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Pfizer-Biontech vaccine data stolen in cyber attack
- fy20 6y agoCan anyone more familiar with this area explain what it says about the IP. What sort of things are shared with the regulatory bodies that could be extremely valuable to other companies developing vaccines? When a new car engine is developed you don't need to share exactly how you make the parts or how it works (of course knowing how it works for a vaccine is probably important), it just has to meet certain standards regarding efficiency and emissions to be approved by regulators.
- gr2zr4 6y agoProbably a document like this https://www.fda.gov/media/144246/download https://www.fda.gov/media/144246/download
- JunkDNA 6y agoThere is sometimes specific information about the actual manufacturing process or synthesis that companies provide. Given that this is an entirely new vaccine technology that has never been used before, there was probably quite a bit of confidential manufacturing content supplied as supplemental material to satisfy regulators. You are correct that the regulators are generally concerned with safety and efficacy of the final product, not the sausage making. But if the sausage making is super complex and/or novel that could potentially have an impact on safety and efficacy. So the company may have been asked to give some amount of detail there. For example: given this vaccine requires cold temperatures or it breaks down, how are they guaranteeing the cold chain in the manufacturing process? (I'm just using this as an illustration of the flavor of question someone on the committee might have) Given how new this vaccine tech is, there are probably quite a few manufacturing-related efficiencies and techniques that Pfizer does not want competitors getting access to. Not because they're going to copy this specific vaccine, but because it allows them accelerate efforts in this area for other vaccines.
- grishka 6y ago> but because it allows them accelerate efforts in this area for other vaccines. And ultimately make the world a better place? I fail to see any downsides here.
- JunkDNA 6y agoI would argue what makes the world a better place is ensuring companies have to innovate on their own. That’s what leads to breakthroughs and new things. Constraints often breed innovation. What is the incentive to sink billions into R&D if someone can sit on the sidelines and just take what you have developed? Look at the situation right now: we have multiple vaccine candidates from multiple companies because they all had significant incentive to develop them not because they were necessarily going to make a lot of money off this particular vaccine, but because they could accelerate R&D on tech they can use for other therapies. Some of these vaccine candidates appear to be mediocre at best. If we didn’t have a competitive marketplace we wouldn’t have gotten the best vaccine possible in the shortest timeframe possible.
- londons_explore 6y agoThere shouldn't be any private data to steal. We grant these companies patents so they can be open about their tech. If they have secret data, that really ought to be a reason to withdraw their patent.
- sho_hn 6y ago> There shouldn't be any private data to steal. Vaccines require the running of clinical trials during development and approval. Trial data was not stolen in this case (according to the companies), but obviously this is private "vaccine data".
- lodovic 6y agoThe article specifically states "we are unaware that any study participants have been identified through the data being accessed". The breached data concerns "confidential information about the vaccine and its mechanism of action, its efficiency, its risks & known possible side effects and any unique aspects such as handling guidelines". What strikes me is the fact that this information is confidential at all.
- willis936 6y agoPerhaps this was an NSA job.
- sho_hn 6y agoI know, this was exactly of my point: I felt that OP didn't read the article, and it didn't occur to them that "vaccine data" could also refer to personal information in their blanket dismissal. In this concrete case it wasn't the case, but that all "vaccine data" should be open is certainly privacy nonsense. Once you introduce that definition I agree.
- a1369209993 6y ago> > There shouldn't be any private data to steal. For technical information (how to make the vaccine) this means it's not private. For personal (including medical) information about clinical trial participants this means Pfizer-Biontech should not have the information in the first place.
- xwvvvvwx 6y agoGood. Hopefully this data will be open sourced.
- rincebrain 6y agoNot entirely. As someone in a sibling thread pointed out, by necessity these research labs get access to patients' medical history, and releasing all of that all of a sudden seems like a net negative to society, especially when we don't have good policies everyone agrees upon for where e.g. you might be justified to turn someone down for a job because they have fragile bones, among other random reasons. (Though as another sibling thread points out, it sounds like patient data isn't breached, so...who knows.)
- stef25 6y agoIn clinical trials companies only get access to patients' medical history by looking at it wherever it's stored (hospital, doctor's office). It can not be "taken home" or downloaded or whatever, for confidentially reasons. Similarly, if you work in a trial you can not have any direct contact with patients. A trial involves administering a substance and then recording its efficacy by examining certain parameters (lab results, images, a questionnaire etc). Someone from the pharma company has to look at these results and then check the patient medical data to make sure there's no unrelated conditions that could have influenced that data (this was my job for a few years). The company will have lab results with numbers instead of names and in a blind study, the treatment they received will be unknown to the company until it's "unblinded" at the end of the trial, which is usually done by an external company.
- snvzz 6y agoData which no doubt is the result of research and engineering funded with public money. Thus, it should be in the public domain and unencumbered with patents in the first place.
- dpwm 6y agoAnd in many cases will be bought as a developed product with public funds.
- tinus_hn 6y agoNo, these companies are not funded with public money.
- maze-le 6y agoNo? > BioNTech to Receive up to €375M in Funding from German Federal Ministry of Education and Research to Support COVID-19 Vaccine Program BNT162 https://www.wallstreet-online.de/nachricht/12930907-biontech-to-receive-up-to-375m-funding-from-german-federal-ministry-of-education-and-research-to-support-covid-19-vaccine-program-bnt162/all https://www.wallstreet-online.de/nachricht/12930907-biontech... > US government and Pfizer reach $1.95 billion deal to produce millions of Covid-19 vaccine doses https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/22/health/pfizer-covid-19-vaccine-government-contract/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/22/health/pfizer-covid-19-va...
- adriancr 6y ago> to Support COVID-19 Vaccine Program BNT162 Emphasis on support That doesn't mean the sum is equivalent to the full R&D cost or that the company actually agreed to give the IP developed. Most likely they could have developed even without public funding but not on the expedited timeline.
- bildung 6y agoDo you have any actual evidence for this? BioNTech has about 1k employees strong and got about 375 million Euros. Even if everyone would exclusively work on the vaccine for the whole time, which obviously didn't happen, that amounts to over 700k€ per seat for half a year. In an industry that isn't exactly capital intensive, i.e. the biggest part of expenses will be salaries.
- janeroe 6y agoStolen or copied as in a leak? Was the original copy removed?
- refurb 6y agoOh HN, please never change.
- jedimastert 6y agoIt was my first thought at well. The real question being "does this impede vaccination efforts?"
- netsharc 6y agoThis discussion thread is pretty much garbage, IMO. The first thread is one guy arguing about patents and public domain (with participants having extremist absolutist views of how the world must be), and now some being pedantic about a word...
- tertius 6y agoIncompetence breeds this type of bickering. Oh, that and extremist views, which stem from another form of the former...
- h_anna_h 6y agoIf anything the extremist view is that publishing secret details about a vaccine should be a crime. The only one who benefits from not publishing them is the vaccine company in expense of everyone else. Regarding "extremist absolutist views", would you consider entities like the FSF, GNU, and wikileaks to be extremist and absolutist? As for "being pedantic about a word", I would say that it is not just penancy but rather a complaint about the presentation by the Reuters, in the style of "the evil russian hackers stole vaccine secrets" vs "the heroic security experts published vaccine secrets to the world". If you have an issue with what these users posted, wouldn't it be better to directly respond to them as to why you disagree rather than dismiss them as extremist lunatics?
- 6y ago
- siboehm 6y agoIn stories like this it's important to consider that returns on R&D for these large pharma companies have recently been getting quite low, 1.8% in 2019 according to [0]. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pharmaceuticals-r-d/pharma-industry-returns-on-rd-investment-hit-nine-year-low-idUKKBN1OI08R https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pharmaceuticals-r-d/pharm...
- rubidium 6y agoThose numbers are somewhat financial fiction to garner sympathy for big pharma, lobby for reduced regulations, and for “AI” startups to pitch their products.
- mherrmann 6y agoCan you substantiate this?
- tremon 6y agoSubstantiate? No, you'll have to wait for the next Panama Papers for that. But the process is similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting : there's so many levels of suppliers/customers/expenses that may or may not belong to the same conglomerate, it's very easy to make the numbers of any individual organization reflect what you want it to reflect.
- deathgrips 6y agoIf you torture the data, it will speak.
- echlebek 6y agoWhy should I, a person who is not a large pharma company, care about this?
- echlebek 6y ago
- cutler 6y agoWhatever happened to Anonymous? Pfizer have been involved in enough scandal and near-criminal activity in the past that I would have imagined governments championing them now as the new medical saviour is as big a cause as anything Anonymous has pursued.
- Shared404 6y agoThe big people got caught, everyone else is killing time in chans.
- maedla 6y agoTotally infiltrated by the alphabet agencies
- mrguyorama 6y agoA not-insignificant portion of them turned out to be crackpots that you don't really want to associate with
- acvny 6y agoYes, once they found the recipe for the vaccine, it should have become public right away unless someone wants to profit from this pandemic.
- tasubotadas 6y agoWhy is it bad to want to profit from the pandemic? What's the alternative? No profit, no vaccine? Or do you think that people should invest tens of millions out of their own pocket just for a good cause? Or do you think that the government will magically conjure a vaccine without the support from the industry?
- albio 6y agoIt is bad to encourage profit from a disaster because it creates a perverse incentive where you hope for more disaster. If you can profit from a disaster it is fine up until greed begins to interfere with solving the disaster.
- fennecfoxen 6y agoRight, so. There are people out there who we can simply call profit-haters. They are of course not quite so foolish as to imagine that people with money should commit millions and billions to pay talented scientists salaries up front, with the hope of doing no more of breaking even. Instead, they envision an alternative where the private sector is simply gone, a thing of the past, and instead some government bureaucracy is placed in charge of directing all of society's resources where they see fit. Of course this gleefully ignores all economics concepts like "incentives", "accountability", the entire body of public choice theory, the principal-agent problem, numerous real world experiences of corruption, waste, and inefficiency in real-world planned economies, and the whole imposition-on-liberty thing. These all have real world effects. As a strictly topical matter, the public sector in the US was in charge of the early COVID testing approach, and its months-long delays cost the nation very dearly. Some coverage from the Grey Lady (a well-known public-sector sympathizer, at that) -- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/us/testing-coronavirus-pandemic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/us/testing-coronavirus-pa... When someone advances arguments like the grandparent post has done, he generally doesn't want this mode of resource allocation to be expanded -- he wants it to be the only thing that exists in the world. It is likely that such persons cannot be dissuaded from this goal, because it is accepted as a hallowed ideological truth: profit is evil. If someone were to save society a billion dollars, and made a million dollars in profit, they would still deem it evil, and would rather see society continue to suffer. They would also be happy for society to pay steep prices in terms of lives, or in terms of freedom. So in the end, one generally can't meaningfully argue with these assertions. All you can do is just point out to others how extremist and foolish the position is. A dead post adjacent laments people profiting from disaster, suggesting this encourages disasters. This is thinking about the incentives, but it is also, unfortunately, somewhat insane in the current context.
- m12k 6y agoAny guesses regarding the hackers? Russia? China? North Korea? Someone else?
- andreygrehov 6y agoRussia only holds 4.3% of global hack attacks, whereas USA and China are the biggest ones. North Korea is not even in top 10.
- pkaye 6y agoI think China already haa a license to make that vaccine.
- bluGill 6y agoRight, although they might be interested in how to make it at scale. I haven't heard anything about their plans to produce it.
- sudosysgen 6y agoI'm fairly certain they just got the license as a contingency in case their domestic/allied vaccines didn't pan out. I don't even know that they will decide to produce it at scale.
- bluGill 6y agoThat could be, but it is different enough that if they didn't make strong efforts to produce it in quantity they wouldn't be able to exercise that contingency. Thus I expect someplace in China is a factory that can make it. It might or not have all the machines set in place, but it would be close enough that they can start them in a month (including the entire supply chain). China is pretty good at manufacturing, so I don't think they would screw this up.
- sudosysgen 6y agoAh, I don't think at this point there is much of a risk anymore.
- swarnie_ 6y agoJust China checking their already 100% working vaccine from months ago is still better /s
- bzb6 6y agoWhy is this kind of data on servers connected to the internet?
- notRobot 6y agoBecause everyone is working from home?
- mercurialshark 6y agoWow, regulators and government entities are terrible custodians of personal data, I'm shocked...
- mercurialshark 6y agoThe title should more accurately reflect that the regulators were the data custodians that were compromised. 'The European Medicines Agency (EMA), which assesses medicines and vaccines for the European Union, said hours earlier it had been targeted in a cyberattack. It gave no further details. The two companies said they had been informed by the EMA “that the agency has been subject to a cyber attack and that some documents relating to the regulatory submission for Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate” had been viewed.'
- nullc 6y agoCyber attack you say? Will an ex-military cyborg dolphin be sharing the data in a worldwide broadcast next?
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- Traster 6y agoI wonder what the purpose of this is. It would be quite disruptive for a bad actor to start leaking data to discredit the efficacy of the vaccine or to highlight side effects.
- thecleaner 6y agoI expect China to soon announce their own new vaccine candidate with similar effectiveness as Pfizer+BioNTech.
- bluGill 6y agoChina has rights to produce the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, so that wouldn't be a surprise.
- bgee 6y agoChina national here. BioNTech's vaccine is already bought and to be manufactured in China [0]. Implying it's China behind this incident is a little too late, don't you think? [0]: https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/fosun-follows-biontech-changing-covid-19-vaccine-plans-bridging-study-for-chinese-filing https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/fosun-follows-biontech...
- romwell 6y agoGood.
- csense 6y ago> some documents relating to the regulatory submission for Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate Hold it. Wouldn't these documents be publicly available already? > confidential information about the vaccine and its mechanism of action, its efficiency, its risks & known possible side effects and any unique aspects such as handling guidelines Why is this confidential? Isn't this information exactly what they're supposed to be shouting as loudly as possible to the scientific community and the general public? If Pfizer's keeping confidential information about the side effects and risks, doesn't that completely undermine the narrative that the vaccine is safe and effective, and citizens oughtn't be concerned about it? I'm not an anti-vaxxer. But this article definitely raises some doubts in my mind about the Pfizer vaccine, where there were none before.