12 ms·

I am so grateful for their hard work. They developed a 90% effective vaccine in weeks, before proving safety and efficacy, and scaling up to 600M doses in mont

I am so grateful for their hard work. They developed a 90% effective vaccine in weeks, before proving safety and efficacy, and scaling up to 600M doses in months. It makes me emotional to think of the number of lives they will save. I didn't think this was possible and I hope I one day get the chance to thank some of the people that worked on this in person.

fassssst 6y ago
NIH developed the vaccine, Moderna and Pfizer are manufacturing it.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  And monetising it. Oxford vaccine is slightly less effective, but about an order of magnitude more affordable.
  - esja 6y ago
    They are all incredibly affordable, measured against the benefits to individuals and society.
    - sanxiyn 6y ago
      I agree, but those are not in contradiction. 1000x affordable vaccine is still an order of magnitude more affordable than 100x affordable vaccine.
    - jonplackett 6y ago
      You can say they are cheap compared, but affordable is what can actually be afforded. And for a country like India with a billion people, paying ~$1 per dose VS something like $15 for moderna is a huge difference. All I'm saying is you should give more credit to companies doing the right thing and essentially giving the vaccine away at cost while there's a pandemic, even if their vaccine isn't quite as good.
      - esja 6y ago
        The companies giving this away at cost are obviously doing something good for the world. That's not my point. I just find it odd that companies like Pfizer and Moderna are about to lift the world out of a catastrophe in unprecedented fashion, and we have people complaining about prices which are not overly high when compared to the benefit, even in the developing world. India's GDP in 2019 was almost 2.9 trillion and the virus has knocked 300 billion or more off that just this year. Even under your extreme example they aren't going to care about spending an "extra" 14 billion.
        jonplackett 6y ago
        I’m not complaining about the prices. I think they’ve done something amazing for sure. I just think the companies doing that same thing, and at cost are more amazing. Without the Oxford one, a lot of countries around the world would still be just as screwed as they are today. But don’t get me wrong I think what they all have done is amazing. And it makes me happy.
      - valarauko 6y ago
        In India the Pfizer vaccine works out to $35 per dose, and AstraZeneca at $3 * [Pfizer Vaccine's Price May Be Throwing off Indian Government, Report Says - The Wire Science](https://science.thewire.in/health/pfizer-vaccines-price-may-be-throwing-off-indian-government-report-says/ https://science.thewire.in/health/pfizer-vaccines-price-may-...)
  - mongol 6y ago
    This is the list of what the EU is paying: Oxford/AstraZeneca: €1.78 (£1.61). Johnson & Johnson: $8.50 (£6.30). Sanofi/GSK: €7.56. Pfizer/BioNTech: €12. CureVac: €10. Moderna: $18. Compare with the price of 1 liter of hand sanitizer. These vaccines are incredibly affordable.
    - jonplackett 6y ago
      Yes, they are, but companies doing it at cost should get more credit than those doing it for profit.
      - cipher_system 6y ago
        Maybe some vaccines are more expensive to produce? Do we know the profit margins on each of these vaccines?
        jonplackett 6y ago
        From wikipedia, comparing it to the old fashioned method: > RNA vaccines can be produced faster, more cheaply, and in a more standardized fashion So should be cheaper if anything rather than more expensive.
        jelliclesfarm 6y ago
        It’s not the cost of vaccines. It’s the transportation and special refrigeration units that are expensive. Many hospitals have to install that infrastructure. Could be worth it if mRNA tech becomes the norm for other vaccines. I am really excited about mRNA vaccine technology. It’s brilliant.
      - tlb 6y ago
        Given a choice between producing enough doses in 1 month for $10 each, and producing enough doses over 10 months for $1 each, which would you prefer they do? The cheap-slow version costs a million lives, and several billion extra man-months of lockdown, in return for a globally insignificant cost savings. Valuing lives at maybe $1000 each. Increasing production 10x for 10x the cost is pretty typical of things where you build a lot of special-purpose equipment which is then worthless after the production run.
- bpodgursky 6y ago
  Nothing is true about this statement.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    My Understanding is that the stabilized Spike Protein sequence was developed and patented by UT Austin and the NIH. This was hen encoded using Moderna's mRNA delivery technology. I'm sure there were also countless other technology innovations that contributed to the quick rollout. It seems very reductive to attribute credit to one individual or organization over another.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    Not Invented Here /s
rhacker 6y ago
I'm very much opposed to the current news cycle about the vaccine when the much more immediately available fix is available on the shelf at any store that carries vitamins or milk. https://vitamind4all.org/letter.html https://vitamind4all.org/letter.html
- dsjoerg 6y ago
  The evidence for the effectiveness of the vaccine is stronger than this: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.08.20222638v2 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.08.20222638v...
  - rhacker 6y ago
    The vaccine won't be available to 10% of the world's population for at least 1 year.
    - wang_li 6y ago
      Pfizer is aiming for 1.3 billion doses this year. That alone gets us to 10%. The WHO also rough guessed that there are already 750 million people who have been infected with the virus. So that's another 10% who likely don't need a vaccine this year. Then there's the 600 million from Moderna. AstraZeneca is aiming for a billion doses plus partner producers, e.g. Siam Bioscience to produce 200 million doses. We're probably getting to 30%-40% globally by the end of the year. Less populous western countries will probably be fully vaccinated by the end of the year. https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/14/us/pfizer-ceo-albert-bourla-vaccine/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/14/us/pfizer-ceo-albert-bourla-v... https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30400664 https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30400664
      - rhacker 6y ago
        That still doesn't help the hundreds of thousands of people that will be dead because they or their doctor didn't know that vitamin D is actively saving people's lives right now. Even after a diagnosis. This advice will save more than one life right? I think that's more important than just pushing the vaccine.
parimm 6y ago
It took 25days from the time the Covid-19 sequence was published to make the Moderna vaccine.[1] [1]https://www.bostonmagazine.com/health/2020/06/04/moderna-coronavirus-vaccine/ https://www.bostonmagazine.com/health/2020/06/04/moderna-cor...
- jjice 6y ago
  Holy cow. That's absolutely incredible. Does the use of mRNA make these vaccines faster to develop?
  - sytse 6y ago
    mRNA vaccines can be printed on a DNA printer! You might be interested in this article: Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1345854099464470528 https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1345854099464470528 It lets you see the exact mRNA contents of the BNT162b2 vaccine, and for most parts understand why they are there!
  - blhack 6y ago
    Yes. You could almost think of the mRNA as being "printed". The real technology in these vaccines is actually encasing them in a lipid, which prevents your immune system from attacking the mRNA.
  - choeger 6y ago
    There is a large caveat, though: The virus is a SARS variant, which in turn is well-studied. Prior research sped up sequencing and analysis significantly. I think we had the first PCR test even before the full genome was sequenced. It is also somewhat easy to target with the mRNA approach. So don't expect the same speed for everything else. I think this particular virus was one of the best possible for a pandemic. One the one hand it causes a serious, potentially deadly, illness. But on the other hand the illness does not immediately destroy our health system, let alone our industrial basis. It is also ideally suited for the relatively new mRNA vaccines. This might be cynical, but the whole thing might turn out to be a net positive. Many more viruses could be attacked now. Personalized, immediate cancer treatment could be just one step away after this. Heck, we might even have found the solution to the problem with antibiotics resistent bacteria.
iridium_core 6y ago
As of December 18th, 2020 deaths in Sweden are only the 3rd highest for the past decade: https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-... So its unlikely that COVID has lead to much excess death outside of what could be expected from an unusually strong 'flu year'. However the avoidable major driver of death is lockdown (from suicides, overdoses, homicide, destitution, interrupted medical care) and mismanagement (eg. sending symptomatic people back into nursing homes as in New York). This whole state of affairs has been great for Billionaires though - who have increased their wealth by 36% in the past 9 months thanks to egregious money printing and economic disruption: https://yubanet.com/usa/net-worth-of-u-s-billionaires-has-soared-by-1-trillion-to-total-of-4-trillion-since-pandemic-began/ https://yubanet.com/usa/net-worth-of-u-s-billionaires-has-so...
- jonathanjaeger 6y ago
  Deaths from the current year can take a while to be finalized, and Decembers can be one of the deadliest months. If the U.S. hits 500k excess deaths this year, that's still a 20-25% hike on our normal death rate (2.7M give or take). Seems like Sweden will surpass past years in the end, perhaps by a similar percentage.
  - iridium_core 6y ago
    If we linearly extrapolate the December 18 data to December 31st, we get 91773 * (366/353) = 95,152. Which would indeed be the highest level this decade, but still only 3.2% higher than 2018. Sweden's 2019 deaths were also the lowest in the decade, so there was a lot of built up 'dry tinder'. In fact the excess deaths in 2020 match up almost exactly with the 'non-deaths' of 2019. This concept is also matched by research: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-deaths-in-Sweden-and-Norway-before-and-after-COVID-pandemic.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de... "In Sweden, the observed increase in all-cause mortality during Covid-19 was partly due to a lower than expected mortality preceding the epidemic and the observed excess mortality, was followed by a lower than expected mortality after the first Covid-19 wave. This may suggest mortality displacement."

fassssst 6y ago

NIH developed the vaccine, Moderna and Pfizer are manufacturing it.

jonplackett 6y ago
And monetising it. Oxford vaccine is slightly less effective, but about an order of magnitude more affordable.
- esja 6y ago
  They are all incredibly affordable, measured against the benefits to individuals and society.
  - sanxiyn 6y ago
    I agree, but those are not in contradiction. 1000x affordable vaccine is still an order of magnitude more affordable than 100x affordable vaccine.
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    You can say they are cheap compared, but affordable is what can actually be afforded. And for a country like India with a billion people, paying ~$1 per dose VS something like $15 for moderna is a huge difference. All I'm saying is you should give more credit to companies doing the right thing and essentially giving the vaccine away at cost while there's a pandemic, even if their vaccine isn't quite as good.
    - esja 6y ago
      The companies giving this away at cost are obviously doing something good for the world. That's not my point. I just find it odd that companies like Pfizer and Moderna are about to lift the world out of a catastrophe in unprecedented fashion, and we have people complaining about prices which are not overly high when compared to the benefit, even in the developing world. India's GDP in 2019 was almost 2.9 trillion and the virus has knocked 300 billion or more off that just this year. Even under your extreme example they aren't going to care about spending an "extra" 14 billion.
      - jonplackett 6y ago
        I’m not complaining about the prices. I think they’ve done something amazing for sure. I just think the companies doing that same thing, and at cost are more amazing. Without the Oxford one, a lot of countries around the world would still be just as screwed as they are today. But don’t get me wrong I think what they all have done is amazing. And it makes me happy.
    - valarauko 6y ago
      In India the Pfizer vaccine works out to $35 per dose, and AstraZeneca at $3 * [Pfizer Vaccine's Price May Be Throwing off Indian Government, Report Says - The Wire Science](https://science.thewire.in/health/pfizer-vaccines-price-may-be-throwing-off-indian-government-report-says/ https://science.thewire.in/health/pfizer-vaccines-price-may-...)
- mongol 6y ago
  This is the list of what the EU is paying: Oxford/AstraZeneca: €1.78 (£1.61). Johnson & Johnson: $8.50 (£6.30). Sanofi/GSK: €7.56. Pfizer/BioNTech: €12. CureVac: €10. Moderna: $18. Compare with the price of 1 liter of hand sanitizer. These vaccines are incredibly affordable.
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    Yes, they are, but companies doing it at cost should get more credit than those doing it for profit.
    - cipher_system 6y ago
      Maybe some vaccines are more expensive to produce? Do we know the profit margins on each of these vaccines?
      - jonplackett 6y ago
        From wikipedia, comparing it to the old fashioned method: > RNA vaccines can be produced faster, more cheaply, and in a more standardized fashion So should be cheaper if anything rather than more expensive.
        jelliclesfarm 6y ago
        It’s not the cost of vaccines. It’s the transportation and special refrigeration units that are expensive. Many hospitals have to install that infrastructure. Could be worth it if mRNA tech becomes the norm for other vaccines. I am really excited about mRNA vaccine technology. It’s brilliant.
    - tlb 6y ago
      Given a choice between producing enough doses in 1 month for $10 each, and producing enough doses over 10 months for $1 each, which would you prefer they do? The cheap-slow version costs a million lives, and several billion extra man-months of lockdown, in return for a globally insignificant cost savings. Valuing lives at maybe $1000 each. Increasing production 10x for 10x the cost is pretty typical of things where you build a lot of special-purpose equipment which is then worthless after the production run.
bpodgursky 6y ago
Nothing is true about this statement.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  My Understanding is that the stabilized Spike Protein sequence was developed and patented by UT Austin and the NIH. This was hen encoded using Moderna's mRNA delivery technology. I'm sure there were also countless other technology innovations that contributed to the quick rollout. It seems very reductive to attribute credit to one individual or organization over another.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Not Invented Here /s

rhacker 6y ago

I'm very much opposed to the current news cycle about the vaccine when the much more immediately available fix is available on the shelf at any store that carries vitamins or milk. https://vitamind4all.org/letter.html https://vitamind4all.org/letter.html

dsjoerg 6y ago
The evidence for the effectiveness of the vaccine is stronger than this: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.08.20222638v2 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.08.20222638v...
- rhacker 6y ago
  The vaccine won't be available to 10% of the world's population for at least 1 year.
  - wang_li 6y ago
    Pfizer is aiming for 1.3 billion doses this year. That alone gets us to 10%. The WHO also rough guessed that there are already 750 million people who have been infected with the virus. So that's another 10% who likely don't need a vaccine this year. Then there's the 600 million from Moderna. AstraZeneca is aiming for a billion doses plus partner producers, e.g. Siam Bioscience to produce 200 million doses. We're probably getting to 30%-40% globally by the end of the year. Less populous western countries will probably be fully vaccinated by the end of the year. https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/14/us/pfizer-ceo-albert-bourla-vaccine/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/14/us/pfizer-ceo-albert-bourla-v... https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30400664 https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30400664
    - rhacker 6y ago
      That still doesn't help the hundreds of thousands of people that will be dead because they or their doctor didn't know that vitamin D is actively saving people's lives right now. Even after a diagnosis. This advice will save more than one life right? I think that's more important than just pushing the vaccine.

parimm 6y ago

It took 25days from the time the Covid-19 sequence was published to make the Moderna vaccine.[1] [1]https://www.bostonmagazine.com/health/2020/06/04/moderna-coronavirus-vaccine/ https://www.bostonmagazine.com/health/2020/06/04/moderna-cor...

jjice 6y ago
Holy cow. That's absolutely incredible. Does the use of mRNA make these vaccines faster to develop?
- sytse 6y ago
  mRNA vaccines can be printed on a DNA printer! You might be interested in this article: Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1345854099464470528 https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1345854099464470528 It lets you see the exact mRNA contents of the BNT162b2 vaccine, and for most parts understand why they are there!
- blhack 6y ago
  Yes. You could almost think of the mRNA as being "printed". The real technology in these vaccines is actually encasing them in a lipid, which prevents your immune system from attacking the mRNA.
- choeger 6y ago
  There is a large caveat, though: The virus is a SARS variant, which in turn is well-studied. Prior research sped up sequencing and analysis significantly. I think we had the first PCR test even before the full genome was sequenced. It is also somewhat easy to target with the mRNA approach. So don't expect the same speed for everything else. I think this particular virus was one of the best possible for a pandemic. One the one hand it causes a serious, potentially deadly, illness. But on the other hand the illness does not immediately destroy our health system, let alone our industrial basis. It is also ideally suited for the relatively new mRNA vaccines. This might be cynical, but the whole thing might turn out to be a net positive. Many more viruses could be attacked now. Personalized, immediate cancer treatment could be just one step away after this. Heck, we might even have found the solution to the problem with antibiotics resistent bacteria.

iridium_core 6y ago

As of December 18th, 2020 deaths in Sweden are only the 3rd highest for the past decade: https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-... So its unlikely that COVID has lead to much excess death outside of what could be expected from an unusually strong 'flu year'. However the avoidable major driver of death is lockdown (from suicides, overdoses, homicide, destitution, interrupted medical care) and mismanagement (eg. sending symptomatic people back into nursing homes as in New York). This whole state of affairs has been great for Billionaires though - who have increased their wealth by 36% in the past 9 months thanks to egregious money printing and economic disruption: https://yubanet.com/usa/net-worth-of-u-s-billionaires-has-soared-by-1-trillion-to-total-of-4-trillion-since-pandemic-began/ https://yubanet.com/usa/net-worth-of-u-s-billionaires-has-so...

jonathanjaeger 6y ago
Deaths from the current year can take a while to be finalized, and Decembers can be one of the deadliest months. If the U.S. hits 500k excess deaths this year, that's still a 20-25% hike on our normal death rate (2.7M give or take). Seems like Sweden will surpass past years in the end, perhaps by a similar percentage.
- iridium_core 6y ago
  If we linearly extrapolate the December 18 data to December 31st, we get 91773 * (366/353) = 95,152. Which would indeed be the highest level this decade, but still only 3.2% higher than 2018. Sweden's 2019 deaths were also the lowest in the decade, so there was a lot of built up 'dry tinder'. In fact the excess deaths in 2020 match up almost exactly with the 'non-deaths' of 2019. This concept is also matched by research: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-deaths-in-Sweden-and-Norway-before-and-after-COVID-pandemic.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de... "In Sweden, the observed increase in all-cause mortality during Covid-19 was partly due to a lower than expected mortality preceding the epidemic and the observed excess mortality, was followed by a lower than expected mortality after the first Covid-19 wave. This may suggest mortality displacement."