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The development of a vaccine of this apparent efficacy at this speed is an astonishing scientific achievement, and if it is as good as it appears to be, it is a

The development of a vaccine of this apparent efficacy at this speed is an astonishing scientific achievement, and if it is as good as it appears to be, it is an immense moment for medical science. Plus, the way this vaccine works is absolutely fascinating: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different-vaccines/mrna.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different... In technical terms, it seems to me they're almost like unit testing for the body: You take out everything except the bit you care about most, and subject it to intense scrutiny until you develop a correct response.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
First time in history when the entire world was working on a single problem.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- zaroth 6y ago
  It took roughly 48 hours to develop the vaccine once China published the genetic sequence. The actual study design was nothing particularly impressive. This was by no means a “entire world” effort. I think the untold story of production and distribution could be interesting, but most of that is yet to be written.
  - chemeng 6y ago
    Agreed, we’ve never produced a vaccine of this type at scale nor managed the required supply chain considerations. Making 10K efficacious non-harmful vaccines for a trial may be much easier than making 100M or 1B. Some processes don’t scale easily.
  - divbzero 6y ago
    > The actual study design was nothing particularly impressive. Now that vaccines can be designed so quickly, I wonder what if anything can be done to speed up the testing of their safety and efficacy.
rantwasp 6y ago
it’s more like stress testing for the virus to see where it breaks
Qw3r7 6y ago
"The development of a vaccine of this apparent efficacy at this speed is an astonishing " It only took 9 months to bring the U2 up to operational speed. Things can move fast if you remove the politics.
divbzero 6y ago
While popular films often depict a vaccine that’s effective enough and soon enough to stop an epidemic (Contagion, I Am Legend, World War Z) in real life many epidemics are fought without the help of vaccines (Ebola, HIV, SARS). The combination of speed, effectiveness, and new technology in COVID vaccines is “astonishing” indeed.
- dnautics 6y ago
  I do believe we have a 36-hour to vaccine protocol for pandemic flu (one of my coworkers ran a real run of the protocol against a novel flu strain almost a decade ago [0]), estimated weeks to first responders/highly vulnerables and maybe a month or two for general population. This is really at the limit of what is physically possible (at best some sort of highly flexible distributed manufacturing network maybe down to weeks for general population?): Flu vaccines are very precedented, and though this protocol had many "new bits" efficacy, infra, and scaleup are kind of more "well known". [0] it was considered to be a dry run in case of a real pandemic; he was told that he would get a phone call during the week, and was emailed the flu virus sequence one morning, built the vaccine over the course of a day, and fed-exed the vaccine seequence to the scaleup and testing facility and by 36 hours they had validation that the vaccine caused a positive antigen response. That year's flu did not become a pandemic, well by luck so far we really haven't had a major flu pandemic since that year.
  - divbzero 6y ago
    That sounds pretty incredible too. Speaking of flu vaccines reminds me of this Pfizer press release from November 2018 [1] that described “a collaboration with German biotech BioNTech to develop new RNA vaccine technology to create a better flu shot”. The press release concluded with optimism but cautioned that “the technology is several years away from being tested in the US”. [1]: https://www.pfizer.com/news/featured_stories/featured_stories_detail/new_rna_technology_could_get_the_flu_vaccine_right_every_year https://www.pfizer.com/news/featured_stories/featured_storie...
    - dnautics 6y ago

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

First time in history when the entire world was working on a single problem.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
zaroth 6y ago
It took roughly 48 hours to develop the vaccine once China published the genetic sequence. The actual study design was nothing particularly impressive. This was by no means a “entire world” effort. I think the untold story of production and distribution could be interesting, but most of that is yet to be written.
- chemeng 6y ago
  Agreed, we’ve never produced a vaccine of this type at scale nor managed the required supply chain considerations. Making 10K efficacious non-harmful vaccines for a trial may be much easier than making 100M or 1B. Some processes don’t scale easily.
- divbzero 6y ago
  > The actual study design was nothing particularly impressive. Now that vaccines can be designed so quickly, I wonder what if anything can be done to speed up the testing of their safety and efficacy.

rantwasp 6y ago

it’s more like stress testing for the virus to see where it breaks

Qw3r7 6y ago

"The development of a vaccine of this apparent efficacy at this speed is an astonishing " It only took 9 months to bring the U2 up to operational speed. Things can move fast if you remove the politics.

divbzero 6y ago

While popular films often depict a vaccine that’s effective enough and soon enough to stop an epidemic (Contagion, I Am Legend, World War Z) in real life many epidemics are fought without the help of vaccines (Ebola, HIV, SARS). The combination of speed, effectiveness, and new technology in COVID vaccines is “astonishing” indeed.

dnautics 6y ago
I do believe we have a 36-hour to vaccine protocol for pandemic flu (one of my coworkers ran a real run of the protocol against a novel flu strain almost a decade ago [0]), estimated weeks to first responders/highly vulnerables and maybe a month or two for general population. This is really at the limit of what is physically possible (at best some sort of highly flexible distributed manufacturing network maybe down to weeks for general population?): Flu vaccines are very precedented, and though this protocol had many "new bits" efficacy, infra, and scaleup are kind of more "well known". [0] it was considered to be a dry run in case of a real pandemic; he was told that he would get a phone call during the week, and was emailed the flu virus sequence one morning, built the vaccine over the course of a day, and fed-exed the vaccine seequence to the scaleup and testing facility and by 36 hours they had validation that the vaccine caused a positive antigen response. That year's flu did not become a pandemic, well by luck so far we really haven't had a major flu pandemic since that year.
- divbzero 6y ago
  That sounds pretty incredible too. Speaking of flu vaccines reminds me of this Pfizer press release from November 2018 [1] that described “a collaboration with German biotech BioNTech to develop new RNA vaccine technology to create a better flu shot”. The press release concluded with optimism but cautioned that “the technology is several years away from being tested in the US”. [1]: https://www.pfizer.com/news/featured_stories/featured_stories_detail/new_rna_technology_could_get_the_flu_vaccine_right_every_year https://www.pfizer.com/news/featured_stories/featured_storie...
  - dnautics 6y ago