Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious what happened to all of the other vaccines that were in development, which we heard about in 2020. Now it still only seems to be Moderna and Pfizer.

If supply is a major constraint we would benefit from expanding the number of options in the market and have more pharma production built in other countries.

Although the pharma cartel is a very small community with a few mega firms. Making vaccine development an even smaller subset.

View on HN

Novavax is potentially even more efficacious, and should be widely available next year. [1]

It's also not mRNA based FWIW. [2]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

[2] https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/moths-and-tree-bark-how-th...

> All alone, the spike protein is harmless

(From your [2])

This is a lie. The spike protein has been shown to cause cardiovascular issues.

Water can also cause death, in high enough doses.

Sola dosis facit venenum.

> This is a lie. The spike protein has been shown to cause cardiovascular issues.

[Citation needed]

There was an article posted on HN a few days ago indicating such: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28438315

Almost necessarily less harmful than the complete virus, but the spike protein isn’t entirely harmless it seems.

Sputnik V is alive and kicking, but not in the western world. Russia is giving licence to produce it, and there are already several other countries that produce that vaccine.

There are also two (maybe three) Chinese vaccines that are distributed around the world.

AstraZeneca didn't suddenly disappear, despite the bad press in some western countries. There's Johnson&Johnson too.

But you are right, Moderna & Biontech/Pfizer are the favourites of the media and regulators in the western world.

CureVac (mRNA based) didn't get good enough efficacy results, most likely due to the timing with the delta variant. They're working on a new version of the vaccine which targets that variant specifically and which will be available next year.

NYT has a very thorough overview of the vaccines in development:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com