[HN Gopher] Making Vaccine ___________________________________________________________________ Making Vaccine Author : di Score : 253 points Date : 2021-02-04 04:55 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.lesswrong.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.lesswrong.com) | Imnimo wrote: | Without any evidence of efficacy, this article doesn't strike me | as much different from "I went into the woods and gathered up | some herbs and made myself an elixir that cures covid". I guess | it's neat that you did all that stuff, but unless it actually | helps, who cares? Doing it with science-y ingredients instead of | herbs and ordered them online instead of harvesting them from | plants doesn't magically mean it actually works. | ChuckMcM wrote: | The difference however is that this article is based on the | scientific method, and the go into the woods and gather herbs | is based on mythology. | | Now the reasonableness of experimenting on yourself, even in a | scientifically "valid" way, is certainly arguable. But the | elements are all there; Theory of the Immune system, Hypothesis | that it can be trained in this way, experiment that trains | immune system in a known with with the experimental training | element. | | As others have pointed out, the immune system is designed to | kill cells it doesn't like. And it has been demonstrated in | other scenarios that it can target cells that are vital to | one's survival, resulting in death when the immune system | targets and kills those cells. | | Thus the risk in the experiment is that it will successfully | invoke an immune response, it just won't be the one that was | anticipated. | | Not surprisingly, this is the whole point of animal trials to | get a feel for what might happen. | fabian2k wrote: | It's hardly the scientific method when the outcome isn't | actually measured. It is entirely unknown whether this whole | procedure has done anything at all. | habryka wrote: | The author said he is going to try to do measurements to | the best of what is easily possible: | | > So, we'll do (up to) two more blood tests. The first will | be two weeks after our third (weekly) dose; that one is the | "optimistic" test, in case three doses is more-than-enough | already. That one is optimistic for another reason as well: | synthesis/delivery of three of the nine peptides was | delayed, so our first three doses will only use six of | them. If the optimistic test comes back positive, great, | we're done. | | > If that test comes back negative, then the next test will | be the "more dakka" test. We'll add the other three | peptides, take another few weeks of boosters, maybe adjust | frequency and/or dosage - we'll consider exactly what | changes to make if and when the optimistic test comes back | negative. Risks are very minimal (again, see the paper), so | throwing more dakka at it makes sense. | | > Consider this a pre-registration. I intend to share my | test results here. | | Pre-registration for this kind of thing seems pretty good, | and I am looking forward to seeing the results. | 1970-01-01 wrote: | TLDR: I attempted to make a COVID vaccine. It was cheap. I have | no proof that it worked. Other risks are unknown. | | The story reminds me of Barry Marshall, but with less science | behind it. https://jamesclear.com/barry-marshall | [deleted] | bawolff wrote: | Honestly i'd be pretty shocked if this actually worked. | wegs wrote: | Why? | | In many cases, the hard part isn't so much making a working | vaccine, as proving it works, scaling manufacturing, etc. | bawolff wrote: | Because if all it took to make a vaccine for a respiratory | disease was stick some peptides up your nose, we would | havev a lot more vaccines (and i dont mean just for | covid.). | | Even if the other parts are harder (not sure if thats true. | The reason proving things work is hard is because most | initially promising candidates dont actually), it doesn't | follow that every single vaccine candidate works. | jcul wrote: | The idea of personal science reminds me of Alexander Shulgin | and his experiments in PHiKAL. | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHKAL | ChuckMcM wrote: | The science is in the whitepaper: https://radvac.org/wp- | content/uploads/2020/12/White-Paper-SA... | | That said, the interesting bits are: | | #1) Vaccine design at home. This is an application of what is | known colloquially as "bio-hacking" and as a topic group is no | less impactful than "computer hacking." | | #2) You can do something for < $1000 which wasn't possible | before because of the industry that will print you rna | sequences. | | Interesting stuff indeed. | 1970-01-01 wrote: | The whitepaper also lists some possible short and long term | side effects. | | I've TLDR'd most of them here for everyone: | | -Immune tolerance: diminished immunity resulting from | exposure to an antigen | | -Vaccine-enhanced disease (VED): A small number of injected | vaccines have led to enhancement of disease, meaning that | infectivity is enhanced, or the disease is made more serious | in people who have been vaccinated. | | -Adjuvant hyperstimulation or toxicity: ..certain adjuvants | have caused hyperstimulation and other serious side effects. | For example, alum produces a robust Th2 immune response, but | an unbalanced ratio of Th2:Th1. A Th2 polarized response, and | alum in particular, have been implicated in immunopathology, | including ADE. Adjuvants can also be toxic. As one example, | the intranasal use of a detoxified mutant form of Escherichia | coli Heat Labile Toxin has resulted in transient Bell's | palsy, or facial nerve paralysis. | | The whitepaper then argues the following: "And it becomes | clear why the formulation described here has not been used in | a commercial product; it is not lack of safety or efficacy, | but other factors.." | xirbeosbwo1234 wrote: | >as a topic group is no less impactful than "computer | hacking." | | It's way less impactful. An amateur playing with computers | might not achieve what a pro can, but it obviously has some | effect. Computer programs are rarely a placebo. | | Little these so-called bio-hackers do is known to be | effective. That's almost by definition. | TeMPOraL wrote: | It's more difficult due to low observability of the system, | low understanding of it, and long deployment cycle. | | Still, it's hacking molecular nanotechnology. Possible | developments are far more interesting than what we do with | computers now. Let's give it some time. | timerol wrote: | Similar to the author of the post, I'm surprised that I haven't | seen or heard much about bio-hacking your own vaccine. Seems like | an interesting trend to follow, though I will be waiting for an | FDA-approved vaccine myself. | | I am a little worried that https://radvac.org/vaccine/ mentions | that their vaccine has "the most extreme complication in some | recipients of stuffy noses." I would expect a functioning vaccine | to elicit an immune response. I would be more comforted if, like | the mRNA vaccine, a sizeable percentage of people trying the DIY | vaccine developed a short fever. Though according to them this is | expected: "Intranasal delivery of chitosan-based vaccines have | shown mild side effects and high levels of efficacy of both | mucosal and systemic immunity, when delivered in a prime-boost | regimen (in both animal models and human trials). " | ampdepolymerase wrote: | Because complying with GMP is tedious and expensive. One | mistake and you could end up with blood poisoning or a brain- | eating microbe. Lab grade material is not the same as | pharmaceutical grade material. You can get a lot of expensive | anti-cancer drugs too at bulk prices from lab suppliers. That | does not mean they are rated for human consumption. What's good | for the lab rat is not necessarily good for the _homo sapien_. | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_manufacturing_practice | | Granted, more biohacking and bio experimentation is a good | thing. Innovation should not be gatekept by institutions and | the establishment. | | Here's a startup idea for whoever's interested: | | Take lab grade pharmaceutical drugs and turn them into human- | rate drugs at a low cost. | caveperson2102 wrote: | Your comment made me think of something, I'll share it as a | "PSA" in case it helps someone stay safe. | | Neanderthal DNA has been linked to severe outcomes from | COVID.[0] To me that means I'll get vaccinated (and strain | specific boosters that may have to happen), full stop. But if I | have a choice of more than one type of vaccine available at the | same time (unlikely? But still), then I will try to keep this | in mind. Other than that it just means I will be extra careful. | | Disclaimer: not a scientist; and anything I say here is first- | person (I'm in the demographic groups I'm referring to). | | My non-scientific speculation: there is a chance the stuffy | nose could be a proxy for high neanderthal DNA. I say that | because other sinus and nasal issues are among the things | linked to genes inherited from Neanderthals. They had different | anatomies in that regard. I've read it could have been an | adaptation to cold. | | I've also read that the extinction of Neanderthals may have | been related to viruses causing respiratory | problems/diseases.[1] | | Anyways, the point is, that some of these genes could correlate | with severe outcomes from coronavirus. | | If a reader knows their genetics, and/or knows people who have | mentioned they have a relatively high amount of neanderthal | DNA... You might want to think about it or mention it to them. | Especially if they have other respiratory or sinus things going | on. | | [0]: | | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2818-3 | | https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/neanderthal-gene-fou... | | [1]: | | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190919080755.h... | | ---- | | [btw I accidentally posted this comment to the wrong thread | then moved it. Not trying to spam or rant, I'm just bad at | commenting because I rarely comment. Anxiety and so on...] | koeng wrote: | Josiah Zayner did one that looked fairly promising (believe it | was either an mRNA or DNA vaccine), but unfortunately he got | banned from a lot of media (like youtube) for it, so that may | partially explain why you haven't seen or heard much. | lxe wrote: | Just to summarize for my own understanding/fascination: this | person DIY's 500 doses of nasal-spray COVID-19 vaccine for $1000 | using ingredients and tools off of Amazon and easy-to-source | synthesized peptides with minimal skill? | habryka wrote: | Yes, though the vaccine is likely to have substantially less | efficacy than current mRNA based vaccines from Pfizer and | Moderna, though I think it's promising enough that some level | of efficacy (like idk. maybe 50%, who knows) doesn't seem out | of the question (whereas Moderna and Pfizer are likely 90%+). | SahAssar wrote: | > 50% efficacy doesn't seem out of the question | | Is there anything at all to back up that figure? Like, | seriously, anything at all? I'd be very interested to hear if | there was, but again, are there any hard numbers from studies | of success rates of this? Or even self-reported numbers? | avs733 wrote: | no. | | the actual efficacy on this isn't 50% or 100% or 0% is is | unknown. | | The value of the vaccines is in part that there is evidence | to backup that they work, they aren't dangerous, they are | formulated properly and consistently. | habryka wrote: | I suggested 50% as more of an upper bound. | | My current guess is I would be very surprised if these have | very high efficacy, based on a number of studies on kind of | similar vaccines I remember reading. I think the most | likely outcome is that these have 0% efficacy, though I | also wouldn't put less than 10% probability on them having | between 20% and 50%. | | But yeah, these are all just random guesses. Probably some | biologists have better models here that could allow them to | make better predictions, but there is no hard data. | [deleted] | xirbeosbwo1234 wrote: | This person DIY's 500 doses of nasal-spray something-or-other. | There is no evidence it's effective and little evidence it's | safe. | | Want a good laugh? Here's the research team: | https://radvac.org/researchers-map/ | | See how many obviously fake identities you can find. | maxerickson wrote: | They exposed their nasal tissues to peptides from the virus. | | You could call it an inoculation. I think it is okay to reserve | 'vaccine' for something a bit more fine tuned and tested. | LinuxBender wrote: | Reflecting back on vaccinating my own animals, several of the | vaccinations involved injecting a liquid into their noses. I | don't recall which vaccinations exactly, it's been a long | time. This was the method tested and approved by | veterinarians. | maxerickson wrote: | Revisiting this, the difference in definition between vaccine | and inoculation probably isn't so big. I think colloquially | it is a good difference here. | rossdavidh wrote: | Well, if we assume that your immune system takes a look at | something that showed up in your nasal membranes once, and | never reproduced, and said "that looks like a big problem we | should learn how to make antibodies against". It is entirely | possible that your immune system is smart enough to take a look | at that and say "that looks like a bunch of inert junk", and | does nothing, because it doesn't need to. | fabian2k wrote: | If there is one thing I certainly wouldn't just play around with | it's the immune system. It's incredibly dangerous and easily | capable of causing all kinds of harm to yourself up to killing | you outright. | | A vaccine is designed to produce an immune response of the right | magnitude. Too low and it doesn't work, too high and it'll cause | damage. At least one of the vaccine candidates in development was | put back to the drawing board because the immune response wasn't | strong enough. So this is not an area that is entirely | predictable, you have to carefully test this to know if it works. | | I'd also be very careful about the inhalation route. Inhalable | insulin is a well-known failure, in part because of side effects | due to the inhalation. And that is a protein that isn't designed | to activate your immune system. | | I also hope the synthesized peptides were carefully purified, you | really don't want to inhale e.g. residual trifluoracetic acid. | zests wrote: | Can you provide more information about how vaccines can cause | damage? | bawolff wrote: | For vaccines in general, i imagine it depends on the type a | lot. Live vaccines for example have the obvious risk factor | of maybe giving you the disease, but i dont know much about | the topic. | | I imagine for this article the biggest risk is you make | something other than you expect and poision yourself, or you | just make something that does nothing. (IANAexpert) | m-ee wrote: | You can actually do much worse than nothing with antibody | dependent enhancement. Let's say you make something that at | first glance appears similar to the virus but is a little | off. Maybe you chose the wrong proteins, or maybe you used | an inactivated virus and the inactivation step damaged some | key part of the virus. You inject the vaccine and your body | learns how to make antibodies for this particle. | | Now the real virus shows up, your body goes "Aha! I've seen | this before let me make those antibodies." But it wasn't | trained on the real virus, so the antibodies it makes | aren't actually effective against the real thing. The virus | replicates and your body makes more and more antibodies but | they do nothing to stop it. Meanwhile the the antibodies | are running rampant in your body causing inflammation and | blood clots. | | This has happened before with vaccine candidates, and is | analogous to what goes in on severe covid. The body tries | to respond to the invading virus but does so ineffectively | and causes potential deadly damage. | dante_dev wrote: | I think he was referring generically to any bad crafted | vaccine. Not the one approved by authorities. Indeed any | improvised drug can be harmful. | wiml wrote: | Some vaccines in the past have been withdrawn for causing | autoimmune disorders, eg arthritis. | m-ee wrote: | The goal of the vaccine is to train the immune system to | recognize the real virus when it shows up. If you get it | wrong, the vaccine may not simulate the virus very accurately | which can lead to a number of issues. You may not mount an | immune response when the virus shows up, or worse the vaccine | may have improperly trained your immune system and you create | antibodies that are ineffective against the virus but wreak | havoc on your body. This has happened before with vaccine | candidates like RSV or Dengvaxia. It can be deadly. | | That's not even getting into the issues that may arise from | skipping all the GMP/GLP guidelines. They can be tedious but | exist for a reason. | recursivedoubts wrote: | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/04/14/cutter- | pol... | fabian2k wrote: | I said that the immune system can cause damage. Vaccines have | a very high safety standard as they are given to large | numbers of healthy people, so the tolerance for serious side | effects is very low. So the development there is very | careful, and anything that looks too dangerous is hopefully | caught in animal experiments or at worst at phase I. | | A well known example of how dangerous the immune system can | be is the following phase I trial: | | https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa063842 | | That drug caused a cytokine storm in the participants in the | phase I trial. | | Allergies are another example of how dangerous the immune | system can be if it is triggered against the wrong targets. | zests wrote: | I have no doubts about the safety of vaccines in healthy | people. I have some harmless curiosity about people who are | not known to be healthy. How do you actually determine if | someone is "too immunocompromised" for a vaccine? | | This must be a question with no good answer. | majormajor wrote: | > I have no doubts about the safety of vaccines in | healthy people. I have some harmless curiosity about | people who are not known to be healthy. How do you | actually determine if someone is "too immunocompromised" | for a vaccine? | | My understanding is that being too immunocompromised for | a vaccine happens in two different ways: | | 1) the vaccine contains live virus and so there's danger | that the weak immune system couldn't fight this off | | 2) the vaccine isn't live, so it's not dangerous on its | own, but the immune system is too weak to recognize it, | so it doesn't build any immunity to the real thing. (One | doctor I was talking to said the mRNA ones should be good | here, because your own body produces so much of the | lookalikes that even a weak immune system should notice | it - and then you're much better prepared to fight the | real thing off faster.) | | Only the first is immediately dangerous, so the standard | seems to be to just stay away from those. | | I'm not sure if much is commonly done for the second, in | terms of looking for response, but you can get tests for | measles antibodies and such, so that would probably be | how? | gus_massa wrote: | The MMR vaccine has live virus, and before injecting the | kids the nurse make a few additional questions about the | health of the children and IIRC about the people that | live with the children. (Like: Does someone in the family | have cancer or is immunosuppressed? I don't remember the | details.) It's safe, but they must check that the nearby | persons are healthy. | jerf wrote: | I have suspected for much of the last year that a lot of | people are running on an unexamined "Only crazy people | think vaccines cause autism -> Only crazy people think | vaccines are ever dangerous in any way -> All vaccines are | perfectly safe" psuedo-syllogism. | | This is false. | | Put another way, the very fact that we run such massive | tests on them before deploying them is itself evidence that | the wrong ones can be very dangerous. (Mostly, as I | understand it, "very dangerous" to a small set of people | who will have very large reactions, even if most people are | fine. The ones that are very dangerous to everyone never | gets past the initial phases at all, of course.) We're not | doing that because vaccines are all perfectly safe under | all conditions, but we just want to hold them back for a | year for no reason. We're doing it because we need to be | very careful with them. | | Though I'd also observe a non-trivial component of that | danger is also because we're injecting them. Bypassing the | body's co-evolved with the environment's defenses is not to | be done lightly. This sort of inhaled vaccine is likely to | be much _less_ dangerous. I won 't say "safe", but _less_ | dangerous; the body already has to deal with essentially | arbitrary small amino acid sequences being inhaled all the | time. I 'd still be a bit worried about sythesizing things | that we haven't co-evolved with. | | (If you don't know what co-evolution is, I'd suggesting | taking a moment to learn about it: | https://www.britannica.com/science/coevolution It's a very | important part of understanding the disease landscape | holistically.) | bawolff wrote: | [Deleted. I didn't fully read the parents post, and | responded emotionally. That was wrong of me and I | apologize] | yters wrote: | I personally know very intelligent and highly educated | people who went to top universities who are convinced | vaccines caused mental retardation in their children. | They may be wrong, but I would not call them nutjobs. | pwython wrote: | > "very intelligent and highly educated people who went | to top universities" | | Imagine trusting a "rocket scientist" to even weigh in on | medical topics because they are "very intelligent" in | their totally unrelated field. This is an unfortunate | misconception that plagues conspiracy theory extremists | who reference PhD graduates in their arguments against | things like 5G brain control.... pointing to people with | doctoral degrees in Music or something. | bawolff wrote: | Being smart and being crazy are not mutually exclusive | macintux wrote: | I think it's more accurate to say that intelligence is | not adequate defense against trusting the wrong sources | of information, and people are _extremely_ resistant to | changing their minds once they've placed a stake in the | ground. | bawolff wrote: | I'd go with both. There are plenty of smart people who i | would consider delusional. Which is separate from people | stuck in their views. | | However, as the saying goes, science advances one funeral | at a time. | jerf wrote: | If you think carefully, you may realize that what you | said is actually entirely unrelated to what I said. | | Perhaps you are not one of the people running on the | unexamined assumption. I still say it's clearly operative | in many people. | | I call it "unexamined" precisely because once pulled up | the conscious level, it is obviously false. Nevertheless, | pulling such things up to the conscious level is not easy | and usually takes effort. Or, to put it another why, | while I cringe every time I adopt this terminology, | Kahneman's System 1 is pretty sloppy about such things. | System 2, when presented with a problem directly, can | often see quickly that System 1 is being irrational... | but it first must be presented with the problem directly. | bawolff wrote: | Yes you are right. I like to think im better than that, | but in this instance i clearly wasn't. | | If i can quibble though, i think "all" can be a bit of a | loaded word in this context, because people often use it | to mean, all well known ones or something along those | lines and not all potential ones including random stuff | people make in their backyards. | fpgaminer wrote: | I recall a researcher talking about previous attempts at | creating coronavirus vaccines. How they resulted not in | immunity, but in training the immune system to _over_ respond | when a real infection came along. | | After a bit of digging I found this: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/ | | > An early concern for application of a SARS-CoV vaccine was | the experience with other coronavirus infections which induced | enhanced disease and immunopathology in animals when challenged | with infectious virus | | I didn't dig deep enough to see if any experimental vaccines | caused similar issues, but it definitely appears to be a | concern. | | So yeah, I'd be _very_ cautious with any homebrew vaccine. You | might accidentally train your immune system to self destruct | when you get exposed to a real SARS-CoV-2. | | That said, I have little to no experience with biology, so it's | entirely possible that radvac based vaccinations have already | been demonstrated not to have this particular problem. | ufo wrote: | A recent attempt at a dengue vaccine faced a similar problem. | The most dangerous kind of dengue fever happens when you are | infected a second time, by a different variant than you were | infected the first time. It turns out that the vaccine ended | up having a similar effect as catching dengue for the first | time. People who never had dengue and got vaccinated had a | lower chance of catching the disease in the future. But if | they did catch it there was a higher risk of it being the | more dangerous version. The end result is that the vaccine is | now only recommended for people who already had dengue | before. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengvaxia | [deleted] | spoonjim wrote: | What is the rationale for doing this? | CivBase wrote: | 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? | bawolff wrote: | Any evidence that this "vaccine" actually works and does | anything. | avs733 wrote: | Quality control. Precision. Repeatability. Certification. | Knowledge. Distribution. Efficacy. Evidence. | | It's like the difference between heroin and opioids | asitov wrote: | Are you saying you wouldn't take the heroin version of a | covid vax? | bawolff wrote: | Heroin actually gets the job done and you can tell if its | working. Not so with this. | xxpor wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. :) | _Microft wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | > 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. | Avshalom wrote: | 1% is not the lowest percent. | _Microft wrote: | Everyone loves an underdog but I can not imagine that this | could possibly work. Why do you think bio-hackers could | come up with something that thousands of smart people in | the industry could not? The money would almost certainly be | better spent on upgrading production facilities in advance | and starting vaccine production long before approval. | dragontamer wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 | aqme28 wrote: | I don't think that's true. You still need to study the | testers over a period of time. With a human challenge study | you can get by with fewer testers and a little less time, | but it won't be that different. | biggieshellz wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | bmj wrote: | Remember that in, say, a cancer treatment trial, patients | are signing up to potentially _not_ receive the treatment | depending on the run-in and randomization phases. I 'm | not suggesting these patients are forced into that | decision; rather, I'm just pointing that controlled, | randomized trials have some ethical fuzziness around | them. | dragontamer wrote: | But they already have cancer, and the treatment may (or | may not) help them. | | What's being proposed here is for people to sign up and | then inject a potentially deadly disease into them. | gojomo wrote: | But until treatments/vaccines were developed, everyone on | Earth had the disease-equivalent, sometimes-fatal status | of "no prior immunity to COVID". | | Sure, the scale is massively different for a young | helathy person: "susceptible to COVID" would mean a | moderate chance of catching (growing over time) the | disease, and then a small chance fo death or previous | complications. But the "susceptibility" is a "health | condition" with nonzero risk-of-death. | | And for society as a whole, COVID passed cancer as a | cause of death last year, and in January 2021 has been | killing about twice as many people as all cancers | _combined_. | | So "diagnosed-with-cancer" versus "susceptible-to-COVID" | shouldn't be _that_ different in terms of the kinds of | risks we 'd let informed people take to address that | danger. | mysterypie wrote: | Not forcefully. He said paid volunteers. Why does the | idea of challenge trials cause a furious reaction? Let's | compare it to the space shuttle: 135 missions with 2 | missions in which everyone died. That's a case fatality | rate of 1.5% -- in the neighborhood of the Covid CFR. And | I'd expect a challenge trial on young healthy volunteers | to have a _much_ lower CFR. Why is risking people for the | shuttle OK, but risking people for a vaccine that | benefits all of humanity not OK? | nostromo wrote: | For this age range, the survival rate for everyone is | 99.98%. It'd be even higher if your screened aggressively | for comorbidities / general health and provided everyone | with top notch healthcare _knowing in advance they have | been exposed_. | | I would sign up for this in a heartbeat. Not only for the | cash payment -- but you'd be a local hero. | maxerickson wrote: | Why wouldn't they be willing volunteers? | | It would be quite possible for it to clearly be informed | consent also, at least to the extent the disease was | characterized at that point in time. | | The reason people keep bringing it up is that the | consequences of the pandemic have been much worse than | the consequences of allowing a few thousand people to | intentionally expose themselves to an infection in a | controlled setting1. It's not guaranteed that challenge | trials would have mitigated the pandemic, but it's weird | to just outright circumscribe the possibility when the | ongoing downside is huge. | | 1. I use the odd phrasing here because lots of people | pretty much choose to expose themselves to the infection | anyway; maybe not explicitly, but close enough. | marvin wrote: | Would it be immoral if they were offered a million | dollars?Honest question, because it feels like the | philosophy might not match up with common experience. It | feels like an interesting question. People voluntarily | risk worse for less pay in other fields, e.g. the | military. | | And if it wasn't immoral, what is the dollar limit? | dragontamer wrote: | Money is worth different amounts to different people. | | Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos will never risk their life for | "only" a million bucks. Find a depressed + suicidal dude | somewhere else, and they may be personally willing to | risk their life for just $100. | | Making an industry of people who are willing to harm | themselves for money is... probably not the business we | should be encouraging. And that's assuming everyone is | "playing nice". At a minimum, it means that we'll be | inclined to start experimenting upon the poor and | depressed (and then shedding away moral qualms because | they signed a piece of paper). | | Historically speaking in the USA, we have legacies like | the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, where African Americans were | chosen as the control group and lied to about getting a | Syphilis treatment: leading to a generation+ long | distrust in science. | | Yeah yeah, we can't "assume" scientists will be racist | jackasses today. But... we still have to account for what | happened in our history and why certain testing | methodologies have become taboo. | namesbc wrote: | In order to use this method to test a vaccine for | deployment to people over 65, you need people over 65 in | your control group. | | This means you are choosing people to murder. | tinus_hn wrote: | A ridiculous exaggeration; you're asking for volunteers | to take a risk. Not killing them. | | People can decide for themselves to take risks. You may | not agree with the choices they make and that is your | problem. Not theirs. | reillyse wrote: | Total ethical failure here. You are supposed to not make | people ill. | xyzzyz wrote: | Disregarding a way to accelerate vaccine development by | months, and save literally hundreds of thousands of lives | along the way, because one thoughtlessly applies cliches | like "you are supposed to not make people ill", even | though the people who you make ill are all volunteers, | well aware of the risk, and handsomely compensated for | it, is the real total ethical failure. | | It's as if when there are some "professional" ethicists | in the area who give "professional" ethical guidance, | people lose their natural moral sense, and defer to their | "professional" guidance no matter how silly it is if you | apply even modicum of scrutiny. | nostromo wrote: | 2,000,000+ people are dead because we didn't take this | path. | | The risk to testers under 40 would have been negligible. | I'm not being flippant about other peoples' lives -- I | would have signed up myself if the compensation was high | enough. | dragontamer wrote: | > The risk to testers under 40 would have been | negligible. | | Luke Letlow (age 41) says otherwise, since he's dead. | Okay, he's above 40, but he's high-profile and easy for | me to remember. Plenty of sub 40 year olds have died. | | Even among the survivors... plenty of young and healthy | 20-30 year olds are having month-long recoveries, unable | to breath at their old capacity. | | Purposefully damaging the control group (who by | definition, must NOT receive the vaccine) is immoral. | Whether people in the control group believe in the | potential harms of the disease or not. | [deleted] | nostromo wrote: | "One person died" isn't a refutation, it's just appeal to | emotion. | | Under 40 the survival rate is 99.98% for everyone -- | including the already ill. If you screened for | comorbidities and gave people great healthcare, you could | get that 99.999% or higher. And save millions of lives | (and trillions of dollars) by doing so. | dragontamer wrote: | > Under 40 the survival rate is 99.98% for everyone -- | including the already ill | | I doubt that. But I'm not entirely sure how to calculate | the numbers you just said. | | https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm | | I realize this page changes, so I've taken a screenshot | here: https://imgur.com/0iM5FHC | | This is the chart of who died in January 2021. Yes, most | deaths are aged 65+, but there's been deaths in all age | categories. I doubt its 99.98% as you suggest (especially | since the current case-mortality-rate is ~2.5%, at least | for my state) | | The official CDC numbers are stratified from 35 to 44, | I'm not entirely sure who you are citing to get "below | 40" age groups. | aqme28 wrote: | I'm amazed at the price here. $1k for 500 doses, and the author | stated in the comments that they could have saved a lot more per | dose if they bought in bulk. | | It seems like a failure of the system that no one is trying for | FDA approval or industrialization. | [deleted] | hannob wrote: | The prices for Astrazeneca vaccines are within the same range. | | There are also efforts for some simple to produce vaccines | underway, it's just not the ones you'll likely see used widely | in industrialized countries. An example is the chinese | Coronavac vaccine. | | Though keep in mind making vaccines isn't just producing them, | it's also running trials. It pretty much doesn't matter how | cheap your production is, it will hardly affect the cost of the | trial. And after all they're there so you actually know whether | your vaccine works - and that part certainly shouldn't be | skipped. | GuB-42 wrote: | They couldn't have bought in bulk "The only unusual hiccup was | an email about customs restrictions on COVID-related peptides. | Apparently the company was not allowed to send us 9 mg in one | vial, but could send us two vials of 4.5 mg each for each | peptide." | | The big problems with COVID vaccines is making sure they are | safe and effective, and logistics. The author doesn't do any of | these. There is a scale difference of 7 orders of magnitude | compared to what we need. And he is taking risks that would be | unreasonable for a commercial vaccine and efficiency is "let's | see if it does something". | | It is an experiment and it has scientific value, maybe some of | the mainstream vaccine candidates started out like this. But it | cannot be compared to current widespread vaccination efforts. | | As for the money, it is a common fallacy to think that throwing | money at a problem will solve it. Same as an often seen | argument "it will take $X billion to end world hunger". World | hunger is solved with food, not money, people don't eat money. | On a small scale, you just have to go to the grocery store and | spend money to feed a starving person. On a large scale there | simply not enough food available unless we do some major | changes regarding agriculture and distribution, throwing in | money will just cause price inflation. Same thing with | vaccines. | readams wrote: | Food supply is not the problem with world hunger. There's | more than enough food to go around, and if there weren't | that's actually a problem that money would solve very well. | The problem is getting the food to the people regardless of | circumstance, such as war, repressive regimes, natural | disasters, and other problems. | | Vaccines are similar: vaccinating the world will be | logistically very very hard. But vaccinating first-world | countries is a lot easier, and supply of vaccine in rich | countries absolutely is a problem that can be solved with | more money and resources. The fact that we've had so much | trouble solving it is a political problem. | goatcode wrote: | > FDA approval | | Of what? | | Edit: I get it now, sorry. I think FDA approval would bump up | the price quite a bit. | palcu wrote: | This Lesswrong thread has a good discussion about the subject. | | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/niQ3heWwF6SydhS7R/making-vac... | fredgrott wrote: | it's not you are implying.. they use peptide..real vaccines use | mRNA thus more effective than this one at say about 10% | effectiveness.. | | Sorry for being brief as it would take a more in depth hour | explanation of why the difference in effectiveness.. | | CDC had a recent article on the differences between this | approach and the approach they and pharms chose namely mRNA | raylad wrote: | >real vaccines use mRNA thus more effective than this one at | say about 10% effectiveness.. | | Not true. Novavax is just peptides and is 96% effective | against the original Wuhan covid-19 strain. | sct202 wrote: | Novavax is growing whole modified spike proteins and | sticking a dozen of them on to a nanoparticle. The article | mentions their peptide is only a small fraction of the size | of the spike protein. | goatcode wrote: | > In principle one can run a similar antibody test on a mucus | sample, but <reasons> | | I'd really like to know what those reasons are. It seems like a | pretty important detail. | pas wrote: | tl;dr a partial/localized immune response just in the nose; and | to confirm the vaccine worked you want to be sure | | It seems "the basic issue is that immunity response in the | mucus lining (i.e. nose, lung, airway surfaces) can occur | independently of response in the bloodstream". | | Which I guess means a false positive for post-vaccination | verification. (The sentence you have copied is shortly after | this: "The key problem is how to check that the vaccine | worked.") | | If your question is why it's possible to have a partial immune | response, then it's because the immune system was not activated | fully. The immune response might only consist of "sIgA | antibodies in nasalwash and saliva", sIgA is secreted IgA, and | IgA "is an antibody that plays a crucial role in the immune | function of mucous membranes". | | So if mucous membrane successfully "handles" the vaccine, then | -- layman speculation -- it's possible nothing [not enough] | gets into the bloodstream/lymph. | [deleted] | trash_cat wrote: | This is actually super exciting. However, there is literally 0 | evidence that this works. Am I missing something? | gregwebs wrote: | All the current vaccines being rolled out give non-sterilizing | immunity. This means the vaccinated still get infected in the | upper respiratory tract and still transmit the virus (but perhaps | 50% less transmission). The vaccine protects them from developing | a severe infection (COVID). The implication of this is that we | will still be dealing with this virus for many years to come. | | I hope the drug companies are working on a vaccine similar to the | one in the article that has the potential to provide sterilizing | immunity since it works in the upper respiratory tract. | maxerickson wrote: | They did not study it, there is not data to make conclusive | statements. There really isn't data to state a quantified | reduction in transmission (None!). | fpgaminer wrote: | I know some people object to biohacking like this, but I'm not | convinced that we should be concerned. In general I believe that, | in a free society, people should be allowed to do as they please | as long as their actions don't endanger or harm others. There's a | lot of nuance and caveats there, though. Perhaps this is one? | | I guess I don't see an inherent problem with vaccine hacking. I'm | reminded of the person who biohacked their lactose intolerance by | doing gene modification on their gut. Even though it's not | something I'd experiment on myself with, I was happy to learn | from someone else's experience. And they're only endangering | themselves; that experiment didn't pose a threat to anyone else | or society. | | There's perhaps an argument that these kinds of things do have an | impact on others, because it might convince others to follow the | author's footsteps. Well I highly doubt any joe or jane shmo is | going to homebrew a vaccine. This is so niche that only a scarce | few would even have the capability to do it. And again, if | someone wants to do something stupid to themselves, who am I to | stop them? | | The only real danger is these homebrew vaxxed people mixing with | herd immunity. But that's easily handled by only recognizing | government approved vaccines. You're welcome to vax yourself, but | if you want access to restricted public activities you'll need an | official vaccine. Or if we mandate vaccination (for example the | required immunizations at school), again you need an official | vaccine. | | But if you want to homebrew vaxx yourself against the yearly flu, | or even want to homebrew vax COVID-19 and get the official one | later when it's more available, I don't see the problem with any | of that. | | I'm mostly curious for rebuttals to this logic. Are there serious | concerns about biohacking like this that I'm missing? Or is this | one of the caveats where, even though it doesn't pose a danger to | others, it's a serious enough danger to self that we should | intervene? | | P.S. As a side note, while reading this article I couldn't help | but imagine a future where every hospital has a "vaccine machine" | which gets fed raw materials and spits out the vaccine de jure on | demand. That seems doable with this radvac protocol. It can | download the latest approved peptide sequences, assemble and | purify the peptides and mix up a vaccine. A vaccine 3D printer of | sorts. Or maybe mRNA vaccines can be made this way? You come in | once a year, the machine looks up your records and downloads a | list of virus genomes from the past year that you hadn't been | vaccinated against. Prints out the custom set of mRNA sequences, | mixes it up, and you inject it. That's the future I'm far more | interested in than a future where everyone biohacks themselves | with instructions downloaded from vaccinebay. | Aachen wrote: | One rebuttal for this logic could be that everything you do has | side effects. Messing up your health costs society tons of | money in lost tax income and the burden on healthcare. | | But as a starting point, I've thought the same in the past and | I don't think it's bad. Just that crossing a red light, even if | no one was harmed that particular instance, may still be judged | to be reckless and fineable, and even if it's only about your | own dead body (let's say you didn't run in front of a cyclist), | that's still an impact in the way described above. | Nevertheless, if you use "don't bother others" as a general | rule for what should probably be legal and then define | exceptions for particular situations and reasons, or even if | you just look for those side effects, it might be useful. | karmicthreat wrote: | This seems to be a form of magical thinking cloaked in science. | It might even screw up them getting the real covid vaccine later. | namesbc wrote: | This is like a person writing a 100 line python program to search | a text file, and claiming they finished a competitor for Google. | [deleted] | angry_octet wrote: | Even if no one dies from this, he and the contrarian happy | clappers on lesswrong deserve a special recognition for ingenuity | at the Darwin Awards. The field is crowded for 2020, what with | HCQ and ivermectin truthers, statistical frauds, denialists and | blind optimists, but there is a chance they'll dominate the anti- | vaxxers in 2021. | jancsika wrote: | > contrarian happy clappers on lesswrong | | I don't understand why, but that insult apparently smells | correct to a guard dog in my brain. | | Do you have an ELI5 for what the insult means? | traverseda wrote: | https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Happy%20clap. | .. | angry_octet wrote: | Unquestioning joy at the truth of the sermon, convolved with | belief that their own brilliance has been ignored and they | can see truth more clearly. | | ELI5: a cult that believes that they know the secrets of the | world and everyone else is dumb. | tinus_hn wrote: | This is a nice analogy to the people who in software propagate | the 'enterprise' mindset. In their minds, their way is the only | way and everyone should and will just conform to their needs. | | Reality shows that's not always true, witness for instance the | death of the irreplaceable technologies Internet Explorer and | Flash. | | Argue all you want but these vaccines have been taken by | hundreds of people with no ill effect already. So for the | people in the article the risks are not worse than the people | in the trials for the commercial vaccines. | | I don't know about the scarcity of the ingredients in this | vaccine but if I was in government I'd have directed an | institute to run a report on theoretic safety and then a trial | on volunteers. That's a better option than locking up the | population for over a year while we wait for the commercial | vaccines. | t_serpico wrote: | It would probably be safer for him to actually get covid than | develop your own diy vaccine... | flr03 wrote: | I'm not suprised to see this post so popular on Less Wrong/the | rational community. I can easily imagine the fascination they | have for crazy scientists doing experimentations on them | selves, cutting all the corners and operating at fair distance | of ethical concerns. I'm not very convinced by the | "Motivations" section of the article by the way, but that's a | nice stunt nonetheless, and quite fascinating indeed. | angry_octet wrote: | They've romanticised the stories of scientists self-testing | and mixed it with the stories of Jenner and Fleming, | misinterpreting their unethical (Jenner) and credit grabbing | (Fleming) ways as brilliant contrarianism. | kneel wrote: | Curious whether short peptides are sufficient to generate a | formidable immune response. | | Looking at the paper cited, it's not trivial to detect T-cell | immunity so I'm not sure a general antibody test would be able to | pick up an immune response. | | It's probably better than doing nothing, but it's not clear | whether it's even in the same ballpark as a Pfizer vaccine. | | edit: I'm not sure about t-cell vs b-cell responses in | immunoassays, can anyone with experience point out what is going | on with these peptides? | jfjrkrkfjf wrote: | Not an expert, but I've read that the antigen presenting cells | break down the antigen into short peptides too (8-20 amino | acids) when creating antibodies. | | One might however still ask if the body is better at selecting | exactly which portions are cut and chosen than however these | were selected. | | Also, if the antigen is small from the start, that might have | implications too (like being ignored). | deadlyvaccine wrote: | I really hope no vaccine will work and all over-80 people will | pay for all the suffering they have done for 98% of the | population. People are living in conditions similar to jail | second year in a row! | [deleted] | jiofih wrote: | > Doing it for ourselves doesn't capture all the benefits - lots | of fun stuff is still closed/cancelled - but it's enough to go | out, socialize, and generally enjoy life without worrying about | COVID. | | Yes, I look forward to having random people skirt the social | distancing rules because they sniffed their own homemade vaccine | over the weekend. | Aachen wrote: | They spent a thousand bucks on this and many weeks and blood | tests. I agree with your general point but do give them some | credit. | jiofih wrote: | No mention of blood test results in the post. | Aachen wrote: | Yeah, the results aren't in yet. | | > Consider this a pre-registration. I intend to share my | test results here. | | Of course, without checking/testing this would be a | completely useless exercise. Or if you test in the wrong | way, like a nose swab after doing nose spray vaccination. | OP instead will do blood tests and does seem to have | thought this through to an extent that I find reasonable. | | However, henceforth considering yourself safe indefinitely | and normalizing socializing during the pandemic and | normalizing the homebrewing of vaccines... that's where I'm | not certain about the conclusion (iff it proves effective | in the first place - e.g. I also see no mention of false | positive rates in the test they'll use). | tinus_hn wrote: | He could use the anal test introduced in China | devilduck wrote: | Why am I supposed to take this seriously? LessWrong is not | exactly known for being a sane place (as much as many of them | would love to believe they are smart) and this guy states it as a | "fun project" which make it sound extremely suspect. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-02-05 23:00 UTC)