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Comment by vijayr02 | Hacker News Reader

I just posted a story about a vaccine being found. Would be great to know from the experts in this area if the approach they describe in the article makes sense

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22565460

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I'm fairly certain finding the vaccine is really quite easy to develop and has been done by multiple companies small and large already. The main issue is to do the clinical trials and get it approved and mass produced in a timely fashion.

These trials and the validation can take about a year.

Here is the official list of currently being developed covid19 vaccines (all in pre-clinical stage)

https://www.who.int/blueprint/priority-diseases/key-action/n...

Thanks for the quick reply.

In the article I referenced, the company says they use a novel plant based method which allows mass production, and expect phase three clinical trials to be completed by November.

The company, Medicago, is not on the list you provided. It also seems to be a Pentagon funded biotech company so trying to understand how credible this news may be (I'm sure there are many unscrupulous companies trying to claim a miracle cure at this point!)

Yeah, a local hospital was approved for vaccine testing today. Timeline for completing the tests? 13 months.

It makes sense that vaccines need more careful assessment before rollout than treatment pharmaceuticals. When the medical infrastructure has reached triage grade saturation, even coin toss treatment candidates could become rational if they can run in parallel to conventional treatment. Exposing the still healthy to a vaccine is an entirely different risk calculation.

A reasonably opportunity to throw money at the problem would be to fund speculative production ramp-up for likely candidates ahead of approval, this should not be left to the invisible hand alone.

We are potentially looking at upwards of a half a million people dead. 13 months makes zero sense no matter how you slice it.

We are potentially looking at half a billion dead.

I hope for your own sake that you haven't put any skin in the game over that assumption.

How comes, then, that every year there is a flu vaccine ready before the season starts?

(Warning: very layperson understanding below)

There are many variants of the flu. Most of them are well-enough understood to vaccinate against, and most of those have an already-tested-and-approved vaccine. The yearly flu vaccine is a combination of those vaccines for the strains the public health experts think are going to be an issue that season.

Sometimes they get it right. Sometimes they don't, and we have a bad flu season (see also: this year).

They start making the flu vaccine the year before. It takes six to nine months, and lots of chicken eggs.

Here's a Planet Money rerun that talks about how they make the regular flu vaccine: https://www.npr.org/2020/03/06/812943907/episode-977-wheres-...

Transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/812943907

Yeah candidate vaccines are easy, proven, safe, working ones hard.

However the Chinese seem prepared to cut corners on the testing and that:

"Coronavirus vaccine could be ready by April, Chinese officials say" https://nypost.com/2020/03/10/coronavirus-vaccine-could-be-r...

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