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Comment by Uehreka | Hacker News Reader

…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.

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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?

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...

Moderna also announced recently the effectiveness of their vaccine wanes.

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

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.

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.

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