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Nations have spent thousands of dollars per person on just mitigation efforts and economic stimulus. Meanwhile we have had the ability for months to vaccinate

Nations have spent thousands of dollars per person on just mitigation efforts and economic stimulus. Meanwhile we have had the ability for months to vaccinate an entire household for a measly $1k? What's the catch? Is it significantly riskier than the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines? Is it easy to make a mistake while producing this and end up with something ineffective or harmful? Is it just not particularly effective?

avs733 6y ago
Quality control. Precision. Repeatability. Certification. Knowledge. Distribution. Efficacy. Evidence. It's like the difference between heroin and opioids
- xxpor 6y ago
  It's kind of funny, pharmaceuticals have similar economics to software now that I think about it: extremely high upfront fixed costs, minimal marginal costs.
  - kazinator 6y ago
    Yes; there are similar risks. Working on something for years that might not work, or not pass clinical trials or whatever. The only difference is that the researcher's limit for not understanding the code might be 150,000 lines, but only 50 atoms for not understanding the molecule. :)
- asitov 6y ago
  Are you saying you wouldn't take the heroin version of a covid vax?
  - avs733 6y ago
    I wouldn’t take the heroin version of anything unless the alternative was highly likely and extremely bad Would I drink murky water in the woods? Maybe? Am I about to die of thirst and have no other clean water sources? Would I take a vaccine made in a dude’s garage and posted on less wrong? Maybe? But only if there are no other options to keep me from a disease way worse than the horrors that covid actually is. But it’s worth recognizing that this fear and noise in the system is the same type of thing that gave us an Arizona couple dead from drinking fish tank cleaner.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Heroin actually gets the job done and you can tell if its working. Not so with this.
  - avs733 6y ago
    Agreed. Was looking for an analogy and my brain spat out an ad not a search result
_Microft 6y ago
They could not even test themselves to see whether they developed immunity against SARS-Cov2. All we know is that someone sprayed something up their nose and hoped that it actually had the effect that they wanted. This is the catch.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  But the point is, even if there's a 1% chance that this plausibly works, the government should be throwing money at bio-hackers like this. Or at the very least exempting them from the regulations that stand in their way. Very likely these moonshots won't work. But they're still dirt cheap relative to the economic impact of Covid. If there's a way to disrupt the current slow approach to vaccine production, we should be exploring it. Find a few thousand smart, maybe insane, biohackers. Give them each a $100k grant. Give them total immunity from FDA regulation. Free them from all the bureaucratic and ethical shackles that slow down establishment science. At a cost of $300 million, even a 1% chance that one of them figures out a way to double the rate of vaccination, constitutes a 1000%+ return on investment.
  - jiofih 6y ago
    If they have total immunity from FDA regulations, how are you going to be confident it actually works and is safe at scale? The regulations are there for good reasons. I haven’t heard of a single one of the available vaccines being held back by regulations, only the speed at which they could go through human trials.
    - dcolkitt 6y ago
      > I haven’t heard of a single one of the available vaccines being held back by regulations, only the speed at which they could go through human trials. The vaccine trials were drastically slowed down by the regulations against human challenge trials.
      - namesbc 6y ago
        Not true, HCT would not have speed up the deployment of the vaccine by even one day.
dragontamer 6y ago
The mRNA vaccines were completed within a week or two with modern technology. It took nearly a year to test: prove that it was safe, prove that it was effective (preventing deaths, preventing hospitalizations, preventing symptoms). This blogpost completely ignores the difficult proof issue.
- nostromo 6y ago
  We could have tested it in two weeks with paid volunteers. The pay for brave vaccine testers could have literally been $1m and we’d have saved several trillion bucks and potentially over a million lives. Hell, make it $10m or $100m and you'd still save a ton of money. We've done this for several other viruses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_challenge_study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_challenge_study
  - biggieshellz 6y ago
    We could test that it's safe, yes. Effective, no. You have to have the people out in the community, for both the vaccinated group and the control group, and then compare who gets infected in each group. The testing actually took less time than they expected due to the unfortunately-high prevalence of COVID-19 in the community.
    - nostromo 6y ago
      No, the testers would be directly exposed as part of the trial, which is why they'd be compensated -- as opposed to waiting around for 9 months for some percent of people to be exposed.
      - dragontamer 6y ago
        And the control / placebo group? You're really going to force testers to potentially pick up the placebo, and then inject them with COVID19 forcefully? I mean yeah, it'd work, but its generally considered immoral under today's philosophy of science.
bawolff 6y ago
Any evidence that this "vaccine" actually works and does anything.
xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
The catch is that we have no evidence it's effective and little evidence it's safe. It might work or it might kill you. Please don't go snorting it until we know which.
ascorbic 6y ago
> What's the catch? Is it significantly riskier than the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines? Is it easy to make a mistake while producing this and end up with something ineffective or harmful? Is it just not particularly effective? Yes, yes and yes. This is all good fun, but isn't a super novel vaccine. The vaccines that are currently being delivered were mostly developed within weeks of Chinese researchers sharing the genome sequences in January 2020. The bits that took the time were the safety and efficacy trials, which is what this is skipping. And it's not like $1000 for a household is cheap: the Oxford/AZ vaccine costs about $3.

avs733 6y ago

Quality control. Precision. Repeatability. Certification. Knowledge. Distribution. Efficacy. Evidence. It's like the difference between heroin and opioids

xxpor 6y ago
It's kind of funny, pharmaceuticals have similar economics to software now that I think about it: extremely high upfront fixed costs, minimal marginal costs.
- kazinator 6y ago
  Yes; there are similar risks. Working on something for years that might not work, or not pass clinical trials or whatever. The only difference is that the researcher's limit for not understanding the code might be 150,000 lines, but only 50 atoms for not understanding the molecule. :)
asitov 6y ago
Are you saying you wouldn't take the heroin version of a covid vax?
- avs733 6y ago
  I wouldn’t take the heroin version of anything unless the alternative was highly likely and extremely bad Would I drink murky water in the woods? Maybe? Am I about to die of thirst and have no other clean water sources? Would I take a vaccine made in a dude’s garage and posted on less wrong? Maybe? But only if there are no other options to keep me from a disease way worse than the horrors that covid actually is. But it’s worth recognizing that this fear and noise in the system is the same type of thing that gave us an Arizona couple dead from drinking fish tank cleaner.
bawolff 6y ago
Heroin actually gets the job done and you can tell if its working. Not so with this.
- avs733 6y ago
  Agreed. Was looking for an analogy and my brain spat out an ad not a search result

_Microft 6y ago

They could not even test themselves to see whether they developed immunity against SARS-Cov2. All we know is that someone sprayed something up their nose and hoped that it actually had the effect that they wanted. This is the catch.

dcolkitt 6y ago
But the point is, even if there's a 1% chance that this plausibly works, the government should be throwing money at bio-hackers like this. Or at the very least exempting them from the regulations that stand in their way. Very likely these moonshots won't work. But they're still dirt cheap relative to the economic impact of Covid. If there's a way to disrupt the current slow approach to vaccine production, we should be exploring it. Find a few thousand smart, maybe insane, biohackers. Give them each a $100k grant. Give them total immunity from FDA regulation. Free them from all the bureaucratic and ethical shackles that slow down establishment science. At a cost of $300 million, even a 1% chance that one of them figures out a way to double the rate of vaccination, constitutes a 1000%+ return on investment.
- jiofih 6y ago
  If they have total immunity from FDA regulations, how are you going to be confident it actually works and is safe at scale? The regulations are there for good reasons. I haven’t heard of a single one of the available vaccines being held back by regulations, only the speed at which they could go through human trials.
  - dcolkitt 6y ago
    > I haven’t heard of a single one of the available vaccines being held back by regulations, only the speed at which they could go through human trials. The vaccine trials were drastically slowed down by the regulations against human challenge trials.
    - namesbc 6y ago
      Not true, HCT would not have speed up the deployment of the vaccine by even one day.

dragontamer 6y ago

The mRNA vaccines were completed within a week or two with modern technology. It took nearly a year to test: prove that it was safe, prove that it was effective (preventing deaths, preventing hospitalizations, preventing symptoms). This blogpost completely ignores the difficult proof issue.

nostromo 6y ago
We could have tested it in two weeks with paid volunteers. The pay for brave vaccine testers could have literally been $1m and we’d have saved several trillion bucks and potentially over a million lives. Hell, make it $10m or $100m and you'd still save a ton of money. We've done this for several other viruses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_challenge_study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_challenge_study
- biggieshellz 6y ago
  We could test that it's safe, yes. Effective, no. You have to have the people out in the community, for both the vaccinated group and the control group, and then compare who gets infected in each group. The testing actually took less time than they expected due to the unfortunately-high prevalence of COVID-19 in the community.
  - nostromo 6y ago
    No, the testers would be directly exposed as part of the trial, which is why they'd be compensated -- as opposed to waiting around for 9 months for some percent of people to be exposed.
    - dragontamer 6y ago
      And the control / placebo group? You're really going to force testers to potentially pick up the placebo, and then inject them with COVID19 forcefully? I mean yeah, it'd work, but its generally considered immoral under today's philosophy of science.

bawolff 6y ago

Any evidence that this "vaccine" actually works and does anything.

xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago

The catch is that we have no evidence it's effective and little evidence it's safe. It might work or it might kill you. Please don't go snorting it until we know which.

ascorbic 6y ago

> What's the catch? Is it significantly riskier than the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines? Is it easy to make a mistake while producing this and end up with something ineffective or harmful? Is it just not particularly effective? Yes, yes and yes. This is all good fun, but isn't a super novel vaccine. The vaccines that are currently being delivered were mostly developed within weeks of Chinese researchers sharing the genome sequences in January 2020. The bits that took the time were the safety and efficacy trials, which is what this is skipping. And it's not like $1000 for a household is cheap: the Oxford/AZ vaccine costs about $3.