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Half Doses of Moderna Vaccine Produce Neutralizing Antibodies
- polote 6y agoLet's hope that half half doses works too
- johnchristopher 6y agoHomeopathy? Homeopathy!
- unicornporn 6y agoStirred, not shaken!
- JohnTHaller 6y agoTake a bit of blue Ford Mondeo...
- StavrosK 6y agoMy God man, do you want people to overdose?!
- vmception 6y agoWhich retail job can I get to bump me up the list on vaccination, but doesn't actually increase my exposure possibility? I would just stick with trying to follow rumors of thawed vaccines about to be thrown out for the day, but all of my group chats are jetsetters and they're often easily swayed by conspiracies or are just Republican and I don't have energy to ask about being vaccinated there. edit: well its nice that I was able to crowdsource a discussion here! as you see, the energy of doing this in a sequential chat is much greater than a nested thread chat. really great insight into how to get it, thanks lifehackernews!
- elric 6y agoWhat makes you think that you are somehow entitled to faster vaccination?
- sneak 6y agoThere is an argument that the rationing/prioritization scheme that is currently in use is inherently unjust, and that no one is entitled to faster vaccination than anyone else.
- owenmarshall 6y agoWhat is the argument against prioritizing those who are at significantly higher risk of death?
- toomuchtodo 6y agoDoses that go to waste because the prioritization system ignores logistics. Utilization should be optimized for.
- owenmarshall 6y agoThe “all or nothing” approach many states has built is extremely foolish, yes, but that isn’t inherently part of an approach based on prioritization. You can prioritize for the sickest while simultaneously optimizing for all doses being used.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago(Removed redundant commentary, leaving citations) https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/533364-fda-chief-urges-states-to-allow-covid-vaccinations-of-lower-priority-groups https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/533364-fda-chief-urges... ("FDA chief urges states to allow COVID-19 vaccinations of lower-priority groups") https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/thousands-covid-19-vaccines-wind-garbage-because-fed-state-guidelines-n1254364 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/thousands-covid-19-vacc... ("Thousands of Covid-19 vaccines wind up in the garbage because of fed, state guidelines") https://www.npr.org/2021/01/28/961722489/why-are-health-care-facilities-throwing-out-covid-19-vaccines https://www.npr.org/2021/01/28/961722489/why-are-health-care... ("They're A Precious Commodity, So Why Are Some COVID-19 Vaccines Going To Waste?") https://www.propublica.org/article/covid-vaccine-wastage https://www.propublica.org/article/covid-vaccine-wastage ("How Many Vaccine Shots Go to Waste? Several States Aren’t Counting.") https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/90935 https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/9093... ("There are vaccines that are being wasted and that is a travesty," Terry Fulmer, president of the John A. Hartford Foundation, told ABC News. "Even one dose wasted is too many.")
- overcast 6y agoThe Moderna dose is already more than 3x the dosage of the Pfizer ones. 100mcg vs 30mcg. Would be great if they could cut that down and still be effective.
- HenryBemis 6y agoSo... if that plays out, perhaps split the doses in half, cover twice the people, so we can all go back to our normal pre-COVID life (or what's left of it). Of course this won't double the number of people vaccinated since Moderna doesn't cover 100%. But every little helps.
- downrightmike 6y agoWe're not going back to pre covid lives period. Even if everyone was vaxxed there would still be more moderate cases that our hospitals can handle. And then that allows the virus millions of chances to mutate and then, just like we're seeing with the UK and South Africa strains. Which as we're seeing all but nullifies the vaccine. The vaccines we're seeing are only 10% effective against the SA strain. Statistically >5% is great, but that's not a risk the vast majority of people want to run with.
- grey-area 6y agoThe vaccines we're seeing are only 10% effective against the SA strain. This is not accurate. The AZ vaccine was only 10% effective in a study in SA. That's the only one that was shown to be vastly less effective. The Pfizer vaccine is believed to be effective against the SA variant (though I think it used In Vitro studies) and there are lots of other vaccines on the way. We will get this under control but it will be a long slow process over several years.
- downrightmike 6y agoSo far it is the only one.
- Montika 6y agookay
- throwaway189262 6y agoIf you read the trial data this is a foregone conclusion. The Moderna vaccine produces antibody titres over twice as high as an actual infection from the data I've seen. My theory is that these companies knew they only had one chance to make a working vaccine, so they did everything they could to make it not fail. Double doses, 5x what was needed in monkeys, gold standard adjuvants. I would not be amazed in the slightest if they decide to half-dose the vaccine or do away with the second shot or even both. They probably didn't have time to run the trial any other way
- CyanLite2 6y agoIf you look at some of their published Phase 2 data, they were actually getting good responses from their 25mcg dosing. But you're correct--this was the fastest vaccine development in the history of mankind, and they errored on doing the 100mcg version just to make sure the efficacy was high enough because they didn't have time to test it on a wider population or do challenge trials. Imagine the blowback on mRNA vaccines in general if they went with the low-dose version and got lowered efficacy...
- throwaway189262 6y agoYup agree 100%. I thought I saw some pre-trial data on 10mcg in monkeys and even that was somewhat effective.
- Etheryte 6y agoThere is a conceptual misunderstanding here. Raising the dose doesn't mean you have a higher efficacy, in fact it can just as easily have the reverse effect. Vaccines aren't beer where you consume twice as much and get twice as drunk.
- IgorPartola 6y agoGranted. But there is a minimum dose necessary to produce antibodies. If you are in a situation where you are guessing completely blindly (because no trial like yours has been done before), do you worry more about falling below the minimum required dose or above the maximum dose past which you get diminishing returns or even lower efficacy? I think it’s reasonable to worry more about the minimum dose because you can always half the doses later. Finding out at the end of a multi-month trial that you didn’t give enough in your doses would be a big setback. Just look at what happened with Assyria Zeneca when they started mixing up dosing in their phase III. They were the most promising vaccine last summer and they haven’t even concluded their US phase III trial yet as a result.
- faitswulff 6y agoI wonder if they, like Pfizer, will take the opportunity to declare that they have shipped 2x as many doses retroactively (in Pfizer’s case it was an extra dose in every vial).
- xiphias2 6y agoHundreds of millions of people would pay 5x the current price to get the vaccine faster. I feel like the policy of governments getting a monopoly on vaccine distribution is stopping companies in competing for speed of vaccine production and building more factories.
- atonse 6y agoYeah but for that reason I’m very thankful that the government DOES have a monopoly on this process. That’ll ensure the vaccine goes to the people that need it the most first, not just the people that can be gouged the most.
- techsupporter 6y agoEdited to add: I'm not sure what's controversial about this? What did I mess up here? People seem to disagree but aren't, as of about an hour after I replied, saying why. In a way, we're seeing this happen at the national/country scale already. Countries that can afford it ("that can be gouged the most") are buying hundreds of millions of doses and the systems that are supposed to be getting doses to countries that can't afford it appear to be going wanting. That's the problem with health care as a capitalistic market. There's no upper bound on what someone would want to pay to preserve either their life or the life of someone they care about. The only limit is on the resources that person has access to, and people will make some screamingly bad long-term decisions in order to satisfy that short-term need for cash. If we did as the grandparent proposed and opened something like a bidding market for vaccines, you'd absolutely have GoFundMe and whatever the digital equivalent of yard sales are for people who are desperate to get the vaccine but don't have the money. Hell, I already see "please venmo me some cash so I can shelter-in-place away from my relative who has COVID because I can't afford to catch it myself as I'm the only person who makes money for my household."
- tarkin2 6y agoIs the title confusing? On first read, I thought it was something that neutralizes antibodies, rather than antibodies that neutralize the virus. My layman's assumption was that the antibodies would always neturalize, so adding the adjectives threw me off the meaning.
- SAI_Peregrinus 6y agoNot all antibodies neutralize the (or any) virus. Some just mark virions for immune cells to acttack, but won't stop the infection process.
- paxswill 6y ago(Summarizing things I've picked up from reading Derek Lowe's blog [0]) Not all antibodies are neutralizing. Antibodies can only bind to a certain part of pathogens, but if an antibody binds to something it might not disrupt what that thing needs to do to infect the body. Relating this to SARS-CoV-2, it looks like if an antibody bind to something other than the spike protein, the virus can still infect cells. As another example, most people have been exposed to at least some other coronaviruses, and of that group, some of those people have developed antibodies that react to SARS-CoV-2. A recent paper [1] looked at if these "cross-reactive" antibodies were helpful in preventing COVID, but it looks like they're non-neutralizing as they couldn't see any effect. 0: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/ https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/ 1: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/10/does-prior-exposure-to-coronaviruses-protect-you https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/10/do...
- dsjoerg 6y ago"Neutralizing antibodies" is the standard technical term amongst immunologists.
- boulos 6y agoThe results in Figure 3 are certainly promising. Has anyone been able to find the mentioned supplementary material though? > A post-hoc exploratory analysis of immunogenicity in subgroups of participants aged ≥55-<65, ≥65-74 and ≥75 years was performed (Tables S6 and S7). Increases in levels of anti-SARS-CoV-2-spike bAb and nAb at days 29 and post-second vaccination at both the 50 and 100 ug doses were generally comparable across the age subgroups and with those observed in the younger (18-55 years) study participants. Seroconversion rates were also comparable across the age groups and with those in the younger participants. It should be noted that the small size of the ≥75 year-old subgroup (n=22) precludes definitive conclusions to be made. There doesn't seem to be any link to supplementary material at either the Elsevier page [1] nor the NIH page [2]. The clinical trial registration [3] suggests that there was an update just a few days ago, so perhaps they're just waiting to upload a new PDF? [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X21001535 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X2... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7871769/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7871769/ [3] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/study/NCT04405076 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/study/NCT04405076
- jessriedel 6y agoProbably not available as part of the journal's "pre-proof" process. You'll likely have to wait until the formal publication date. > These versions will undergo additional copyediting, typesetting and review, and may not yet have full ScienceDirect functionality. For example, supplementary files may still need to be added, links to references may not resolve yet, etc. The text could still change before final publication. https://service.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/22799/supporthub/sciencedirect/ https://service.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/22799/s...
- noobermin 6y agoWhile this is interesting, I'd still like to see a link to a doctor's opinion, not an article by an economist.
- kiliantics 6y agoA doctor's opinion really isn't worth much. Maybe a virologist.
- swayvil 6y agoSo does getting the disease.
- monkeypizza 6y agoSo many people in the comments are just certain that more money wouldn't have made any difference to vaccine production, and that economic considerations had nothing to do with it. The arguments they make fail to simple comparison tests: "If we paid Tesla 2x as much per car, could they really not produce more cars?" They also fail to privileging the status quo - "If we paid Tesla half as much money, would they produce fewer cars?" Obviously, they would. Money influences how easily they can produce cars. At the margin there must be decisions related to turning money into efficiency every day. And the same thing must apply for vaccines. The best vaccine expert in the world asked for a yearly sabbatical - 200k wasn't enough to keep them. Double that to 400k? Oh actually it can wait til next year. The question for people who deny money's ability to produce more vaccines is: why do you admit that any lower price for a vaccine would reduce supply - but you deny that any higher price would increase supply. What magic is this?
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoMoney works well to speed things up until your project hits the the grindingly slow beast known as the federal bureaucracy. Then money potentially still works, but in ways that produce many negative externalities.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tim333 6y agoThey've probably underpriced vaccine really. I guess we're spending $5-$40 per head and the value to the economy of getting back to normal a couple of months earlier is likely over $1000.
- scoopertrooper 6y agoFrom what I understand, the problem with scaling the Moderna/Pfizer vaccines is that they use a novel process that hasn't been used for producing a vaccine at scale previously. They're having to build out entirely new factories and supply chains. This sort of work normally takes years. Would throwing more money at the problem ease some bottlenecks in increasing production? maybe? Would it cut months off the time to complete the roll out? Plausibly. However, I don't think it'd make a huge difference to the speed of the roll out over the next six months or so. Some things just take time to ramp up.
- known 6y ago"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" --Knuth (b. 1938)
- londons_explore 6y agoI'm surprised some poorer nations haven't taken their ~million vaccine doses, split each one into 20 fractional-doses and inoculated 20 million people. Sure, the vaccine efficiency probably drops from 93% to 15%, but it's still better to have a population of 15% resistant people than a population where 1 million get 93% protection and 19 million get 0%. As more doses come in, the country can similarly divide them and give them as 2nd, 3rd and 4th 'boosters'. They'd probably get up to herd immunity levels with far less total vaccine... I wonder if perhaps the contracts with vaccine producers stop them doing this? (since it might hurt the vaccines reputation)
- brg1007 6y agoOne of the many problems in poorer nations is the cost to get people to the vaccination centers. Multiplying that cost 3-4 times does not help.I don't know if mobile vaccination teams are really possible for Moderna and Pfizer, due to temperature requirements.
- tempestn 6y agoMy understanding is that insufficient dosing could theoretically breed vaccine-resistant variants of the virus, but there's not a lot of data on this, so it's not known how great a risk it is.