3 ms·

There are like 50+ COVID vaccines in development. Which one do you administer? Forget about side effects, half of them are probably duds! Can we afford to admin

by ip26 6y ago

There are like 50+ COVID vaccines in development. Which one do you administer? Forget about side effects, half of them are probably duds! Can we afford to administer billions of vaccines that don’t even work?

WalterBright 6y ago
With the agonizingly slow rollout of the current vaccine, we wouldn't be administering billions of vaccines without soon finding out if it is efficacious or not. > Can we afford Evidently we can afford to spend several trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of deaths waiting 6 months for the vaccine trials.
JoshuaDavid 6y ago
Yes? 10 billion vaccine doses that cost $100 each would be a trillion dollars. Which is somewhere between 7% and 25% of the total cost of COVID-19 to the US. The real question is whether we can afford to use our non-emergency drug approval process in a time of crisis. This time the answer is probably "yes, and it probably only cost a few tens of thousands of lives and a few trillion dollars" but if the disease in question had been Ebola instead of COVID I worry that we would have seen the same ineffective response that optimizes for minimizing liability instead of maximizing effectiveness.
- ip26 6y ago
  The problem is not administering one vaccine. If you were pretty sure which one to use you could take a gamble- which is exactly what we have done with early auth of the Moderna and Pfizer! But If you don’t yet know which ones actually work yet, do you give everyone ten different experimental vaccines in one shot?
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    You give a different vaccine to each person.
voldacar 6y ago
>Can we afford to administer billions of vaccines that don’t even work? the seen and the unseen strikes again We have already sacrificed trillions of dollars in shutting down or greatly restricting the global economy for a year, so any questions of "can we afford" are totally moot by now
- ip26 6y ago
  I don't just mean dollars. Getting everyone vaccinated is a huge national effort, nine to twelve months long, that we need almost everyone to participate in. Everyone has to trust the institution. So what happens if the first two vaccines were benign but also ineffective? How do you convince 300 million people that this time we've got it right? It's worth noting the fastest ever vaccine development before this was 4 years; the early COVID vaccines were developed & authorized in 9 months and a large risk production ramp was started before authorization was granted.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    > nine to twelve months long, ... So what happens if the first two vaccines were benign but also ineffective? We'd know it was ineffective by 3 months tops. Presumably several vaccines would be in play, and after 3 months switch to the more effective ones. We'd have had an effective vaccine loong before 9 months.

by ip26 6y ago

WalterBright 6y ago

With the agonizingly slow rollout of the current vaccine, we wouldn't be administering billions of vaccines without soon finding out if it is efficacious or not. > Can we afford Evidently we can afford to spend several trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of deaths waiting 6 months for the vaccine trials.

JoshuaDavid 6y ago

Yes? 10 billion vaccine doses that cost $100 each would be a trillion dollars. Which is somewhere between 7% and 25% of the total cost of COVID-19 to the US. The real question is whether we can afford to use our non-emergency drug approval process in a time of crisis. This time the answer is probably "yes, and it probably only cost a few tens of thousands of lives and a few trillion dollars" but if the disease in question had been Ebola instead of COVID I worry that we would have seen the same ineffective response that optimizes for minimizing liability instead of maximizing effectiveness.

ip26 6y ago
The problem is not administering one vaccine. If you were pretty sure which one to use you could take a gamble- which is exactly what we have done with early auth of the Moderna and Pfizer! But If you don’t yet know which ones actually work yet, do you give everyone ten different experimental vaccines in one shot?
- WalterBright 6y ago
  You give a different vaccine to each person.

voldacar 6y ago

>Can we afford to administer billions of vaccines that don’t even work? the seen and the unseen strikes again We have already sacrificed trillions of dollars in shutting down or greatly restricting the global economy for a year, so any questions of "can we afford" are totally moot by now

ip26 6y ago
I don't just mean dollars. Getting everyone vaccinated is a huge national effort, nine to twelve months long, that we need almost everyone to participate in. Everyone has to trust the institution. So what happens if the first two vaccines were benign but also ineffective? How do you convince 300 million people that this time we've got it right? It's worth noting the fastest ever vaccine development before this was 4 years; the early COVID vaccines were developed & authorized in 9 months and a large risk production ramp was started before authorization was granted.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  > nine to twelve months long, ... So what happens if the first two vaccines were benign but also ineffective? We'd know it was ineffective by 3 months tops. Presumably several vaccines would be in play, and after 3 months switch to the more effective ones. We'd have had an effective vaccine loong before 9 months.