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The plan is in inject 6 Billion people with $vaccine. I have no medical expertise, but the idea of >3 million people dying from 6 Billion unregulated injections

by netrus 5y ago

The plan is in inject 6 Billion people with $vaccine. I have no medical expertise, but the idea of >3 million people dying from 6 Billion unregulated injections does not seem outlandish to me. Edit: especially taking into account one of the main tasks of the regulators was to decide _which_ vaccine to choose. If I remember correctly, there were hundreds of vaccines in development. In hindsight we know which ones were the right choice, but that's the result of rigoros, regulated, time-consuming testing.

saalweachter 5y ago
Let's also keep in mind that the timeline for approving the vaccine still pales in comparison to the timeline for manufacturing and distributing it. Phase III trials for Pfizer took ~16 weeks. It has been 26 weeks since the US granted an EUA based on that trial. In the 26 weeks since then, ~14% of the world has been vaccinated. And that's after we spent those 16 weeks of the trial building out manufacturing capacity. We did skip a lot of steps on this vaccine. When we started mass administration of it, we had no idea whether it would prevent or reduce transmission or just symptomatic infection. We are still figuring out how long we expect immunity to last, whether we need boosters every six months or never. Maybe once we have the technological capacity to manufacture and distribute 8 billion vaccine doses ~instantly it will make sense to skip the "does this even work?" step, but as long as that remains the bottleneck I have a hard time believing it.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  You missed the does this have any long term effects on 6 billion people. Without long term testing we may find out in 5 years those who had the vaccine may suffer some side effects unknown today. More worrying is if in the future this delivery model becomes the norm where we roll out solutions before fully testing to save money.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  In my opinion, that's the largest selling point of mRNA vaccines. In 4 weeks you can have the entire world's productivity capacity changed into whatever vaccine you deem urgent, and when it's not urgent, you can just store it in a computer's hard drive. Once this is possible¹, we can ask governments to keep some extra capacity unused to respond to emergencies. What is different from any previous tech, where extra capacity would be useless nearly every time. 1 - AKA, when the patents expire. I vote for greatly rewarding the people that developed them and taking the patents away, but I'm sure that won't happen, so I hope we don't see any larger pandemics for 15 years.

by netrus 5y ago

saalweachter 5y ago

Let's also keep in mind that the timeline for approving the vaccine still pales in comparison to the timeline for manufacturing and distributing it. Phase III trials for Pfizer took ~16 weeks. It has been 26 weeks since the US granted an EUA based on that trial. In the 26 weeks since then, ~14% of the world has been vaccinated. And that's after we spent those 16 weeks of the trial building out manufacturing capacity. We did skip a lot of steps on this vaccine. When we started mass administration of it, we had no idea whether it would prevent or reduce transmission or just symptomatic infection. We are still figuring out how long we expect immunity to last, whether we need boosters every six months or never. Maybe once we have the technological capacity to manufacture and distribute 8 billion vaccine doses ~instantly it will make sense to skip the "does this even work?" step, but as long as that remains the bottleneck I have a hard time believing it.

ipaddr 5y ago
You missed the does this have any long term effects on 6 billion people. Without long term testing we may find out in 5 years those who had the vaccine may suffer some side effects unknown today. More worrying is if in the future this delivery model becomes the norm where we roll out solutions before fully testing to save money.
marcosdumay 5y ago
In my opinion, that's the largest selling point of mRNA vaccines. In 4 weeks you can have the entire world's productivity capacity changed into whatever vaccine you deem urgent, and when it's not urgent, you can just store it in a computer's hard drive. Once this is possible¹, we can ask governments to keep some extra capacity unused to respond to emergencies. What is different from any previous tech, where extra capacity would be useless nearly every time. 1 - AKA, when the patents expire. I vote for greatly rewarding the people that developed them and taking the patents away, but I'm sure that won't happen, so I hope we don't see any larger pandemics for 15 years.