Moderna Covid vaccine candidate almost 95% effective, trials show

The above won't be hard to do for the first 3 months at least: just give the shot to health care workers as they come in for their scheduled shift. What gets hard is when you want to do a walk-in clinic: you need to figure out how much to order without knowing how many people will show up.

Note, don't take the above as a statement that Pfizer will (or should) ship at higher temperatures. While it works out on paper that they can, they have been putting effort into arranging really cold shipment for a reason: it is best to give the entire time stored at higher temperatures to the end clinic. Human logistics are the hardest part of this and this and really cold shipment gives more flexibility to the hardest part.

In any case: with both vaccines the hard part is ensuring people get their second dose on time after starting the shots! This is by far the most difficult logistical issue with either vaccine.

The 2nd key takeaway here is that while 5 patients in the vaccination group tested positive for coronavirus, none of them had severe disease. Which means to me that while this vaccine isn't a magic shield, if you do get it, it will keep you out of the hospital and probably make it a very mild experience.

I'm not sure there's a real difference here.

[0] https://www.hpsc.ie/a-z/vaccinepreventable/mumps/

Pope Benedict almost died of shingles in August.

> The analysis was based on the first 95 to develop Covid-19 symptoms.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54902908

The mRNA platform the BioNTech/Pfizer and the Moderna vaccine use is new, and that is generally something that can lead to shorter development.

As far as I understand, the biggest difference here is simply doing more things in parallel that you usually would do sequentially. This adds more risk because you already waste money in later expensive steps that are unnecessary because a previous step turns out to already fail the vaccine candidate. The easiest example here is producing the vaccine before phase III trials are completed, that is pure risk (in part assumed by governments in this case). This is really a case of "money is no object", a vaccine is useful enough in this case that you can take a lot of financial risk and pour lots of resources into development compared to a less critical vaccine.

The other thing that the more pessimistic timelines assume is that not everything will work out. Any problem can delay a vaccine or kill a candidate entirely.

People try way harder when the stakes are high, and everyone involved is at least a little terrified of being "the one who delayed it." That does wonders for cutting through pointless red tape and bureaucratic delays.

A minor example:

About ten years ago, a flash flood completely destroyed about thirty linear feet of the main road connecting the tourist district of Hershey, Pennsylvania to the rest of the town.

I assumed it would take weeks or months to repair, based on how long road work has usually taken in the area. It would have been a disaster for a lot of the local restaurants, economically.

IIRC, two days after the flood the road was back in order. It certainly didn't take more than a week.

Obviously, inventing a new vaccine is orders of magnitude more complex than fixing a road, but I think this aspect of human nature still applies.

If these things work as they appear to do, it'll be even more impressive than putting a man on the moon.

From President Trump in May 2020 [1]:

> Then, my administration cut through every piece of red tape to achieve the fastest-ever, by far, launch of a vaccine trial for this new virus, this very vicious virus. And I want to thank all of the doctors and scientists and researchers involved because they’ve never moved like this, or never even close.

> The NIH and HHS have also been working constantly with private industry to evaluate more than 100 potential treatments.

> The Food and Drug Administration has swiftly approved more than 130 therapies for active trials; that’s what we have right now, 130. And another 450 are in the planning stages. And tremendous potential awaits. I think we’re going to have some very interesting things to report in the not-too-distant future. And thank you very much to Dr. Hahn.

> Through a historic series of funding bills, my administration is providing roughly $10 billion to support a medical research effort without parallel. I especially want to thank Senator Steve Daines of Montana for his incredible work. He has worked so hard to secure additional funding for vaccine development. He has been right at the forefront.

He also goes on to discuss Operation Warp Speed [2] which, as far as I understand it, creates trials and determines a distribution plan.

[1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-pres...

[2]: https://www.hhs.gov/coronavirus/explaining-operation-warp-sp...

In short, there were several vaccine candidates within days to weeks of the genome being decoded.

What takes time is testing the vaccine candidates for safety and effectiveness. Companies normally go step-by-step. They run a phase-I trial, then evaluate the results and decide whether to go on to a phase-II trial. If they run a phase-II trial, they again wait until the results are in and have been evaluated before moving on to a phase-III trial. That reduces financial risk. In this case, companies began preparing phase-III trials before the phase-II trials were even completed. You can begin enrolling people into the trials and producing the necessary doses before you even know whether the phase-II results are any good. One of the reasons they could do that was because the government was taking on the financial risk.

Technically, Moderna's phase-I trial is not even complete yet: [1]. It runs until November 2021. But Moderna moved forward onto the next phase as soon as it had enough data from the phase-I trial to justify doing so (I assume this meant some combination of safety and efficacy data).

1. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04283461

https://www.research.ox.ac.uk/Article/2020-07-19-the-oxford-...

To make sure that this is done most effectively, the US government announced "Operation Warp Speed" back in May which has helped private and public organizations work very effectively.

Other comments are correctly pointing out some corollaries of this, such as trials proceeding very quickly and trial phases being run almost in parallel; but the root cause all of this can happen is the legal immunity for the consequences.

The tough nut are retroviruses like HIV. 40 years without a HIV vaccines. Though the related feline virus has a vaccine.

"...since all of the vaccines are targeting the same Spike protein, it is highly likely that they are all going to work."

There are of course lots of hypotheticals here, and things to be concerned about, but a priori surely we should be hopeful it reduces infections too?

Another factor is money. The covid vaccine trials have done some testing steps in parallel that would normally be done sequentially to avoid wasting money should it fail along the way. So yes, more risks are being taken, but they are financial, not clinical.

Don't listen to the fearmongering. There may have been a handful of outliers in the world who got reinfected, but there's data showing that immunity seems to last for over six months in 100 out of 100 people tested[1]. There have also been multiple studies showing that some people exposed to the original SARS virus in ~2003 have cross-immunity to COVID. There's also evidence of pre-existing immunity from other coronaviruses[2].

When the vaccine becomes available to you, get vaccinated. In the meantime, wear a mask and keep being careful, but we have legitimate reasons to be hopeful. We have two vaccines showing efficacy, more to come in the following months. There's also a synthetic antibody therapy that just got FDA emergency approval[3]. This is going to save a lot of lives. All of the serious data points to the fact that this is going to make a huge dent in the number of new cases and fatalities.

[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.01.362319v1

[2] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/11/05/scie...

[3] https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavi...

Pfizer is about a week faster.

> Well over 200 virus strains are implicated in causing the common cold, with rhinoviruses being the most common.

> Vaccination has proven difficult as there are many viruses involved and they mutate rapidly. Creation of a broadly effective vaccine is, therefore, highly improbable.

IIRC the virus in the rhinoviruses family mutates more rapidly than the virus in the coronavirus family.

$38bn ain't bad for a company without a single product released for the past 10 years.

It also says something about the in incentives that drug companies trying to maximize market cap have.

biotech needs to pay market salary for employees and then they'll rich good market cap.

I don't work directly on vaccines, but given the number of attempts, a 2020 approval definitely seemed possible to me, and even Fauci saying that in the summer. But I've also said that it wouldn't have a significant effect in 2020.

Edit: Here is Fauci saying on May 27 that we might have a vaccine by end of year:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandrasternlicht/2020/05/27/...

Normally vaccines take longer to develop because years of studies must be done to confirm the absence of longer-term side effects, not always because the actual vaccine development itself takes years. This requirement seems to have been bypassed for potential covid19 vaccines, allowing the vaccine to be released faster, at the expense of not having time to test for the absence of any long-term side effects (e.g. if a side effect takes 2-3 years to manifest, it's impossible to detect this with a trial that only lasts 6-12 months).

I’m not in science, but friends who had colleagues more involved in biological sciences said those fellows were total skeptics that anything like 6-8 months would be possible.

Imagine if this would have happened ten years ago. Think we’d have any prayer for a vaccine? Wouldn’t be surprised if the technology didn’t even exist within some point in the last couple decades.

So in some ways maybe we are ending up “lucky”.

Oncology trials can take years. On top of that, teams threw their entire effort into a single vaccine because billions of people will need it, and they may need it multiple times depending on how this vaccine goes. Cancer drugs are often for one type of cancer, which has fewer people and thus less priority.

If 7 billion people were at risk of developing one type of cancer, I think we'd have a better chance at developing it. Cancer is hard but that's not the only reason it's slow.

In a limited US-centric look, it seems like the resources are at about the same level, with funding for cancer at ~$5.6 billion for the NCI[0], and ~3.6 billion for COVID19[1] (in June, not sure if more funding has been approved since).

Not sure what metric you want to consider for cancer survival, but the rough trend in 5-year cancer survival seems to be in the ballpark of improving between 0.25-1% yearly (until 2013)[2].

[0]: https://www.cancer.gov/about-nci/budget/fact-book/data/resea...

[1]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/nih-grapples-researc...

[2]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/five-year-cancer-survival...

The worst hit places per https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking... seem to be Latin American; Mexico, Peru, Ecuador.

It is possible that Africa simply lacks the data.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54889084

If the US government is happy to hand out billions in funding and then pay a high price for the doses, why would a private company not take advantage of this?

Somehow the EU/UK convinced AstraZeneca to sell the Oxford vaccine at production cost.

You can cherry pick it if you want: the full data isn't released so they can hide something. There is no reason hide anything though: all the data will be given to the FDA (and other national equivalents) so you aren't hiding anything for long. There is every reason not to: this release is legally binding to the SEC, so if they are hiding anything there are legal implications: CEOs go to prison for less.

> 95% of the 50% who got the vaccine haven't contracted the virus.

Much more than 95% of the 50% who got the vaccine haven't contracted the virus. They looked at the first 95 people in the entire test to get the virus. Of these 95 people, only 5 were in the treatment group.

(B) Or did the candidate just go about their daily lives afterwards?

Because, unless path A was taken, then this 95% efficacy sounds very misleading.

> "which consists of a 2-dose schedule" [0]

[0] https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...

I believe that if Moderna found their vaccine didn't work they would license the Pfizer one as I assume their factories can be converted in a few months. Note that these are mRNA factories - I wouldn't expect a someone working on a different type of vaccine to be able to convert their factory. I would also expect that the process of conversion to produce a different vaccine will takes some months and cost us half a billion doses next year. This is just speculation though, there is no reason to make a license deal so we won't find out.

You can assume all manufacturers are watching each other. Some of the "getting ready to enter phase one trials" vaccines will probably be canceled as there is no point. If one of the promising candidates in trials fails Pfizer and Moderna will build (or license) more factory space because there is less competition for the demand.

One article said the reason of these vaccines can be stored more easily than the other is they use different proprietary formulations of inactive ingredients to carry the mRNA. Again, in a sane world, the most effective one would be shared, right? In the US, this is the kind of thing the Defense Production Act could be used for (instead of keeping meat plants open!!).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF9IOB2TExg3QIBupFtBDxg

Do note that there is no safety data yet for children, "youngest" in this case, is ~20 year olds; and that there has been a famous case where a vaccine that was safer for over-20 significantly increased the risk for narcolepsy 6 fold for under-20. (Safety profile was established for adults, but the vaccine was given to children). More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix#Narcolepsy_investiga...

Everyone knows its not going to kill most people, that's not what they're trying to prevent. They're trying to prevent it getting into long term care homes, or into at risk communities (indigenous, low income, obese, etc). They're trying to give you good reasons to want to wear a mask, want to cut down on your social interactions, and want to help stop the spread.

Take a look at what’s currently happening at El Paso Texas. There’s no hospital to go to.

We choose a level of precautions (cost) according to the risk. Which is what bugs me about the non-mask crowd cause it costs NOTHING.

Having yourself injected with a newly developed substance is a different thing.

Let's face facts, the long-term effects are unknowable - you trade that for the short-term protection.

The reason for those anecdotes is to counter the false narrative that young people are basically invulnerable to Covid, and should therefore live like it doesn't exist. That false narrative has been quite prevalent, even here, as an oblique way of arguing against public health measures.

There's no actual prevalent narrative that no one escapes Covid unscathed that needs to be countered.

The fact that the prevention is worse than the disease, in terms of economic hardship, depression, deprivation of education, etc; the fact that prevention measures hit poor people and minorities much more than rich people (who can move around and educate their kids in private schools that largerly do not shut down) - these are all inconvenient facts.

At least be honest - say you know lockdowns are horrible for many people that even if they got the disease would be fine (save for the extreme anecdotes!) but we still decide to impose them.

Really hard to have an honest conversation based on facts these days.

I think it’s too soon to declare that, with long term lung/organ damage being indicated for people (of course, this also depends on a few different factors).

Also just because you don't know anyone doesn't mean it's bad. If we can reduce people dying it's worth doing it. And it's just not a few in this case.

But if we recalculate the odds in terms of a particular in-group, and tell you that, of the 25 people you know and care about, there's a 22 percent chance that one of them will die, that seems like a large risk, and one you would work hard to avoid.

And if we then polled all of the people like that, the majority of them wouldn't know anyone that had a bad case! We'd have anecdotes popping up constantly telling us "actually it wasn't that bad" and "stop worrying so much", alongside other anecdotes like "my sister was in the hospital for 3 weeks" and "my wife died in the waiting room". And if you look around in reality, you do in fact see both sets of anecdotes.

(I used a 1% rate for serious cases because it's easy to work with, and not because it's accurate. Reality is as always more complex.)

What symptoms did they display? What was the timeline of their symptoms, or how did their illness develop/proceed? How soon after initial infection, did person-to-person infection begin? When were the infections/illnesses occurring (Feb/Mar/Apr? Or more recently?) What are the symptoms that stood out to you/them the most? What made them think that it was covid vs another upper respiratory disease? Did they get tested, what tests were used, and how accurate were those tests? What were the treatments, and treatment modalities that were recommended to them by public health officials or private physicians? Do they have post-illness physical records you're willing to share?

I, too, (and I'm sure we all do) have quite a bit of other anecdata I could share - in my workplace, a number of people and their families have been infected. There's a wide variance of experiences - from very mild, to multiple deaths. I chose not to include that information because I couldn't verify their disease progression, or symptom development, or treatment regime. I can provide that actual in-depth information on my experience, based on counsel from my physician and medical health professionals.

Ultimately, the most important questions: how do you create policy for a population, when their experiences are so different? Is this really the best we and our governments can do?

One died.

This might skew your "average" anecdata a bit.

So either we're not collecting the data that would reveal them as actually a problem, or something else has to explain why they are immune to the devastation that is supposed to be associated with Covid.

Let me tell you what the big darn deal is, from the perspective of someone who likely won't get sick either.

My wife just suffered through sepsis from a previous surgery. She ended up being admitted into the ICU for three days. I learned after the fact that there are roughly 40 staffed ICU beds in the entire county, population ~400,000. Those beds could easily be taken by COVID patients in a situation where you have uncontrolled community spread, and the hospital is now making difficult choices of who deserves those beds.

Now as she recovers her immune system is still fragile. In her normal condition, she probably would be OK after contracting COVID-19. Now, perhaps not so much. If others around me assume that contracting COVID-19 is "no big deal" and end up transmitting it to her, that may not be a problem for those people. It would be a huge deal for me.

What's missing in these rosy pictures of COVID-19 is the lack of awareness that... gasp... we live with other people, and that we all have a duty to protect each other, not just ourselves! What is so wrong with that? If wearing a mask helps me protect others around me, then why not do it? Honestly, if that's the worst encumbrance you've encountered in your life so far, then you've had quite the privileged experience, and as I'd say to my children, you're damn spoiled.

If you don't want to listen to me, listen to the people who have taken an oath to protect my life and yours: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-enraging-deja-vu-of-a.... It's absurd the entitlement that some people display, thinking "well, if something bad happens to me, there will be someone to save me". At the end of the day, the nurses and doctors that treat you are people too. Respecting them means more than sending flowers or banging on pots, it means doing your part to help ensure they can care for the true emergencies and not just idiots who can't be bothered to follow some simple rules to help out the greater good.

And also, the extremes are important because statistically more people hit those extremes than with other respiratory viruses. There are states reporting nearly full ICUs right now. There are states (re)opening field hospitals.

The whole reason for lockdowns and restrictions isn’t to prevent a huge amount of deaths. Most people don’t die from Covid. The whole point is to keep our hospital system above water.

It's now competition and one of the best ways to score points in this competition is by manipulating the empathy of your fellow human.

I wish the internet was still about real discussion but now it's about heartstrings and upvotes.

Haven't you notice the same pattern with the "long covid" stories? Light on science, heavy on heartstrings.

An internet based off of rational discussion is long dead, even here on HN. Just watched the mods (hi @dang ) wipe nuke a story about Sweden's Covid-19 success off the front page. [1]

Oh well.

[1] = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25112382

I'm definitely planning on getting the vaccine, but I'd really feel better with it being out in the field for longer. Especially with this type of vaccine (mRNA).

That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be your choice, but it does mean that there is a public stake in whether people get vaccinated. Certain people have medical reasons for opting out. I could see you having psychological reasons for the same. But that doesn't necessarily extend to "anyone can refuse vaccines for any reason".

How do you feel about inadvertently infecting others who are at high risk from Coronavirus? That's the big factor why people are angry about anti-vaccers. They are a danger for others who cannot get vaccinated for medical reasons.

I personally will be getting whatever comes first for the general population, on day one. But it'd be dishonest if I didn't admit having concerns over safety we might not be aware of at the time this is administered that would only be known many months or years later.

That's overridden by the fact that I lost one family member to the virus and another who survived it but is already seeing long-term effects in her lungs from when she had the virus. She was just hospitalized again for those effects. If folks have more info about measuring long-term impacts of a vaccine, I'd love to hear it for the peace of mind. Again, I'll be getting the vaccine regardless, because of very clear long-term effects of the virus.

"Late-stage trial results of a potential COVID-19 vaccine being developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca could be presented this year as the British government prepares for a possible vaccination rollout in late December or early 2021."

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britai...

https://youtu.be/7g0Jh4h5E1E

Please don't copy/paste HN comments and certainly not in the same thread.

Wait... how do you know it's COVID?

I mean, given how prevalent it is right now it certainly could be COVID, but to your own point, a rash isn't a particularly common symptom, in the ~15% range. Fever, chills, cough, night sweats, breathing problems. Could be any of a range of upper respiratory diseases. In any other year I'd say you have bronchitis - there's 3 million cases of that every year in the US too.

Feel better soon!

Couple days of the cold, followed by a fever and increasing difficulty breathing for 3 days. Just getting up from the couch felt like having just run a marathon and having to 'make' my body breathe. Actually having to force the air into my lungs. To the point where I called the hospital and was told there wasn't anything they could do ATM.

Then, one moment I will never forget. I went to sleep with the biggest worries I've ever had about how the next day would look. If there was even a next day. I woke up at 3:00 AM. And I could just breathe normally. All symptoms were just gone. No fever, nothing. The biggest relieve of my life.

Followed by 3 months of weird pains and discomforts. One of which was a stabbing pain that would travel from my lungs down to my side during the course of 4 days. Something that my SO also experienced.

Also, most of the issues I experienced in the months after the whole ordeal where psychological in nature. I could make myself short of breath by just thinking about it and I would have to go lie down. I also experienced chest pains 4 months after. All of that went away when I started to breath differently. I had been taking very short breath right from my upper chest area. This was actually causing me pain. I learned to breath by expanding my abdomen and after forcefully breathing very slowly like that for 2 days, everything went back to normal. So there's a big tip for anybody reading this. I think it's called diaphragmatic breathing, Google it.

Anyway, good luck to you and anybody else that needs it! When all of this is over and we're back at the bars, first round is on me! <3

So how do you know for certain? Could be a bunch of other (infectious and non-infectious) health issues too.

Turns out, it was a psychological thing; something similar to a panic attack, with my lungs completely clear. They gave me anxiety medication and the feeling has gone completely. Not saying that it's necessarily the same with you, but if you experience hyperventilation and feel like you can't breathe, try to relax and breathe slowly and deeply. May be it's not as scary as it seems.

I hope you get better soon.

They’re relatively inexpensive and it’s worth picking one up to track O2 levels to know when you should go to the hospital.

Breathing difficulties start in week two and can get really bad in week three - from what I’ve read week 3 is when you starting getting better, or when you start getting worse.

Shameless plug, but since this is a challenge for many people I created a product to help: https://narwallmask.com

Launches tomorrow.

Only one has had to spend a night in the hospital for low oxygen, but overall, I know of 5 people who have been made absolutely miserable for 2 weeks because of this virus. Seemingly no permanent side effects, but it was an awful slog to get there.

As a private person you can realistically get an oxygen concentrator. These are simpler and less expensive than ventilators (I am not even sure if an untrained person should operate a ventilator).

I was involved in getting a concentrator for my friend who got a very bad case of covid though not bad enough to get into a hospital. The concentrator got his oxygen saturation level from low eighties (dangerous) to low nineties (still below the norm but less dangerous).

I feel good for the most part, but in May I developed a difficulty breathing, and It's still there.

Nothing major, but many days I need to artificially force yawning to feel good. It's like I cannot forget breathing as something automatic. Some days I'm ok, tough.

I also think that this reasoning may be more accurate that the official not very accurate covid tests.

Doing this reasoning myself also saved me money and the 4h waiting queue to do the test (the last thing I want to do when I have fever).

On the other side, I know people who had symptoms, tested negative (and trusted the test) and still when out to meet (and maybe contaminate) friends or colleagues.

(I’m not a doctor, this is just from personal experience, and seems somewhat backed up in practice — standard disclaimer, etc.)

Edit: If you can get a pulse oximeter, it can be useful for making sure your blood oxygen level isn’t dipping into dangerous territory.

But again, can’t emphasize this enough — definitely speak with a medical professional if you can for advice on how to proceed with the symptoms you’re experiencing.

Hang in there, hope you get well soon!

I'am not a doctor, but I've had pneomonia early this year.

It's too late now, but I suppose what you can do is have a pulse oximeter at hand, so you can see breathing problems coming before you get into trouble. At least, that's what I hear people say.

The numbers have gone up, according to the CDC it was 42% in 2018.

My mother worked out on the Peloton every single day, didn't miss one workout, and said that she was fine. She experienced mild symptoms and loss of smell and fevers, but other than that she was fine.

My grandmother was rushed to the hospital because she is in the prime age range and has just about every single previous condition you could imagine for someone pushing 90. She was diagnosed with Covid and Pneumonia, felt like shit for a while, and was release and is now fine.

I am not saying the virus is not real or isn't serious, but at some point we need to stop only looking at number of confirmed cases, and start digging a little deeper before we start spreading all of this rash fear.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/16/9352392...

Source: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/promising-inte...

>The trial involved 30,000 people in the US with half being given two doses of the vaccine, four weeks apart. The rest had dummy injections.

>The analysis was based on the first 95 to develop Covid-19 symptoms.

Antibodies are easy to test for (the chemistry required can be put into mass-produced home test kits), while it's more difficult to test for other responses (a recent long-term study of covid-19 T-cell response was with only ~100 subjects).

A hypothetical vaccine that produced a meh antibody response but mobilized the T-cell or mucosal systems could be effective at preventing the disease but not look like much on an antibody screen.

It is funny to see the market reaction. MRNA spiked 15% this morning while BNTX (The Pfizer vaccine maker) tanked 13%. All over a few percentage difference in a sample size so small that it came down to the difference of one or two cases.

Currently we don't even know wether the vaccines can cause herd immunity effects or not. It's perfectly possible that they just reduce heavy sickness infections into symptomless spreader infections. The tests didn't check for that (you can't do daily PCR on a test population of ten thousands). If that was the case the vaccines would still be a great improvement, but the third wave during partial vaccination would be particularly nasty if the vaccinated are not firewalls but stopovers.

Safety testing is done in preclinical and phase 1 testing. They wouldn't be injecting something unsafe into 30,000 people. Phase 3 is mostly about efficacy.

The number of people vaccinated is increased gradually. Even after phase III and approval, the monitoring for side effects continues and the vaccine can be withdrawn if necessary.

Vaccines can cause autoimmune responses detected months later. These two vaccines are RNA vaccines never used n this scale Residual DNA risk is probably not significant, but there is small potential blowback.

On positive side, RNA vaccines can open new era of programmable vaccines for viral infections and cancer treatments.

Edit: And sure, Covid has killed more than 120,000, but what do you think will happen when people find out the vaccine kills people? They won't care it's 1 in 50,000, they'll just refuse any and all vaccines. Then what?

Such collective measures would either be 'a sense of duty' or 'mandatory vaccination'. People ignoring the first option are kind of asking for the second option.

The choice is between having to be quarantined or taking the vaccine.

https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/a-framework-for-e...

The obviousness of this strategy has been challenged over the last 10-20 years. At-risk people in some cases do not respond fully to vaccines, and the reaction can be stressful to their systems.

Last I heard, the recommendation for influenza was 100% vaccination for nursing home staff and a strong recommendation for visitors to also get vaccinated. The bubble of protection from this strategy has, apparently, lower overall risks.

Doctors and nurses, especially urgent care, will likely be first in line (or perhaps due to an abundance of caution, half of them first in line, half later). I'd like to see the people we have labelled 'essential workers' up next.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/11/13/a-vaccin...

I think that is a ridiculous statement. The conspiracy-minded folks will be that way regardless of objective reality.

My understanding was that "traditional" types of vaccines are slower to make and get approval for, for various biological reasons.

This video explains the basics and has a list of citations in the description: https://youtu.be/S1l6BchEoZM

That’s totally different than questioning new, unproven vaccines, especially when no vaccine of the same type has ever been widely deployed. There are very legitimate concerns about genetic vaccines. And for vast swaths of the population, getting covid might be less risky than getting this vaccine.

I’d be surprised if it made a difference. Most people, myself included, have literally no idea what the relevant differences are between a protein vaccine and an mRNA vaccine (I’ll look them up after writing this, of course), let alone what S1/S2/N/E protein vaccines are.

I trust the medical establishment for much the same reason I trust our civilization in general, but people like my mum who thought they knew better are unlikely to start trusting them regardless of the names of the technical methods involved.

And same as with the BioNTech vaccine, the testing continues until they have 160+ covid cases in one of the legs.

This reminds me of the speculative rationalizations that are given after-the-fact whenever the stock market rises or falls.

So let me chime in with the speculation:

The biggest factor is probably the realization that COVID is not as big a personal risk as feared, no matter what the media or the government says. People are gladly using COVID as an excuse to work from home or avoid meeting their elderly relatives, but when it comes to avoiding infection in order to save "the system", enough people simply don't care anymore. It's too abstract.

The new public messaging needs to be: "It Ain't Over Yet" kind of thing.