5 ms·

My Vaccine Crackpottery: A Confession

24 points by zuhayeer 6y ago

ve55 6y ago
Google cache of this post if it does not load: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9g2W9AV5KNwJ:https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/%3Fp%3D5224+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9g2W9A...
- Khelavaster 6y ago
  Thank you!!
ve55 6y ago
I've been seeing a lot of very negative takes similar to this one on how poorly we have been doing with vaccine distribution (not to mention, well, everything we did before the vaccine). Upon thinking about a lot of the people that I read content from, I noticed something in common with those saying this: they are all extremely ambitious people. Most of them are (serial) startup founders, a few are hardworking prolific academics, but it's safe to say they know what having high expectations and moving quickly is like. That is to say that there exists a large contrast with what they believe can and should be achieved with what the average politician or government worker has grown to expect: A paradigm of milquetoast results and mediocre enthusiasm paired with general social gestalt that now expects bureaucratic and institutional failures to occur throughout the systems that we need so badly to help us. Many have strong personal opinions on how we would start to improve this situation, but I think proper incentives, higher expectations, and skin in the game would be a good start.
- pjc50 6y ago
  People don't just expect government failure, they demand it, and elect leaders to actively sabotage effective public health measures.
ketanmaheshwari 6y ago
Interesting read. My personal ideal world Covid crack-pottery confession is that prevention is better than cure: Food merchants should have been practicing utmost care with contamination to the order of handling plutonium for nuclear weapons. People should have been practicing healthy eating habits and exercise routines such that their immunity to virus would be of multiple order of magnitude more than what it currently is. So much so that the virus would barely a blip in the global consciousness radar.
- dempseye 6y ago
  "People should have been practicing healthy eating habits and exercise routines such that their immunity to virus would be of multiple order of magnitude more than what it currently is." Difficult when you're an 85 year old with dementia in a nursing home.
  - thoughtstheseus 6y ago
    Healthy eating habits and exercise is different for different people.
  - gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
    > Difficult when you're an 85 year old with dementia in a nursing home. this is someone beyond life expectancy and almost by definition liable to be taken out by anything, never mind covid
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  > Food merchants should have been practicing utmost care with contamination to the order of handling plutonium for nuclear weapons. We're not able get everyone aboard mask-wearing.
- pjc50 6y ago
  "General health" absolutely does not make you immune. And even if it reduces the severity of symptoms, if being healthy enabled you to get out more it would be worse for spreading the virus.
dekhn 6y ago
If you're a computer scientist or a physicist and you want to criticize biomedicine, please go work in the field for a couple of decades. It gives a wonderful perspective. After two decades of working in biomedicine, I returned to pure software engineering/computer science because biomedicine (especially the US, but everywhere, really) is so messed up structurally, it will never recover. It will only get more expensive and less effective.
AndyPatterson 6y ago
I wish folk would move away from the world war two nostalgia, it's debilitating and wasn't at all hard and fast, even if a 90 minute movie cut leads you to believe that.
- mchusma 6y ago
  Japan took over most of the Pacific I'm the time it took for the FDA to schedule the meeting to approve the vaccine after EUA was submitted. In 1947 we vaccinated 5 million people from a "cold start" in 2 weeks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_New_York_City_smallpox_outbreak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_New_York_City_smallpox_... People keep bringing up examples of going fast because others are saying "we are going as fast as we can."
  - flukus 6y ago
    > Japan took over most of the Pacific I'm the time it took for the FDA to schedule the meeting to approve the vaccine The operation was completed in that time but many of the plans were created years earlier and much of the preparation (like ships/planes/manpower) was done decades earlier.
pjc50 6y ago
> The solution, I’d say, is not to put toddlers in charge of the government! As should be obvious by now—indeed, as should’ve been obvious back in 2016—that solution has some exceedingly severe downsides. The solution, rather, is to work for a world where experts are unafraid to speak bluntly, so that it never falls to a mental toddler to say what the experts can’t say without jeopardizing their careers. Well, yes. But what if the public want to be run by an angry toddler because he confirms their prejudice? What if they've spent years listening to Angry Toddler Radio filling their heads with those prejudices?
aaron-santos 6y ago
> I think that, in a well-run civilization, the first covid vaccines would’ve been tested and approved by around March or April 2020, while mass-manufacturing simultaneously ramped up with trillions of dollars’ investment. We have 60 clinical vaccines[1]. Which ones? All of them? The first one? The first dozen? You're going to see a bunch more of these types of arguments from hindsight in the coming months. The choice wasn't to approve or deny and then manufacture the vaccines we have today. It was to find the signal in the noise. [1] https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-covid-19-candidate-vaccines https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-c...
- maxfan8 6y ago
  The article addresses this point: > Instead events—including the staggering cost of delay, the spectacular failures of institutional authorities to adapt to the scientific realities of covid, and the long-awaited finding that all the major vaccines safely work (some better than others), just like the experts predicted back in February—all this only made me more confident of my original, stupid and naïve position.
  - aaron-santos 6y ago
    Thank you for digging up the quote. Not to argue against you, but to this part of the article. This again is arguing about making a decision with information we have available to us now. Now we know all major vaccines safely work. Scott Aaronson should be able to back up this claim, that among the vaccines we had in February all turned out to be effective so choosing amongst them at random would have yielded an acceptable outcome, with a source.
eyelidlessness 6y ago
I can’t find much to disagree with in the post. And I expect to be downvoted for saying so unqualified. So in anticipation of that, I hope whoever is annoyed by what’s in it is keeping in mind the author’s repeated insistence that he’s not an expert and expects his lay perspective to be wrong.
mchusma 6y ago
Great post, but even he underestimates how obvious an approval decision it was. Vaccines have a strong safety and efficacy history. I think if you replace the words "not approved" with "banned", the insanity of the vaccine ban is clear. Even though Congress has multiple times given.the FDA commissioner broad powers to approve during a pandemic, they opted to not do it. There needs to be legislation to ensure the next one goes better. Effectively, they need to remove the discretion part from the FDA. My favorite ideas are: (1) automatic EUAs for any vaccine candidates when a disease has over 1 in 1,000 chance of killing a group and the vaccine candidate is from a company who has had a drug approved in the last 10 years. (2) allowing people during pandemic to pay to be in a vaccine trial. I know many people who would have loved to be in a trial, but were not able. (This was the FDA doesn't have to say something is "authorized" so it seems more organizationally feasible.) (3) allowing human challenge studies to happen. (4) 1 gradual rolling study instead of separate studies. Gradually increase the number of people who can be tested, and stop of the safety profile looks bad, but watch all for efficacy outcomes. So vaccinate 10 in week 1, 100 in week 2, 1,000 in week 3, 10,000 in week 4, etc. There has only been 1 ever long term side effect reported (from a polio love virus vaccination of an immunocompromised person), so you really want to see short term effects. (5) also just increase the level of ambition. Trump should have proposed bills in congress to lift the vaccine ban. Biden's goal in his first 100 days is to vaccinate 100M (given that we are supposed to have about 240M doses delivered by then with already approved vaccines. This is a low bar, sort of like saying "I hope we don't just accidentally throw away most of the vaccine". His goal should be 50% vaccinated in the first 30 days or something.
viraptor 6y ago
A lot of interesting content. But I wanted to just point out this: > in West Virginia, they mistakenly gave antibody treatments instead of vaccines If you're vaccinating entire population, there will definitely be mistakes. Go ahead, mention that someone managed to notice them and notify the right people. Don't put them in the same sentence as someone spoiling vaccines on purpose. We can't afford people being afraid to report mistakes.
lazylizard 6y ago
the whole covid thing could have been easily stopped if the whole world would just lockdown together for 1 month eh? why did we even need a vaccine?

24 points by zuhayeer 6y ago

ve55 6y ago

Google cache of this post if it does not load: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9g2W9AV5KNwJ:https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/%3Fp%3D5224+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9g2W9A...

Khelavaster 6y ago
Thank you!!

ve55 6y ago

I've been seeing a lot of very negative takes similar to this one on how poorly we have been doing with vaccine distribution (not to mention, well, everything we did before the vaccine). Upon thinking about a lot of the people that I read content from, I noticed something in common with those saying this: they are all extremely ambitious people. Most of them are (serial) startup founders, a few are hardworking prolific academics, but it's safe to say they know what having high expectations and moving quickly is like. That is to say that there exists a large contrast with what they believe can and should be achieved with what the average politician or government worker has grown to expect: A paradigm of milquetoast results and mediocre enthusiasm paired with general social gestalt that now expects bureaucratic and institutional failures to occur throughout the systems that we need so badly to help us. Many have strong personal opinions on how we would start to improve this situation, but I think proper incentives, higher expectations, and skin in the game would be a good start.

pjc50 6y ago
People don't just expect government failure, they demand it, and elect leaders to actively sabotage effective public health measures.

ketanmaheshwari 6y ago

Interesting read. My personal ideal world Covid crack-pottery confession is that prevention is better than cure: Food merchants should have been practicing utmost care with contamination to the order of handling plutonium for nuclear weapons. People should have been practicing healthy eating habits and exercise routines such that their immunity to virus would be of multiple order of magnitude more than what it currently is. So much so that the virus would barely a blip in the global consciousness radar.

dempseye 6y ago
"People should have been practicing healthy eating habits and exercise routines such that their immunity to virus would be of multiple order of magnitude more than what it currently is." Difficult when you're an 85 year old with dementia in a nursing home.
- thoughtstheseus 6y ago
  Healthy eating habits and exercise is different for different people.
- gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
  > Difficult when you're an 85 year old with dementia in a nursing home. this is someone beyond life expectancy and almost by definition liable to be taken out by anything, never mind covid
systemvoltage 6y ago
> Food merchants should have been practicing utmost care with contamination to the order of handling plutonium for nuclear weapons. We're not able get everyone aboard mask-wearing.
pjc50 6y ago
"General health" absolutely does not make you immune. And even if it reduces the severity of symptoms, if being healthy enabled you to get out more it would be worse for spreading the virus.

dekhn 6y ago

If you're a computer scientist or a physicist and you want to criticize biomedicine, please go work in the field for a couple of decades. It gives a wonderful perspective. After two decades of working in biomedicine, I returned to pure software engineering/computer science because biomedicine (especially the US, but everywhere, really) is so messed up structurally, it will never recover. It will only get more expensive and less effective.

AndyPatterson 6y ago

I wish folk would move away from the world war two nostalgia, it's debilitating and wasn't at all hard and fast, even if a 90 minute movie cut leads you to believe that.

mchusma 6y ago
Japan took over most of the Pacific I'm the time it took for the FDA to schedule the meeting to approve the vaccine after EUA was submitted. In 1947 we vaccinated 5 million people from a "cold start" in 2 weeks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_New_York_City_smallpox_outbreak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_New_York_City_smallpox_... People keep bringing up examples of going fast because others are saying "we are going as fast as we can."
- flukus 6y ago
  > Japan took over most of the Pacific I'm the time it took for the FDA to schedule the meeting to approve the vaccine The operation was completed in that time but many of the plans were created years earlier and much of the preparation (like ships/planes/manpower) was done decades earlier.

pjc50 6y ago

> The solution, I’d say, is not to put toddlers in charge of the government! As should be obvious by now—indeed, as should’ve been obvious back in 2016—that solution has some exceedingly severe downsides. The solution, rather, is to work for a world where experts are unafraid to speak bluntly, so that it never falls to a mental toddler to say what the experts can’t say without jeopardizing their careers. Well, yes. But what if the public want to be run by an angry toddler because he confirms their prejudice? What if they've spent years listening to Angry Toddler Radio filling their heads with those prejudices?

aaron-santos 6y ago

> I think that, in a well-run civilization, the first covid vaccines would’ve been tested and approved by around March or April 2020, while mass-manufacturing simultaneously ramped up with trillions of dollars’ investment. We have 60 clinical vaccines[1]. Which ones? All of them? The first one? The first dozen? You're going to see a bunch more of these types of arguments from hindsight in the coming months. The choice wasn't to approve or deny and then manufacture the vaccines we have today. It was to find the signal in the noise. [1] https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-covid-19-candidate-vaccines https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-c...

maxfan8 6y ago
The article addresses this point: > Instead events—including the staggering cost of delay, the spectacular failures of institutional authorities to adapt to the scientific realities of covid, and the long-awaited finding that all the major vaccines safely work (some better than others), just like the experts predicted back in February—all this only made me more confident of my original, stupid and naïve position.
- aaron-santos 6y ago
  Thank you for digging up the quote. Not to argue against you, but to this part of the article. This again is arguing about making a decision with information we have available to us now. Now we know all major vaccines safely work. Scott Aaronson should be able to back up this claim, that among the vaccines we had in February all turned out to be effective so choosing amongst them at random would have yielded an acceptable outcome, with a source.

eyelidlessness 6y ago

I can’t find much to disagree with in the post. And I expect to be downvoted for saying so unqualified. So in anticipation of that, I hope whoever is annoyed by what’s in it is keeping in mind the author’s repeated insistence that he’s not an expert and expects his lay perspective to be wrong.

mchusma 6y ago

Great post, but even he underestimates how obvious an approval decision it was. Vaccines have a strong safety and efficacy history. I think if you replace the words "not approved" with "banned", the insanity of the vaccine ban is clear. Even though Congress has multiple times given.the FDA commissioner broad powers to approve during a pandemic, they opted to not do it. There needs to be legislation to ensure the next one goes better. Effectively, they need to remove the discretion part from the FDA. My favorite ideas are: (1) automatic EUAs for any vaccine candidates when a disease has over 1 in 1,000 chance of killing a group and the vaccine candidate is from a company who has had a drug approved in the last 10 years. (2) allowing people during pandemic to pay to be in a vaccine trial. I know many people who would have loved to be in a trial, but were not able. (This was the FDA doesn't have to say something is "authorized" so it seems more organizationally feasible.) (3) allowing human challenge studies to happen. (4) 1 gradual rolling study instead of separate studies. Gradually increase the number of people who can be tested, and stop of the safety profile looks bad, but watch all for efficacy outcomes. So vaccinate 10 in week 1, 100 in week 2, 1,000 in week 3, 10,000 in week 4, etc. There has only been 1 ever long term side effect reported (from a polio love virus vaccination of an immunocompromised person), so you really want to see short term effects. (5) also just increase the level of ambition. Trump should have proposed bills in congress to lift the vaccine ban. Biden's goal in his first 100 days is to vaccinate 100M (given that we are supposed to have about 240M doses delivered by then with already approved vaccines. This is a low bar, sort of like saying "I hope we don't just accidentally throw away most of the vaccine". His goal should be 50% vaccinated in the first 30 days or something.

viraptor 6y ago

A lot of interesting content. But I wanted to just point out this: > in West Virginia, they mistakenly gave antibody treatments instead of vaccines If you're vaccinating entire population, there will definitely be mistakes. Go ahead, mention that someone managed to notice them and notify the right people. Don't put them in the same sentence as someone spoiling vaccines on purpose. We can't afford people being afraid to report mistakes.

lazylizard 6y ago

the whole covid thing could have been easily stopped if the whole world would just lockdown together for 1 month eh? why did we even need a vaccine?