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> we're under-funding research in microbiology. "We" as in: the entire world. In general.

Yes, definitely?

Someone I know in immunology reported that only 5% of grant proposals received funding. There are absolutely huge areas that would benefit from more funding.

> Someone I know in immunology reported that only 5% of grant proposals received funding.

And what percent deserve funding? Given the incremental publish or perish nature of academia most of it likely isn’t (if it’s anything like the other sciences).

Part of that pressure comes from the lack of funding though. When you have to fight against 100 other applications for a grant showing you have a recent track record of well-cited papers helps you stand out.

If researchers had steadier access to funding there would be less pressure to constantly publish 'breakthroughs' to secure next years funding.

Publish or perish applies to tenure, not funding so much.

In my experience, when resources become too scarce and competition too tight, actors start working on the surest bets, or playing the authority card or the most sensational moonshots.

IOW, real science gets shown the door and politicking sets up camp.

A major reason that this happened so fast is due the US government’s operation warp speed program.

Moderna worked with NIAID on this vaccine closely, and the us gov funded it without regard for if it actually worked or not.

So it’s funding...but it seems extremely unlikely that we would fund most other diseases this way. The way warp speed works is that the federal government funds the vaccine even if it doesn’t work. This allows the drug maker to work faster because they don’t have to worry about losing billions of dollars on a vaccine that does nothing. The federal government eats the risk.

It’s was a really good strategy for the vaccine development and I think the federal team deserves a lot of credit for where we are with the vaccines.

maybe not as the "warp speed" program is being prevented from interacting with the incoming administration who will be in charge of administering it, all for petty political reasons. this will likely cost tens of thousands more lives. pfizer did not participate in "warp speed" at all as they wisely determined that the federal government is completely corrupt for the time being.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/15/dr-fauci-trump-should-work-w...

What does this have to do with the news that this vaccine was developed so quickly? Regardless of if the program evaporates in January, the vaccine won’t.

It would mean all the work to prevent a vaccine would be undone by not disseminating the vaccine to the public. The end results are the metrics of success.

The vaccine isn't owned by the federal government. It's owned by these private companies. The Trump administration cannot prevent the vaccine from being disseminated to the public neither here in the US, or in the rest of the world.

Pfizer chose not to participate in operation warp speed because they thought filling out the required federal paperwork would slow them down.

It had nothing to do with any perceived corruption.

Here's the CEO of Pfizer explciitly telling a journalist on the record they wanted to stay out of the "politics" of the program, which I think the non-naive reader can tell exactly what that means; they certainly would not announce that the very government they rely upon for drug approvals is "corrupt", they correctly identified that Trump has turned every US program into his own personal quid-pro-quo machine and they wanted no part of it:

> "When you get money from someone that always comes with strings. They want to see how we are going to progress, what type of moves you are going to do. They want reports," he finished. "And also, I wanted to keep Pfizer out of politics, by the way."

https://www.newsweek.com/pfizer-avoided-rd-funding-trumps-op...

Reading your source, it seems the bureaucratic limitation was their #1; then comes politics.

"Pfizer declined the R&D funding in order to "liberate" scientists from bureaucratic limitations as they worked to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, the pharmaceutical company's CEO, Dr. Albert Bourla, said in a September interview with CBS News' Margaret Brennan."

Don't forget other countries.

Warp Speed is a mix of R&D funding and of guarantees to purchase a given number of doses if the vaccine is approved. Some companies get both, some just get a purchase guarantee. (I don't know if any got R&D funding without a purchase guarantee).

The EU has been doing commitments to purchase if approved with substantial down payments to promote R&D. Japan has been doing purchase commitments, but I don't know if they have paid any upfront.

For Moderna, they got both a lot of upfront R&D funding and large purchase commitments from Warp Speed. They got a large purchase commitment from the EU.

For Pfizer, they got no R&D funding from Warp Speed but a 100 m purchase commitment. From the EU they got a 300 m purchase commitment and a big down payment. They got a 120 m dose commitment from Japan.

AstraZenica got a big down payment in the EU and a large dose commitment, and they got R&D funding and a large dose commitment from Warp Speed.

I believe this is how it is going with all the major COVID vaccine efforts.

You may be right about funding, but it can also be attributed to incentives: has our desire to eradicate a disease ever been expressed in such an intense way, with the benefits being so enormous?

> Also interesting to note: so we can develop and approve vaccines for new diseases within months?

It's a new type of vaccine that's never been approved before, apparently simpler to develop: https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/16/21569345/moderna-covid-1...

> Moderna was the first vaccine to enter clinical trials back in March. Only 63 days after the genetic sequence of the virus was posted online, the company injected the first volunteer with their candidate. They were able to move so quickly because they used a gene-based technology to create their vaccine. Those types of vaccines are relatively simple to create once researchers know the viral gene they’re trying to target.

> Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine was built using the same method. The two are made from tiny pieces of mRNA, which gives the human body instructions to produce copies of the coronavirus spike protein. Then, the immune system learns to defend against that protein. Gene-based vaccines are the long-promised future of vaccine development, but they’ve never been approved for use in people by the Food and Drug Administration. The early successes of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are a promising sign for the method.

And of course, being in the middle of a pandemic 'helps', in terms of funding, clearing red tape, and also seeing results in testing (with so many people being infected, you can start to see differences between placebo and not-placebo groups much more quickly).

Sure, but what about the other 10's to 100's of Corona vaccines that are currently undergoing phase 2 and 3 trials?

I'm not convinced by the argument that developing and approving a vaccine this fast is mainly possible because of technological advances that happen to be in sync with the pandemic.

It's NOT the development that is fast ... it's the green lighting for proceeding through the phases. The FDA accelerating these trials very much "happen to be in sync with the pandemic"

Are you arguing that it's the norm to go from we want to develop a vaccine against this new disease to here's a vaccine ready for trials within months is the general norm?

Regardless of the massive speedup and exceptions given by the FDA, you don't agree that the lab part of the development was slightly (understatement) faster than usual?

> Sure, but what about the other 10's to 100's of Corona vaccines that are currently undergoing phase 2 and 3 trials?

Are they mDNA vaccines like the Moderna and Pfizer ones? I actually have no idea.

In any case, technology that gives the possibility of going fast doesn't mean every single usage of it will go fast.

> And of course, being in the middle of a pandemic 'helps', in terms of funding,

Pfizer and BioNTech explicitly did not take US govt funding to create the vaccine.

I don't just mean in terms of external funding, but also internal approval for funding.

It's obviously much, much easier to justify a generous budget (and rapid timeline) to higher-ups for a vaccine when there's a pandemic caused by said virus going on.

Not that governments are the only way to get funding, but BioNTech received $400m from the German federal government to support the Covid vaccine development.

It's not underfunding of drug research and development. It's the FDA restrictions, which have been relaxed for this drug, and they've been expedited through the approval process.

So maybe more funding for FDA, contingent upon them speeding up the process.

> How long does the immunity last?

If we consider that recovered patients are immune between 6 and 8 months at least, that timeframe seems likely.

> What are the long term side effects?

I keep on asking myself. What vaccines do truly exhibit long term side effects? Narcolepsy with the 2009 swine flu vaccine or the Guillain-Barré syndrome for the 1976 flu vaccine do not fit the bill, because they actually showed up in the early months after administration (although some were found out later).

> I keep on asking myself. What vaccines do truly exhibit long term side effects?

Dengvaxia also comes to mind. Weird corner cases that only show up after an accelerated phase 3 trial when you start vaccinating way more than 30k people.

Same goes for the Guillain-Barré syndrome cases which are estimated at about 1 in 100.000 persons vaccinated. If the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines are able to cause any trouble that is as common as that, we would very likely have no idea right now based on the data that exists.

My risk of dying from COVID is higher than that. Sign me up.

UK is already expecting a high number of adverse reactions.

http://tapnewswire.com/2020/11/uk-government-expected-high-v...

It was a murky situation, but LYMErix comes to mind: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/

Thanks, very informative. I wasn't aware about that one.

> Also interesting to note: so we can develop and approve vaccines for new diseases within months? It doesn't have to take 10 years if we really want to eradicate a disease? My conclusion: we're under-funding research in microbiology. "We" as in: the entire world.

Perhaps, perhaps not. This is far outside my field of expertise, but here is an analogy: the fact I released 9 games in 9 months a decade ago does not imply that all games can be coded, foley-ed, and art-ed, in one month by a junior developer with Eclipse, Photoshop Elements, Bryce, and Audacity.

I assume there are many diseases where the treatment is the equivalent of an indie platformer while others are the equivalent of a AAA-headliner and yet more are the equivalent of currently fictional games like The Oasis.

Yes, Moderna said it expected the vaccine could be shipped and stored for up to six months at minus 20C

It can even remain stable once thawed for 30 days if refrigerated at between 2C and 8C

This is much much easier to transport/manage compared to the Pfizer vaccine (store at -75, survive only 5 days after thaw in normal fridge)

> Does it prevent spreading (read: keep wearing masks after vaccination) or does it "only" prevent symptoms?

I don't believe there is any vaccine in the world that would act like this, since that's not how the immune system works.

Early polio vaccines did.

Source? I skimmed through "History of polio vaccination" [1] and didn't see anything about that.

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3782271/

I happened to read it here recently: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1957/02/how-goo... No, that's not a scholarly article.

Is it possible to spread a virus without an infection? It seems like other than being a surface, any ability to spread would be predicated on also testing positive for the virus -- wouldn't it?

> Is it possible to spread a virus without an infection?

No, but it's possible to spread a virus without having symptoms, without feeling sick or requiring medical attention. i.e. mild, asymptomatic infection.

No, it is not possible to spread virus without being infected.

But...

It is certainly possible to spread virus without having any symptoms. Like children do with SARS-CoV2. All the time. Source: https://www.cell.com/med/pdf/S2666-6340(20)30020-9.pdf?_retu...

You can be infected, shed tons of virus and not have any symptoms.

This isn't about funding... this is about taking a giant leap into mRNA vaccines, that until now have not been approved for human use. We aren't injecting processed proteins into our bloodstream to trigger and train our immune systems... We are reprogramming our bodies into vaccine factories.

Not sure what you are being downvoted for. Your tone may seem pretty alarmist (but that has been the norm for anything cornoa related). Otherwise it's true.

Not at all and expert, but I think the idea of reprogramming is wrong, as it implies the vaccine is editing DNA (source code).

mRNA vaccines are more analogous to temporarily running a subroutine.

“Reprogramming” actually has a specific meaning in genetics, and it’s not editing of DNA, it’s the editing of (transient, i.e. epigenetic) DNA modifications. It’s definitely true that this is not what RNA vaccines are doing.

But I guess the parent comment was using “reprogramming our bodies into vaccine factories” as a hand-waving description rather than a technically precise term. And that description is then roughly correct: with RNA vaccines, it is correct to say that our bodies are being triggered to produce the actual “vaccine” themselves; namely (at least in one type of RNA vaccine), the body’s cells are translating the injected mRNA to produce antigens, which is what a conventional vaccine contains, and which, in turn, produces an immune response.

As a hand-waving technical pedantic, you are literally correct.

But, "literally" actually has a specific meaning in english, and it's not always to be literal.

Yeah like letting a craftsman use your backyard shed as a woodshop for a few weeks.

Except your "backyard shed" is actually an uncountable number of your cells that are "edited" (changed using the reprogramming abilities inherent to mRNA, but god forbid you refer to it as such) into not being "backyard sheds" anymore, but being factories for spike proteins that can't be stopped other than waiting for the fire to burn out. After a few weeks, you don't get your "backyard shed" back, because the craftsman destroyed it.

> so we [the world] can develop and approve vaccines for new diseases within months?

Approving vaccines could be done in days, if we are willing to ignore the obvious problem of that approval being completely worthless. Situations like the current one with a heavily incentivized race to the mass market are favoring crooks willing to fudge tests. In the last two decades multiple bad actors (GKV, Ranbaxy, Cetero) had been found in the economy of clinical trials. Due diligence takes time.

> Also interesting to note: so we can develop and approve vaccines for new diseases within months? It doesn't have to take 10 years if we really want to eradicate a disease badly enough? My conclusion: we're under-funding research in microbiology. "We" as in: the entire world. In general.

Given the harm caused by this vaccine, we consider a higher cost of development to be acceptable. That includes monetary cost, the cost of redirecting many other research resources to this research, and the potential cost of rushing development with less testing than normal.

This is all sane to do, because corona also has a really high cost. Other diseases have a much lower cost, and hence investing less in them makes sense.

Sure, the world could probably focus all its attention on fixing a disease, and make meaningful process. But what would the world have to give up in order to do that? Would that trade-off be worth it. With Corona, it becomes worth it a lot sooner than with something else.

A lot of the medical industry is about creating ongoing revenue streams rather than curing the causes of illness.

> Does it prevent spreading (read: keep wearing masks after vaccination) or does it "only" prevent symptoms?

There would be no reasonable mechanism for a vaccine that prevents infection but somehow still allows "spreading". Either you're sick or your not, the immune system doesn't "prevent symptoms" (strictly: it's the cause of them). This isn't how things work.

As far as "long term side effects"... that's also an extremely rare kind of interaction. Vaccine delivery is extraordinarily safe. I worry that your phrasing is invoking anti-vax paranoia.

> There would be no reasonable mechanism for a vaccine that prevents infection but somehow still allows "spreading".

Sure. I agree.

But there are mechanisms for a vaccine to prevent symptoms and still allow for some infection and spreading.

> Either you're sick or your not, the immune system doesn't "prevent symptoms" (strictly: it's the cause of them).

You seem to be contradicting yourself here. Being sick = having symptoms = the immune system being (overly) active. The main goal of all the vaccines under development is to prevent the immune system becoming overly active (AKA: fight the symptoms). Not necessarily to prevent any virus from being made in the body and being spread. Although we all hope that it also prevents spreading, it's not a given and it's not proven to do so (yet).

It's perfectly possible to be infected and infectious without "being sick" (no symptoms). Children do it all the time with SARS-CoV2.

> As far as "long term side effects"... that's also an extremely rare kind of interaction.

We're about to vaccinate some 5 Billion people. That means we have to take into consideration "extremely rare" kind of interactions. Especially if you don't want to feed the anti-vax conspiracy theories.

> I worry that your phrasing is invoking anti-vax paranoia.

I worry that releasing the vaccine too soon could invoke irreparable anti-vax paranoia.

I'm all for the vaccine and I would be willing to participate in the trials (if they had space available). But I don't think that it's a good idea to just rush this vaccine and start immunizing the herd en-masse with the risk of serious disease in 1 in 100k people (for example). Now that would really feed the anti-vax paranoia.

What, specifically, are those mechanisms that you think prevent symptoms but allow for infection and spreading?

Additionally, even if this mechanism exists, why would we care? The goal is not eradication of the virus at a molecular level, it is stopping the disease at a societal level. Stopping the disease is accomplished when symptoms are prevented. Because symptoms kill people, not the virus.

There is an incredible misunderstanding about the difference between a disease (i.e., symptoms caused by a virus) and the virus that causes it. Viruses, bacteria, spores, and other toxic material is everywhere constantly. COVID is the only virus I can think of where we have been actively scared of the mere existence of the virus.

> What, specifically, are those mechanisms that you think prevent symptoms but allow for infection and spreading?

Asymptomatic spreading. Kids do it with SARS-CoV2 all the time.

In other words: the body sheds virus (cells fabricate virions), but the immune system reaction doesn't cause symptoms.

> Additionally, even if this mechanism exists, why would we care?

Because the virus will keep spreading and killing people as long as < 70% of people remain infectious.

In case the vaccine doesn't prevent much of the spreading, we'd be looking at years before everything is like it was before the pandemic. This is because we're not going to vaccinate 5 billion people in a matter of months all at once (too risky). This will take a while.

Additionally humans would be a reservoir for the virus to evolve in, potentially causing mutations that cause symptoms (years or decades in the future). It wouldn't actually solve the problem in the long run.

You think... a vaccine is going to CAUSE asymptomatic spreading? I think you need to start citing some science here. Things you are saying really aren't making sense.