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Comment by BuyMyBitcoins | Hacker News Reader

This question is being asked from a place of ignorance, why aren’t there inactivated virus vaccines for covid yet? Wouldn’t they be more effective?

(Edit: in the US. It seems like only mRNA is available)

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Several inactivated virus vaccines exist for COVID-19. SinoVac/CoronaVac.[1] Sputnik-V.[2] Janssen.[3] (The Johnson and Johnson vaccine.) None are as effective as the messenger RNA vaccines at preventing symptomatic illness, although they're pretty good at preventing death.

All three are easier to store and transport than the mRNA vaccines, as well as being one-shot vaccines. There's a political problem - they're seen as inferior vaccines for poor people, at least in the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoronaVac

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_V_COVID-19_vaccine

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janssen_COVID-19_vaccine

Sputnik V and Johnson and Johnson are not live or attenuated virus but adenovirus vaccines. They infect the host with a harmless virus that make your cell produce spike protein. They are a fairly new tech.

Also Sputnik V is a two dose vaccine, like Astra Zeneca’s

They are new tech in humans, slight but important distinction, as mRNA is new everywhere (but amazing tech!).

It’s unfortunate that went that way. There were supply problems with J&J, and by the time that cleared up, states had mostly built out infrastructure to handle the storage and transport limitations of the RNA vaccines.

One shot is a miracle for vulnerable populations — my dad was a very vulnerable person with limited mobility; the county sheriffs went out and vaccinated him and others. The two shot regimens are also difficult for workers in swing /night shift and other scenarios.

>There were supply problems with J&J

Supply problems makes it sound like they didn't have enough ingredients to make it. IIRC the labs making it were contaminated. That's less of a supply problem than a competency problem.

Yes, one shot is also good for rural population vaccinated with a mobile unit and maybe for some people are who are at risk getting a very powerful immune response and end up getting stuck with an incomplete vaccination scheme, because they can't take the second dose. I have an acquiantance in that position, she still has an off the scale antibody count after covid and the first Pfizer dose. It's great that we have more options now.

When the French gov't announced that you need a vaccination pass to be admitted into restaurants, more than 600k people registered for vaccination in the folliwing days, most of them for the one shot J&J vaccine. So I guess it's also good for undecided people?

Sinovac is considered barely effective, even by WHO, who consider it to be 51% effective, vs. 70+% for Western vaccines. (50% is considered to be ineffective.)

Most countries who have an alternative don't use Sinovac.

Japan reported contamination of Moderna, and recalled a million doses:

https://apnews.com/article/business-health-coronavirus-pande...

> inferior vaccines for poor people

I thought the vaccines in the US were free, why would the inferior ones be for poor people?

There was a push for offering homeless individuals the Johnson and Johnson vaccine in several places due to it being a single dose vaccine. There was concern about the logistics of scheduling a second dose for the unhoused and adherence rates.

JNJ is adenovirus iirc

(You should edit to correct that, Animats)

Infographics are available at the British Society for Immunology website, Types of vaccines for COVID-19 page (April 2021):

https://www.immunology.org/coronavirus/connect-coronavirus-p...

Which lists:

-- Viral vector vaccines (OAZ; Jannsen; CanSino; Gamaleya)

-- Genetic vaccines (Pfizer; Moderna; CureVac; Inovio)

-- Inactivated vaccines (Sinovac; Sinopharm; Bharat; Shifa; CAMS)

-- Attenuated vaccines (Codagenix)

-- Protein vaccines (Novavax; Sanofi)

To help making sense of the names, an interpolation follows from a table of article "An overview of current COVID-19 vaccine platforms" (April 2021), at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8076774/ :

-- University of Oxford/ AstraZeneca "ChAdOx1-S; AZD1222" - Deficient chimpanzeeadenovirus

-- Sinovac "CoronaVac" - Inactivated whole virus

-- Inactivated Wuhan Institute of Biological Products/ Sinopharm - Inactivated whole virus

-- Beijing Institute of Biological Products/ Sinopharm "BBIBP-CorV" - Inactivated whole virus

-- CanSino Biological Inc./ Beijing Institute of Biotechnology "Ad5-nCoV" - Deficient adenovirus-5

-- Bharat Biotech "Covaxin" - Inactivated whole virus

-- Gamaleya Research Institute Sputnik V "Gam-COVID-Vac" - Deficient adenovirus-5

-- Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies "Ad26.COV2.S" - Deficient adenovirus-26

-- Novavax "NVX-CoV2373" - Recombinant protein

-- BioNTech/ Fosun Pharma/ Pfizer "BNT162 - Comirnaty" - RNA-based vaccine

-- Moderna/ NIAIDc "mRNA-1273" - RNA-based vaccine

There's plenty, Sinovac and Sinopharm to name a few. They aren't as effective because a dead virus doesn't trigger the same immune response as the live version. The western vaccines replicate an important piece of the live virus which produces a better immune response.

In general a whole cell vaccine is better as the entire virus gets targeted. I believe the mRNA was done the way it was for calendar speed. Hopefully whole cell vaccines will be approved in the near future as odds are they'll be much better at handling variants.

How can we talk in generalities about dead virus vaccines vs mRNA when these are the first ever mRNA vaccines approved? And the current attenuated vaccines are certainly not more effective than the mRNA vaccines.

Better stated would be that for other diseases, live attenuated and dead virus vaccines seem to target most of the virus vs just a small part of the virus (spike in this case). I think the target of just the spike was done for calendar speed. If a larger target can be used in the future, I think it'll have more success. Delivery can be mRNA or traditional.

Why would you expect a vaccine to confer significantly longer lasting immunity than an ordinary infection? What evidence do we have that natural immunity lasts any longer than a year?

In general natural immunity is as good or sometimes better than a vaccine.

N=1 that natural immunity lasts long has to do with my 70+ year old dad who got covid Summer 2020 and has been doing blood donations ever since as he has type O blood. Every time he goes in they report back that his antibody count is still high. I can't offer you any studies on that, just a personal antidote.

Edit guess I'll get more minus points for my N=1 antidotes

> In general natural immunity is as good or sometimes better than a vaccine.

There are some notable exceptions though, e.g. HPV, Tetanus, and some others.

If you’re wary of the mRNA platform the Jansen vaccine is on the adenovirus vector platform and is authorized and available in the US.

Isn't it mostly the vector that's different? It's still modified to produce the spike protein, so it's not actually a deactivated coronavirus?

I think Sinovac is this. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinovac_Biotech)

I think in testing in the west it was less effective at the time than others.

(Speculating here.) What I think might be a good idea is to do both. The mRNA vaccines seem extremely effective at what they do, but there might be benefit in giving the immune system experience with other parts of the virus besides the spike as that may make immune escape a lot harder for the virus to pull off.

I think the idea is that without the spike protein the virus would be a feeble pathogen and so not worth worrying about.

It looks like there have been a few studies with inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. It looks like they are effective but I’m not sure if they are expected to be more effective than the current mRNA vaccines:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2107715

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2780562

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