The Husband-and-Wife Team Behind the Leading Vaccine to Solve Covid-19 | Hacker News Reader

The Husband-and-Wife Team Behind the Leading Vaccine to Solve Covid-19

nytimes.com

95 pointstysone41 comments

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Discussed yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25044147

https://archive.is/ZCVOP

Such massive media coverage before actual outcomes smells .. not right.

How so?

We’re all desperate for good news.

I am not excited about lack of long term data on this vaccine for a disease with such a low IFR.

For those who don't know (including me), IFR means Infection Fatality Rate. "applies to infectious disease outbreaks ... [and] represents the proportion of deaths among all infected individuals, including all asymptomatic and undiagnosed subjects." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_fatality_rate

The problem is that the fatality rate for all medical problems goes up when your healthcare system is overwhelmed and your providers are sick or dying.

Don’t get appendicitis when your local hospitals are setting up tent cities to cope with the demand.

Our media is horribly horribly corrupt. The past four years has been absolutely horrific media coverage filled with absolutely insane spin about absolutely everything.

If you're not watching/listening to both mainstream and alternative sources (podcasts, former news people who have been cancelled, people like Rogan, Megan Kelly, No Agenda) you're missing out on at least to 1/3 to 1/2 of the analysis that's desperately needed.

When it comes to the main stream media, this whole fucking decade reeks of corruption.

Pretty normal. Look how much coverage remdesivir got, and I think the current verdict on that is more or less "it might do something, maybe, but probably not much".

The founders have a 20+ years track record of success and thus are trustworthy - that is why.

I don't think "there are about 20k people walking around with the vaccine, they had no serious side effects for months and the vaccine protects 90% of them" can be considered "no actual outcome".

Also, this is a relatively small biotech (when compared to Pfizer and the like) which has been publicly traded for about a year now, and this kind of company depends on a good news flow in order to keep investors happy. After all, they have not yet made any money yet, and costs have been going through the roof lately due to investments into vaccine development and manufacturing.

Media coverage on the vaccine itself doesn't bug me, but articles like this are a little concerning.

If this vaccine works as well as reported, it is a huge accomplishment and deserves celebration. Those responsible for the vaccine should definitely be rewarded. However, it's dangerous to make celebrities out of scientists.

Besides, this vaccine wasn't the work of two individuals. BioNTech alone is a publicly traded company with almost two thousand employees, and there were likely many more from Pfizer and elsewhere assisting them with this project.

Why is it dangerous to make celebrities out of scientists? If they make an important contribution should their names be left unsaid? Is the Nobel prize dangerous? Or having Einstein, Curie, etc. be widely known? I'm glad when I see scientists names highlighted rather than just actors and sports heroes.

Celebrities in general. It's the fact that you get famous for a focused discipline or achievement but then people look to your opinion on any and everything else, or even if you are still consulted on only your area of focus you can become lazy and indulge in your status and power, whereby your opinion should no longer be relevant, but you are still popular and listened to.

I agree that listening to famous people on any topic that is not their area of expertise is a bad thing. That's caused by hero worship and lazy journalism, not highlighting the names of scientist who make breakthroughs.

I do think it's important for us as a society to recognize and highlight the names of people who make important contributions to science because it sets a good example for the kinds of contributions that others (i.e. kids) can aspire to make in the future.

But that’s the problem of the people listening. They are the ones looking for some advice and an opinion. And why not respond (as the celebrity) — any of us probably have appreciated being asked our opinion on things.

Also celebrities can do good things. Bill Gates is a celebrity (in a way), and has helped us a lot with vaccines and pandemics, and that’s definitely not his historical area of expertise.

No one seems concerned that this is the first "Genetic Vaccine". It doesn't just contain proteins to train your immune system... it rewrites your own cells to produce those proteins. There is no off switch.

The only approved vaccine like this (that I know of) is to protect horses from west nile virus.

That is not true, there is an inherent off-switch in this method. Messenger RNA is not stable in cells and is actively degraded. A typical mRNA has a half-life of a few hours in a cell. After the mRNA is degraded, no more viral protein will be produced.

This has nothing to do with gene therapy or anything that would permanently modify your genome.

I'm so glad you pointed this out. A horse in search of a mule and et cetera.

> Messenger RNA is not stable in cells and is actively degraded. A typical mRNA has a half-life of a few hours in a cell.

Can anyone speak to the confidence we have in these claims? That is, are we virtually 100% sure that these mRNA have no mechanism to stick around for longer than intended?

GP's point is valid - that this is the first mRNA vaccine that would be widely used.

Let's say our assumption is wrong - these mRNA have a way to stick around forever. Is there an off switch?

These things have been in development for over a decade. There's mountains of in vivo data on mRNA vaccines.

They have never been approved for human use, so you might want to check sources on that data.

One question I got in an organic chemistry exam many years ago was why RNA is not as suitable as DNA for storing genetic information. Essentially why it is inherently less stable than DNA.

With a bit of organic chemistry knowledge you can determine how the additional OH in RNA allows for water to attack there and cleave the RNA strand. This is very dependent on pH, but RNA is inherently less stable than DNA.

But that's not actually the most important mechnanism here, but it is one that is inherent in the chemistry of the molecule, there is no way around it.

Cells need to regulate protein production up and down. If mRNA were to live eternally, there would be no way to reduce protein production. So cells obviously have a way to remove mRNA. What actually happens is that mRNA is permanently degraded by RNAses, so any mRNA that isn't replenished will be gone after a while and protein production will stop. This is a fundamental part of regulation of protein biosynthesis, and you can find that in every textbook.

In addition to the the additional hydroxyl group and cellular RNAses, mRNA is predominantly single stranded while DNA is double stranded, which provides additional stability and protects the nucleotide.

In addition to that being a fact, synthetic mRNA can predominantly reprogram cells to create arbitrary proteins, which provides additional stability and protects the programmer.

One conclusion I got in a mathematical logic exam so many many moons ago was how something being "not as X" still implied that something was "somewhat X".... so just because "RNA is not as suitable as DNA for storing genetic information", essentially it still is somewhat suitable, and perhaps suitable enough.

What about reverse transcription? For example let's imagine you use this vaccine on someone with HIV or another retrovirus.

I haven't looked at the sequence of the vaccine, I assume it is not public. But for the HIV reverse transcriptase to bind the sequence would need to have the proper binding site, and there is no reason to put that in there. Those enzymes are specific, they don't just transcribe anything they come across.

Just because a light-bulb will more than likely burn out eventually doesn't mean there is an inherent off switch.

I can't think of a single existing drug with an off switch. Food doesn't have an off switch. Everything in your body goes in, and then goes out according to the pharmacokinetics that your liver, kidneys, and other parts impose.

This isn't like the first person biting into a new apple variety for the first time... this is like the first person growing an apple from scratch in their stomach, using techniques that have never before been approved for human use.

I can't think of a single existing drug that works like that, because there hasn't been one. Food doesn't reprogram my cells before it "goes out".

The first vaccine was a live virus (cowpox), and it reprogrammed your cells in a way stronger sense than an mRNA injection does.

Yeah... and that's why cowpox was bad.

If your immune system realizes the source of the spike proteins is your own reprogrammed cells, and then attacks them, it will lead to cascade autoimmune disorders mimicking the symptoms of AIDS.

I don't know where you're getting this information from, AIDS isn't an autoimmune disorder. HIV destroys immune cells directly. The symptoms are mainly from secondary infections. Also, if your immune system realizes that your own cells are making virus particles, it will destroy them... and every other cell will survive. That's what happens when you catch a cold - every virus works that way. mRNA is even better because it probably won't cause any of your cells to get targeted for destruction. The failure mechanism you're proposing would at worst make it as bad as some other vaccines.

I don't know why you don't see the difference between similar symptoms and similar mechanisms.

A compromised immune system spiraling out of control attacking itself looks the same from the outside.

I do know where you're not getting information from, as there isn't any... because it's never been approved for human testing.

>it's never been approved for human testing.

That's not accurate, there have been several studies where mRNA vaccines have been tested. They were previously being developed for cancer treatment.

It's never been approved for human testing *until now under the administration of a lame duck lunatic begging for a reason to take credit for a solution.

How did those cancer treatments pan out? Why weren't they FDA approved?

Maybe you could have started your thinking with the #1 abused drug in the world, heroin; and the nearly instant off switch drug, narcan, that is carried by everyone in emergency medical services.

How much is pfizer paying you? or are you just a r/wsb autist? #YOLO

I was thinking of drugs like penicillin when I said that. I guess you could count the chelating agents they give to people with heavy metal poisoning in that, too. But by and large, drugs do not come with off switches.

Oh... so you only thought of 1 fungus, and then concluded that there couldn't be any drug at all... by and large.

I guess you never learned 1 =/= ∞.

Your off switch is probably stuck.

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