What you need to know about the Covid-19 vaccine | Hacker News Reader

What you need to know about the Covid-19 vaccine

gatesnotes.com

103 pointsmisiti378024 comments

All very promising but I am simply not interested in a brand new vaccine that has been minimally tested. Especially an mRNA vaccine, a technology which is only a few years old now and comes with side effects like inducing autoimmunity. We're talking about altering your genome, permanently.

The Gates article mentions the mRNA solution needs to be kept at -80C up until delivery. In a controlled environment, a test lab in a first world country this is completely feasible. However the logistical challenges that presents seem impossible when you consider the infrastructure (or lack thereof) of a continent like Africa.

The normal development cycle of a vaccine is 5 years and we're shortening that to 18 months? By having years less human testing? And side stepping government regulators? No thank you.

And really all I get out of it is short term immunity which requires boosters or worse a yearly shot like the flu shot? Honestly it sounds worse and worse the more I research it.

IIRC, while Moderna's solution is RNA based, Inovio's should be DNA based, which means -20C instead of -80C, a definite improvement.

Can you offer a source on the claim that an mRNA vaccine would permanently alter your genome? I have a PhD in microbiology, and I would be VERY surprised if an mRNA vaccine did that.

Does anyone have a list of the 8-10 vaccines Bill Gates think are especially promising?

This resource[1] linked by Gates in the article says

> "Most of the active projects are in exploratory or preclinical stages. However, 5 candidates have recently moved into clinical development, including mRNA-1273 (Moderna), Ad5-nCoV (CanSino Biologicals), INO-4800 (Inovio), LV-SMENP-DC and pathogen-specific aAPC (Shenzhen Geno-Immune Medical Institute). Notably, Moderna was able to start clinical testing of its mRNA-based vaccine just 63 days after sequence identification."

Presumably, those are 5 out of the 8-10 that Gates thinks is promising

[1]: https://cepi.net/news_cepi/cepi-publishes-analysis-of-covid-...

I'm surprised the one from Oxford isn't mentioned.

Why are you surprised?

Because it's one that's been aggressively pushed by the institution itself and the only one that I know of that seeks partnerships with many companies / institutions without any royalty involved (that I know of, at least).

Also because they were quickly able to get 1000+ people for the Phase 1 study, and they're starting the Phase 2/3 study next month (objective: 6000 people recruited).

They want (assuming that it is effective, of course, which is absolutely not guaranteed) to have something ready for emergency use by early autumn.

Perhaps it's just better communication on their part, mind you.

I'm curious about this. Could you please point me towards more information?

Here are some resources:

- http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-04-23-oxford-covid-19-vaccine-...

- https://covid19vaccinetrial.co.uk/

- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/world/europe/coronavirus-...

- https://www.biocentury.com/article/305063/

The NY Times story is a bit of storytelling but it's kind of fascinating how they got there.

For now I'm placing my bets on this one because they do not want royalties out of it and they're seeking deals with many companies to manufacture as much as possible (at risk, because at this point it is not known if it works).

The other promising factor is that their work is a continuation of a 10 year project to develop a coronavirus vaccine. They are just modifying it to work with sars-cov2. So it already had a lot of work out into it.

not a direct answer but https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/23/a-...

Well, you can start mixing the concrete for the factories before the vaccine is ready if you want to save time.

Given how quickly the virus is spreading in NYC will the vaccine be ready before most people have already gotten it?

It's kind of irrelevant, timing-wise. If other varieties of coronavirus are anything to go by, it's likely that people's immunity will fade in something like 12-18 months and we'll get another round of this (albeit more localized based on where the cases peaked 12-18 months before) if a vaccine isn't available yet.

Well, if fighting off the disease doesn't produce long term immunity, then neither will a vaccine. I guess we'll either have to keep-up with booster doses, and hope for the best that the the virus doesn't mutate enough to not be neutralized by the given vaccine.

Any idea whether a COVID-19 vaccine can be added to the annual flu shot cocktail or are we going to be asking folks to get vaccinated twice each year? If 2 vaccines, can they be given at the same time or would we need to space them out for a period?

Probably too soon to know for certain but could add to the challenges of attaining and maintaining herd immunity.

There are multiple COVID vaccines in play, and they use different technologies. Assuming you have a choice, it would depend on which of those you're administering. But yes, it is certainly possible. There already exist combination vaccines like MMR, DPT, etc

I feel reasonably confident about vaccine efficacy, I suspect the reason this thing is so bad is because of the binding affinity of its spike protein. If that mutates, it will become less lethal so waning vaccine efficacy becomes less of an issue.

Well, even if it mutates in a way that is beneficial (to us), you still have the original strain which will continue to spread unabated without a vaccine. It was just a handful of people who were infective initially, and now the diseases has spread everywhere. It can still happen again.

Also, for diseases that are considered "eradicated" because we now have a vaccine, if you are one of the insane anti-vax people and stop giving vaccines to your kids you can still have outbreaks because of natural reservoirs for the disease. (For e.g. measles outbreak in the state of Washington). Infectious diseases rarely just go away completely.

> If other varieties of coronavirus

What other varieties? SARS and MERS are some significant coronaviruses, both died out long before there was a vaccine.

The endemic ones that cause colds.

The vast majority of viruses that cause the common cold are rhinoviruses.

Regardless, no one has produced a vaccine for anything that causes the common cold.

As long as it doesn't come mandatory with the mark of the beast...

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