Moderna Says New Vaccine May Be Ready in Early 2022 for Omnicron Variant | Hacker News Reader

Moderna Says New Vaccine May Be Ready in Early 2022 for Omnicron Variant

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23 pointsthomasyoung9912 comments

to the poster or mods: please edit it as "Omicron" for the future keyword searches

And for all time

Hopefully our regulatory bodies are functioning correctly because this sounds like Moderna trying to beat Pfizer to the market, which is not how we want these drugs created.

of course we want moderna trying to beat pfizer to the market! why wouldn’t we?

(agreed, we also want functioning regulatory bodies)

Products rushed to market tend to be poorly tested, poorly thought out and often suffer from mistakes that would have been easily identified if the schedule wasn't set by trying to beat a competitor to market.

The testing is the most regulated part. We DO want them to get this to market asap!

Based on what I've read this variant produces relatively mild symptoms, but is theorized to be more transmissible amongst vaccinated people due to heavy mutation on the spike protein the vaccines create immunity for.

Is this correct?

It seems like the articles I read on it purposefully try to minimize coverage of the fact that the doctors in South Africa are talking about how mild the symptoms are, and instead seem to be intended to provoke fear.

There's been lots of headlines about South African reports that it has mild symptoms. And lots of complaining that early observations from small and young sample groups should maybe not be reported as uncaveated "it's mild" headlines. (personally: start looking in 2-3 weeks, then there might be useful info, and it's not like it being reported as bad or not-so-bad in the mean time actually changes anything for me. Trying to get anything useful out of this early reporting seems for now fairly pointless.)

That's also why we should be caution about reports that this variant attacks mostly the young given that the population in the areas where it has been identified is itself mostly young.

It has increased hospitalizations in South Africa and it is more contagious and spreading rapidly. What do you think will happen?

Is Omnicron related to Unicron? For the uninitiated the latter is a Transformer the size of a planet. The prefixes alone would suggest that a robot the size of a solar system would be called Multicron. Omnicron would be something bigger, perhaps as large as an entire galaxy.

Took me a minute, ha!

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