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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

Good news for Pfizer shareholders as there will be endless purchase orders from the government, and little incentive to improve its durability

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…wouldn’t they just seek out a vaccine manufacturer whose vaccine has better longevity? Idk if this applies to Moderna, but even if it did, at this stage in the game there are over a dozen vaccines in production worldwide.

Moderna also announced recently the effectiveness of their vaccine wanes.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

I don't think any of them have better durability. If you used the Biothrax reduced schedule of doses at 0 months, one month, 6 months (five months after second dose), 12 months (six months after third dose), and 18 months, you might be able to switch to boosting once a year before a predicted spike. That would be improbable even in the richest countries (look at how Anthrax went in the US military), so the probable solution would be not to care about infection, or to pray to the god of live attenuated nasal spray vaccines to save us all.

Figure 1 of this study (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.06.21261707v..., linked elsewhere in the thread) shows a pretty clear difference between Moderna and Pfizer.

It might give you a year after 3 or 4 doses instead, but I'm not sure it's worth the reactogenicity. Good point though.

Some studies[0] have shown Moderna does not have the same waning problems as pfizer, possibly due to pfizer’s much smaller dosage.

https://amp.ft.com/content/aaddc31b-415d-43d0-b314-bc89a8b86...

Are you suggesting that the likelihood of a contract renewal worth tens of billions of taxpayer dollars rests solely on our government seeking to objectively determine the best vaccine for the taxpayers?

Do you have a license for that sort of dangerous thinking?

Not in the near future. Pretty sure there are multi-year contracts given that the US government was able to negotiate the Pfizer vaccine price from $30+ down to $19.50 per dose.

COVID-19 is becoming endemic. The second booster will be the virus itself.

Maybe they should give you the live virus after receiving the vaccine? I mean, studies show that being vaccinated and getting COVID-19 provides the best immunity.

Please stop giving our authoritarian overlords ideas

One of Germany's top health officials actually said that he hopes to get infected with the virus as long as the vaccine protects him from severe symptoms. That caused a bit of a stir in his fan base.

That is what I'm saying. If they are actually going off research they'd follow-up the vaccine with the live virus.

Is that snark? Do you believe they did this on purpose?

Big corps have been known to do worse...see, e.g., the nesle baby formula scandal.

https://www.ranker.com/list/nestle-baby-formula-boycott/meli...

It looks like they on purpose not developing new vaccine for delta, gamma, etc. and instead continue to milk the old one.

Typical MBA myopia - they don't see that with the quick production mRNA tech and the regularly emerging virus variants (seasonal Covid, flu and whatever is to come) they have on hands the perfect business model of vaccine as basically a subscription service, and instead they go the old way of regulatory capture to maximize the ROI of the current product through the vaccine mandate/etc.

> they on purpose not developing new vaccine for delta

Pfizer is testing a Delta-specific booster [1]. They can’t just plop it into the market. It has to go through a whole new set of approvals.

[1] https://cdn.pfizer.com/pfizercom/2021-07/Delta_Variant_Study...

That's not 100% true; boosters for the flu do not need to go through the whole 6-month-testing double-blind rigamarole. A COVID booster with a tweaked Delta specific formula could be approved much more quickly than the original vaccine. There's precedent for that.

Do you remember the swine flu from 2009?

A couple of years ago (in the year after the swine flu craze), I was at the doctor's to get my yearly seasonal flu shot when I read the label on the vaccine vial stating that it was a seasonal flu / swine flu compound mix. Apparently the manufacturer got rid of their leftovers from the previous year by the help of a cost efficient second cycle use. I doubt that many people, who got their seasonal flu shot that year, were told what else they were injected with.

I politely declined.

It was all over the news that the 2009 flu shot would have a swine flu component, and if I recall correctly it was somewhat delayed. I got mine as soon as I could. People who caught it over the summer said it really kicked their ass, the vaccine just made me a bit achey all over for a day.

>It was all over the news that the 2009 flu shot would have a swine flu component

It wasn't in Germany. In fact the vaccine was highly controversial back then and not a single person within my social circles admitted to getting it.

There's no evidence that boosters actually need to be tweaked for delta.

Boosters produce much broader neutralizing activity, including neutralizing antibodies that are effective (in vitro) against SARS-1 and MERS.

The immune system is designed to be a fuzzy matcher, and the boosters seem to kick broad production of antibodies into gear.

If possible explanations involving the evolutionary psychology of the immune system appeal to you (yes i'm a bit sarcastic there) then it appears that broad immunity is expensive to the immune system, and if you only encounter a virus once then you get a narrower immune response under the assumption that it may be a one-time-thing. But if you get hit with two bad infections in the same year (with sufficient separation between them) your immune system gets the message that you're going to be seeing a lot more of this virus in the future so it goes all "okay, fuck you and your entire family" on the virus.

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