different article. Here's the relevant bit from the BBC article: >The trial involved 30,000 people in the US with half being given two doses of the vaccine, four weeks apart. The rest had dummy injections. >The analysis was based on the first 95 to develop Covid-19 symptoms.
  • BryanBeshore 6y ago
    “ More than 30,000 participants at 100 clinical research sites in the United States are participating in the study, which launched on July 27, 2020, after results from earlier stage clinical testing indicated that the vaccine candidate is well-tolerated and immunogenic.” Source: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/promising-interim-results-clinical-trial-nih-moderna-covid-19-vaccine https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/promising-inte...
• fasteddie31003 6y ago
  Is there any way I could get this vaccine before the FDA approves it? I've looked through the studies and it's good enough for me.
  • coldpie 6y ago
    I don't know about this particular one, but there are a number of vaccine trials going on right now. You can try searching for "covid vaccine trial" in your area, or reaching out to your local department of health. My wife is in the Oxford-Astrazeneca trial here in Minnesota. She was recruited through a Facebook ad. The downside is you don't know whether you got the placebo or the real thing :) My wife has a 2/3 chance of having the vaccine. It's unclear to me when they will unblind her. It seems unethical not to unblind participants if a safe, effective vaccine is available, but I'm not an expert on trial methodology.
    • Dumblydorr 6y ago
      If you unblind patients, that will change their behavior and alter your results. If they told her she had the vaccine, she'd be more likely to go out and take risks. Conversely, if they told her she had placebo, she'd probably stay in and take less risks. Overall, this would lead to a dramatic reduction in the power to observe an actual protective effect, as vaccinated would be riskier and unvaccinated would behave safer. Hang in there, she is doing a good service, I hope you are both well!
      • coldpie 6y ago
        Yes, I understand the purpose of blinding. I'm wondering if that purpose still holds once a vaccine is approved and is widely available. Surely for her safety they will unblind her so she knows whether to go get the real vaccine?
    • sp332 6y ago
      Ars Technica mentioned that this was a consideration, but so far at least, it doesn't seem to have stopped anyone working on COVID research. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/well-need-more-than-one-vaccine-to-beat-the-pandemic/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/well-need-more-than-...
• 01100011 6y ago
  So after initially saying there's no way I'd take a vaccine that has been rushed to market I'm now thinking that, as a middle aged male with no kids, I sort of have a duty to take the risk. I suppose the vaccines will go to higher risk groups and front line medical staff first, but once they're available I'm signing up.
  • eli 6y ago
    I don't think it's fair to say it was "rushed." It is not, in fact, approved yet.
  • ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    I've been jokingly telling people, "As a software developer, I know never to trust the first version of anything". I'm definitely planning on getting the vaccine, but I'd really feel better with it being out in the field for longer. Especially with this type of vaccine (mRNA).
  • lumberingjack 6y ago
    Good try guyum
• known 6y ago
  mRNA type vaccines will soon provide cure to Cancer https://archive.is/LWvx5 https://archive.is/LWvx5
• nickgrosvenor 6y ago
  I read today, they’re saying between this and the Pfizer vaccine. They’ll be 40 million doses available this year. Enough for 20 million people. Because we only have a month and a half left of this year, when were these vaccines going to come online? And where? Obviously it’ll go to at risk people, but when exactly will it start to roll out if it’s already Nov 15th?
  • hinkley 6y ago
    > Obviously it’ll go to at risk people, The obviousness of this strategy has been challenged over the last 10-20 years. At-risk people in some cases do not respond fully to vaccines, and the reaction can be stressful to their systems. Last I heard, the recommendation for influenza was 100% vaccination for nursing home staff and a strong recommendation for visitors to also get vaccinated. The bubble of protection from this strategy has, apparently, lower overall risks. Doctors and nurses, especially urgent care, will likely be first in line (or perhaps due to an abundance of caution, half of them first in line, half later). I'd like to see the people we have labelled 'essential workers' up next.
  • 35fbe7d3d5b9 6y ago
    The rollout of these will likely be fast-tracked by the FDA for an emergency use authorization and rolled out to healthcare providers first. How long, who knows – the fact that this vaccine doesn't require cryogenic cooling like Pfizer's does may be an accelerator.
  • pradn 6y ago
    The National Academies have a set of recommendations for the priority of vaccine distribution. Upshot is that it's going to mainly be high-risk people like healthcare workers and folks with severe risk factors first. https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/a-framework-for-equitable-allocation-of-vaccine-for-the-novel-coronavirus https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/a-framework-for-e...
    • tubularhells 6y ago
      And the rich and the politically connected, of course.
• tibbydudeza 6y ago
  Well the anti-vax conspiracy crap already started on my local Whatsapp groups here in S.A - some UK women doing a wikipedia search around the terms recombinant DNA and used a human cell line (MRC-5) from the packaging of the trial Oxford vaccine. If it was up to these ignorant people we would still have kids getting polio in 2020.
  • kumarharsh 6y ago
    That's what Trump effectively put in motion by withdrawing from WHO. https://youtu.be/7g0Jh4h5E1E https://youtu.be/7g0Jh4h5E1E
    • salmon30salmon 6y ago
      Some UK woman did research causing a WhatsApp group in South Africa to question the vaccine, and this is the fault of the president of the US? That is quite the stretch considering none of the players are citizens of the US.
      • tibbydudeza 6y ago
        QAnon, Pizzagate, Coronavirus is caused by 5G originated from where ???.
      • kumarharsh 6y ago
        I was referring to the last line: "If it was up to these ignorant people we would still have kids getting polio in 2020." It is quite possible that Polio might make a comeback if we become lax or let anti-vaxxers keep spreading their batshit propoganda.
• Unklejoe 6y ago
  What's the general consensus on when these will start rolling out to the public? I know I can look this up on my own but there's so much conflicting info out there and things are changing so fast.
  • pfdietz 6y ago
    Late December. Full coverage of the US by June.
    • aclindsa 6y ago
      Do you have a source for that?
      • standardUser 6y ago
        A source for one of the claims from Moderna's press release: "By the end of 2020, the Company expects to have approximately 20 million doses of mRNA-1273 ready to ship in the U.S."
        • neuronic 6y ago
          20 million doses are for 10 million people. Everyone needs two shots. Also, having the doses is one thing. Distributing and administering them is another. At least 30% of people will certainly refuse to get vaccinated as well, further complicating things.
          • standardUser 6y ago
            The first wave of vaccines are destined for frontline and high-risk individuals. They may have a different perspective on the vaccine than your Average Joe, and I doubt uptake will be a big concern. I don't think distributing and administering will be difficult since it will be on a limited scale. The later rollout to the general public is where most of the problems may be.
          • aksss 6y ago
• tboyd47 6y ago
  I think the real question is, will the distribution of this and the Pfizer vaccine cause the lockdowns to stop? Everyone seems to assume that they will, but we haven't heard any statements from our bureaucratic elite to suggest that vaccines will obviate the need for lockdowns.
  • seniorivn 6y ago
    that's because they change their mind on the inside everyday or so, wait till the vaccination finishes
  • qppo 6y ago
    The lockdowns (if you could call them that, they're a joke) are driven by case statistics. If the cases go down the lockdowns will stop.
    • tboyd47 6y ago
      They started this whole thing saying we need to lock down to save the hospitals.
      • qppo 6y ago
        Yes, and hospitalization numbers are one case statistic. That's a "why should we lockdown" and not "what metrics do we use to decide how hard to lock down"
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
  • pjc50 6y ago
    Falling infection rates will obviate the need for lockdowns. That can be achieved either by successful anti-infection measures (masks, distancing, etc) or by vaccination.
  • usrusr 6y ago
    Political support for lockdowns etc will surely drop hard once significant parts of the high risk population are vaccinated and intensive care utilization goes down (support was eroding even before vaccine news hit). We'll then see a heavy third wave challenging the immune systems of those who didn't qualify for early vaccination. Currently we don't even know wether the vaccines can cause herd immunity effects or not. It's perfectly possible that they just reduce heavy sickness infections into symptomless spreader infections. The tests didn't check for that (you can't do daily PCR on a test population of ten thousands). If that was the case the vaccines would still be a great improvement, but the third wave during partial vaccination would be particularly nasty if the vaccinated are not firewalls but stopovers.
• rwcarlsen 6y ago
  Since top comments here are anecdata about how terrible covid is for a young person, just thought I'd share my experience. Everyone I know who has gotten covid - several neighbors (and their households), most of my wife's hometown (400 people) - including her parents (in their 70s) and two of her siblings and all their children (15 people) all had it. For everyone it was somewhere between nothing and a bad cold. Nobody has any lingering issues. We don't want to paint our picture of the situation using only extremes. How about we include the "average" anecdata too?
  • mlang23 6y ago
    Thanks for posting this. While the rate of cases in my vascinity isn't as high as your seems to be, I only hear about mild to "strange weird cold". I am glad for them. Doesn't seem like the big danger the media is trying to sell. At least not in my circles.
  • dpweb 6y ago
    Averages don't matter. Most people walk away from car accidents unhurt. Still, seatbelts are mandatory. We choose a level of precautions (cost) according to the risk. Which is what bugs me about the non-mask crowd cause it costs NOTHING. Having yourself injected with a newly developed substance is a different thing. Let's face facts, the long-term effects are unknowable - you trade that for the short-term protection.
    • ffggvv 6y ago
      i’m not comparing them but you could say the same for the flu. as there are many people who die from it. it’s all a matter of where you draw the line of risk/reward
      • thomasz 6y ago
        Our healthcare systems are designed to handle a bad flu season. COVID is different in so far as it's far more deadly, and that it puts a higher burden on the health care systems because the average time spent in an ICU is way longer.
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  Genuinely asking - is the timing coincidental or is the decision to release these results after the election politically motivated for either Moderna or Pfizer? COVID has of course hurt Trump’s candidacy and one could see how good news prior to voting would help his chances. There’s a saying that goes “everything in an election year is about the election”. Thoughts?
  • pashamur 6y ago
    Either decision (release or not release) would be seen as political; my preference would be to adopt something like France's system of complete media blackout within a couple days to a week before the election - otherwise we'll be endlessly debating whether certain things were timed in order to help one side or the other.
• beezle 6y ago
  So what exactly does the 95% protection represent? 95% protection of people who wear masks and are good about social distancing and avoiding crowds/bad indoor situations? Or 95% of people going about their lives in the manner that we all did pre-Covid? I really don't know how this is made to be some great news if it is the former and not the latter.
  • eli 6y ago
    Did you read the article? The group of people who got the vaccine had 95% fewer cases than the group who got a placebo.
    • beezle 6y ago
      Perhaps I missed it - does the article say that the test groups were NOT wearing masks and social distancing? Or that they were? If they were wearing masks and social distancing, what % of that 95% came from that vs the vaccine? [adding the below] From this CNBC article in August, it seems participants are free to continue wearing masks https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/12/coronavirus-vaccine-trial-heres-what-its-like.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/12/coronavirus-vaccine-trial-he... "But he is still taking precautions as best he can. "I'm not going to walk around without a mask on," he said. "I don't think I'm superman."
      • eli 6y ago
        It's a double blind study. Nobody (including the researchers) knew who was getting the vaccine vs a placebo until the end of the study. That's the point. So both groups were taking the same precautions. So roughly none of that 95% is attributable to difference in precautions.
  • splaytreemap 6y ago
    It means 95% of people exposed to the virus who would have otherwise gotten sick, do not get sick.
• bionhoward 6y ago
  Really great news for the Biosecurity industry because the mRNA vaccines are far easier to manufacture. Main hurdle now seems to be to freeze dry (“lyophilize”) them for transport, cuz otherwise you gotta keep em at extremely cold temperatures, which adds a ton of cost (and may not even be doable)
  • andrewmunsell 6y ago
    Isn't the big advantage of the Moderna vaccine over BioNTech that it doesn't have to be stored at -80c? This one should be stable at normal refrigerator temperatures for up to a month and -20c for longer, according to the article. That doesn't seem hard to transport at all
    • neuronic 6y ago
      BioNTech didn't get to perform testing regarding storage and is therefore giving the safe numbers. Might as well be possible to transport and store their vaccine at much friendlier temperatures - but since that isn't verified this risk won't be taken with today's knowledge.
• hikerclimber 6y ago
  hopefully it kills people instead of saving lifes.
• ttul 6y ago
  Nature published a relatively easy-to-consume article about mRNA vaccine technology in 2018, which is perhaps good reading as we try to interpret the meaning of these recent announcements: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243
  • lowdanie 6y ago
    Thanks for the link!
  • AareyBaba 6y ago
    Also this JAMA video on the various types of coronavirus vaccines https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMc3vL_MIeo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMc3vL_MIeo
• cacois 6y ago
  "No significant safety concerns have been reported, but nothing, including paracetamol, is 100% safe." Is it just me, or is this language very irresponsible? They are just talking about having small side effects, like headache and fatigue - just like the flu vaccine has. Likening this to "safety" seems incredibly dangerous to me, as it will give people already predisposed to dislike vaccines more ammunition to speak out against them and refuse them.
  • adrianmonk 6y ago
    I think it could have been worded more clearly, but I don't think it's irresponsible. The study looked for both. Part of the result is that the study looked for and did not find safety issues. The other part of the result is that it did find minor side effects.
• 02020202 6y ago
  i bet the flu vaccine has the same efficiency ...
• thecleaner 6y ago
  These numbers are on a sample size of 90 so I would not totally rely on them.
  • NewEntryHN 6y ago
    Sample size is 30,000.
  • el_benhameen 6y ago
    I had that misunderstanding at first, too. But as far as I understand it now, this was a trial with ~30,000 people, and they report the first n number of people to get covid. In this case, n=95, and 90 of those 95 were in the control (placebo) group. The assumption is that with an ineffective vaccine, the control/experimental covid ratio would be 50/50, so the heavy skew to the control group is good and significant news. So this is not a sample where just 90 people were given the vaccine, which would be less reliable.
• DSingularity 6y ago
  Can someone briefly explain the mechanisms of these mRNA vaccines? I’ve never heard of them.
  • toddmatthews 6y ago
    https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243
    • DSingularity 6y ago
      Thank you. It will be be multiple readings before I sufficiently understand this.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• at_a_remove 6y ago
  I wonder what would happen if you had both vaccines.
• benzible 6y ago
  Very interesting thread with some caveats here: https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/1328352029190877185 https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/13283520291908771... Excerpt: > [With] these early efficacy results, we may be measuring the effects of an impressive front line army that spins up in response to the vaccine - but then we should be careful not to assume the same efficacy persists to hold that line after most of the troops disappear! [...] Only time and careful follow up will tell how much the >90% efficacy of the two vaccines holds after the early vaccine responses fade away.
  • tachyonbeam 6y ago
    I'm getting tired of all the anti-vaccine pessimism. Don't listen to the fearmongering. There may have been a handful of outliers in the world who got reinfected, but there's data showing that immunity seems to last for over six months in 100 out of 100 people tested[1]. There have also been multiple studies showing that some people exposed to the original SARS virus in ~2003 have cross-immunity to COVID. There's also evidence of pre-existing immunity from other coronaviruses[2]. When the vaccine becomes available to you, get vaccinated. In the meantime, wear a mask and keep being careful, but we have legitimate reasons to be hopeful. We have two vaccines showing efficacy, more to come in the following months. There's also a synthetic antibody therapy that just got FDA emergency approval[3]. This is going to save a lot of lives. All of the serious data points to the fact that this is going to make a huge dent in the number of new cases and fatalities. [1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.01.362319v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.01.362319v1 [2] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/11/05/science.abe1107 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/11/05/scie... [3] https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavirus-covid-19-update-fda-authorizes-monoclonal-antibody-treatment-covid-19 https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavi...
    • throwaway201103 6y ago
      I have zero interest in a vaccine for a disease that I am 99.5% likely to recover from in a few days. Granted, if I were 80 years old with comorbidities I might be more interested. I'll see how I feel when I reach that point in life.
• tehjoker 6y ago
  Does anyone know if there is peer reviewed literature out there? I am skeptical of too-good-to-be true statements coming from the PR department.
  • hilbertseries 6y ago
    Neither pfizer or moderna has released the full analysis of the phase 3 data, but both interim data releases have been basically identical in terms of efficacy. It's good to be skeptical, but phase 3 trials are pretty tightly controlled and subject to independent analysis. I don't think there's really anyway you can read this data as being manipulated. Unless there's massive fraud in both studies.
    • tehjoker 6y ago
      I don't think it would be outright fraud that I would be looking for, but rather them glossing over things like composition of the group, the novelty of the RNA approach and how that could affect different subgroups given we'll be giving it not to 30k but hundreds of millions of people at least. A kind of crazy thing that occurs to me, how does it interact with someone that has a retrovirus infection? I get that those reverse-transcriptase proteins act specifically, but weird stuff out of left field could be a problem once deployed widely. I figure a peer reviewed article would at least have to address the "known unknowns".
      • refurb 6y ago
        I mean, that's the FDA's job right? And they have advisory committee's made up of academic experts who review the trial design and data. It's not like we're taking the company's word for it.
        • tehjoker 6y ago
          To be honest, I'm not taking anyone's word for anything at this point. I want to see for myself.
• victor106 6y ago
  This is great news. Slightly off topic but its interesting that Moderna's market cap is $38bn and Zoom's market cap is $113bn. Obviously Moderna's vaccination directly saves life's and has much more impact than Zoom. A sign of the times/market we live in.
  • nerderloo 6y ago
    According to Wikipedia, "As of November 2020, Moderna was valued at $35 billion, and while none of its drugs had been approved" since its creation in 2010. $38bn ain't bad for a company without a single product released for the past 10 years.
    • Balgair 6y ago
      I work in biotech so I may be able to share some of my experience in the field. That said, I may also be sharing my mis-experience too ;) Biotech startups are longer term things than software startups. Typically, your product doesn't get to the market until years 10/12 of the business. This is due to the regulatory issues like with the FDA or the EMA and other countries. Critically, that approval to be on the market or not is made near the end of those 10/12 years. So, yes, you bust your butt to get the business going for a decade or more and then the regulatory agency decides if it can be sold[0]. Many other biotech people complain about this (and rightly so!), but I personally feel that this is the 'lesser evil'. We do not want pacemakers, knee joints, or pharmaceuticals to be developed like exercise equipment. That said, the new product is likely to be a new market entirely, and one that you now have a near total monopoly on. Like with any start-up, it's a risk/reward calculation. And biotech tends to be a high risk business, thus leading to high rewards that are economic, psychological, and spiritual. [0] To be clear, this is a very complex process, and I have simplified it down. Each business and use case is very different.
      • victor106 6y ago
        Thanks for this. I am always confused how an investor should approach investing in the biotech space without any medical knowledge. Any thoughts you can share?
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• ne4f 6y ago
  With a number of promising vaccines, and governments around the world already producing large numbers of doses, the question may become: "which one do I take?". After the 737-Max debacle, I am less inclined to trust US regulators (is the FDA less prone to regulatory capture than the FAA?). Or, perhaps I should say, I'd be wary of a vaccine that was cleared by a single regulator, especially given the economic pressure to find a vaccine. I'll probably go with the one that has had the most oversight, from the most agencies around the world. Is that information available anywhere?
• generalizations 6y ago
  I'm curious if there's any long-term side effects.
• geland 6y ago
  Is it common practice to measure effectiveness in this way? They only evaluated ~90 of their 30000 test group, and out of that tiny sliver of the data there were more in the placebo group that got covid than the vaccinated group. My questions would be: Does their small subset have the same number of vaccinated vs placebo? Are the ~90 evaluated cases representative of the whole group, or are they only from one area or health profile? How long have they followed this group? It still seems like this early on in the study you could cherry pick the data to show any amount of effectiveness that you want. Did I miss something here?
  • bluGill 6y ago
    This is how you do it. They evaluated the ~90 that got covid. There were equal amounts who got the placebo vs the vaccine, so if the vaccine doesn't work you would expect ~45 of that ~90 to have got the vaccine. However only 5 of that ~90 got the vaccine, that implies that the vaccine works. You can cherry pick it if you want: the full data isn't released so they can hide something. There is no reason hide anything though: all the data will be given to the FDA (and other national equivalents) so you aren't hiding anything for long. There is every reason not to: this release is legally binding to the SEC, so if they are hiding anything there are legal implications: CEOs go to prison for less.
• Taniwha 6y ago
  The big question for me is: what's the difference in the RNA fragment targeted by the Moderna vs. the RNA targeted by the Pfizer one? is there any overlap? mostly overlap? What I'm really asking of course is are they complementary? or essentially the same thing? will it make sense having both? how fast will the virus mutate once these vaccines are ubiquitous?
  • rossdavidh 6y ago
    Per Derek Lowe at Science magazine: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/11/09/vaccine-efficacy-data https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/11/09/va... "...since all of the vaccines are targeting the same Spike protein, it is highly likely that they are all going to work."
    • Taniwha 6y ago
      It's not so much that - I guess what I'm trying to get at is a couple of things: -whether applying some combination vaccines to a population will reduce the R value more than just one -whether applying some combination vaccines to a population will provide more resistance to virus mutation I guess it depends on whether they target different portions of the spike protein, the same portion, or the whole thing - if you're going after a small portion you essentially get to wildcard the rest of the protein, if you're doing the whole thing it's very specific and simple mutations will defeat it
      • rossdavidh 6y ago
        I would guess we'll never find out the answer to that one, as it's unlikely to be studied in any rigorous way. But my guess is that it would reduce the R value a bit, but maybe not very much, since the immune system is likely to say "oh, that again, well we already know how to fight that", rather than generating a new type of antibody. But that opinion is worth everything you paid for it. : )
        • Taniwha 6y ago
• scottlocklin 6y ago
  Lol, you "muh science" nerds are too much. Moderna is about as obvious a scam as any company that doesn't presently have executives in court or prison. ""On a scale of one to 10, one being less concerned and 10 being the most concerned," said Daniel Taylor, an associate professor of accounting at the Wharton School, "this is an 11." Taylor said Moderna's stock-selling practices appear well outside the norm, and raise questions about the company's internal controls to prevent insider trading. Since January, CEO Stéphane Bancel has sold roughly $40 million worth of Moderna stock held by himself or associated investment funds; Chief Medical Officer Tal Zaks has sold around $60 million; and President Stephen Hoge has sold more than $10 million." https://www.npr.org/2020/09/04/908305074/bad-optics-or-something-more-moderna-executives-stock-sales-raise-concerns https://www.npr.org/2020/09/04/908305074/bad-optics-or-somet... https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/4-reasons-investors-are-betting-against-moderna-2020-07-09 https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/4-reasons-investors-are-bett... https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/19/vaccine-experts-say-moderna-didnt-produce-data-critical-to-assessing-covid-19-vaccine/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/19/vaccine-experts-say-mode... https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/07/moderna-spars-with-us-scientists-over-coronavirus-vaccine-trials.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/07/moderna-spars-with-us-scient... Anyone who believes these assclowns has both developed a mRNA vaccine and a coronavirus vaccine must subsist on a diet of pure soylent, and probably owns a juicero. I know shit from shinola about mRNA, other than they've been working on it for more than a decade and have never fielded one, but I know shenanigans when I see it. I mean, maybe the CEO needed to repair his roof or fix up his swimming pool or buy the 'Game of Thrones' DVD box set or something. Possible! Seems unlikely though!
  • pvarangot 6y ago
    The fact that they are dumping stock just means that they think the company is overvalued, which I think any sane individual that is looking at the market will infer. They want to sell on the upside. It doesn't mean that it's a scam. The vaccine may work, they may be profitable, and they may have developed tech and processes that can be used to create other mRNA vaccines on a fast timeline even without all the world aligning to help them. It may also be that the amount of growth priced into the current stock price is just unrealistic even if all of this is true.
• hikerclimb 6y ago
  Hopefully this doesn’t work...
• fasteo 6y ago
  Not that I am antivax or anything, but I think this is a good time to remind the great Fred Brooks quote about software development in particular, and product development in general. "while it takes one woman nine months to make one baby, nine women can't make a baby in one month". [1] Are we missing something in this fast-paced vaccine development ? Are we taking more risks ? Nobody seems to be talking about this and less so now that we have entered into the "mine is better" PR war. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
  • mansr 6y ago
    One factor speeding up the phase 3 trials is the high rate of infections. Since the evaluation is done at a set number of confirmed cases among the test subjects, this happens much sooner for covid than it would be for just about anything else at this time. Another factor is money. The covid vaccine trials have done some testing steps in parallel that would normally be done sequentially to avoid wasting money should it fail along the way. So yes, more risks are being taken, but they are financial, not clinical.
    • fasteo 6y ago
      >>> So yes, more risks are being taken, but they are financial, not clinical. Great point
    • beagle3 6y ago
      > So yes, more risks are being taken, but they are financial, not clinical. While most vaccines produced so far have been quite safe, there are three known cases I'm aware of that weren't, (Early 1950s attenuated Polio vaccine that caused polio, H1N1 Pandemrix vaccine making narcolepsy 6-fold more prevalent in sweden in 2009, swine flu vaccine increasing risk for guillan-barre in 1976). Of these, the 1st and the 3rd were rushed out. So I wouldn't say "no clinical risks". There's some info here[0], though it's not complete [0] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history....
      • 6y ago
• lumberingjack 6y ago
  When they come up with a vaccine to cure tobacco cancer it kills more people than corvid I'll take that
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Does it make sense to distribute this oldest to youngest?
  • beagle3 6y ago
    It does. Do note that there is no safety data yet for children, "youngest" in this case, is ~20 year olds; and that there has been a famous case where a vaccine that was safer for over-20 significantly increased the risk for narcolepsy 6 fold for under-20. (Safety profile was established for adults, but the vaccine was given to children). More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix#Narcolepsy_investigations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix#Narcolepsy_investiga...
• leoplct 6y ago
  I read the method used to measure efficacy: They have tested 44,000 people. 50% got a placebo, 50% got a vaccine. Then has been giving them the freedom to get the covid. 95% of the 50% who got the vaccine haven't contracted the virus. Correct me if I am wrong. Supposing a random person has a 5-10% chance of contracting the virus (according to average cases/testing worldwide), should the efficacy be 5-10% * 95% = 0.7%-0.5%?
  • blackrock 6y ago
    (A) Did they have someone with Covid-19 sneeze or cough or spit on them? (B) Or did the candidate just go about their daily lives afterwards? Because, unless path A was taken, then this 95% efficacy sounds very misleading.
    • mansr 6y ago
      Nothing is misleading. Half the participants got the vaccine, the rest placebo, before going about their usual lives. Now, a few months later, 95 cases have been confirmed across both groups. Of these, 90 had received the placebo and only 5 the vaccine. If the vaccine didn't work at all, the split would be roughly 50/50. A somewhat effective vaccine might result in a 70/30 split, and so on.
      • blackrock 6y ago
        This sounds like a terrible way to test the vaccine’s efficacy. A better test would be to have all the participants walk through a minefield of people with the virus. Breath in all that infected air. Then run the numbers and see who got infected.
        • mansr 6y ago
          It's the standard method, and I see nothing wrong with it. What you suggest (deliberate exposure) is called a challenge trial. This is normally considered ethical only when an effective cure (e.g. antibiotics) is available. Even so, there are plans to conduct such a trial in the UK, and there's no shortage of volunteers. We'll see if they get approval.
• hikerclimb 6y ago
  Hopefully this doesn’t work and lots of people in us die
• hikerclimber 6y ago
  hopefully masks don't work anymore. :)
• hikerclimber 6y ago
  hopefully masks don't work against coronavirus anymore.