I agree though if a general vaccine is created.
I'm really looking forward to a future where this and heart disease or just merely annoying.
The vaccine works by instructing the body to make up to 34 “neoantigens.” These
are proteins found only on the cancer cells, and Moderna personalizes the
vaccine for each recipient so that it carries instructions for the neoantigens
on their cancer cells.Edit: Ah yes, why patent specifics when you can patent the umbrella which is akin to covering all bases - https://patents.google.com/patent/US10055540B2/en
A "big influx of money from all countries in the world" - if from governments themselves and not individual citizens buying - would in fact be a proof point against its claimed effectiveness, if forcing the otherwise free market (via easily-commonly captured political-government-institutional channels) is what's required to drive funding towards it, e.g. regulatory capture to provide profits when they may not actually be deserved-warranted - say by trying to get approval for a fraudulently approved product, e.g. "... the 26 pharmaceutical companies paid some $33 billion in fines during the 13-year period. The top 11 alone accounted for $28.8 billion" - https://www.pharmaceuticalprocessingworld.com/gsk-pfizer-and...
And arguably this is just the tip of the iceberg and the industry hasn't been held accountable for most of their fraud since the industrial complex formed.
This isn't just a problem with the pharmaceutical industry but with clearly corrupt-captured regulators like the FDA - who allowed this fraud to happen to begin with, missing or not checking into whatever lies were presented for the fraud to occur and the products to make it to market.
And that's why headlines like "Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than expected" should be taken with extreme skepticism.
But otherwise, I always agree with people taking a default being skeptical approach to any medical news.
We don’t know how valuable this tech is. It could be worth trillions. It could be niche. Risk sharing, not cost, is the currency of deal making.
> immediately publish details and surrender any patent
mRNA vaccine production methods are tough, e.g. Moderna’s encapsulation technology. Add to that the personalisation required for these treatments, and we’re still far from economies of scale.
…and were invented with publicly-funded research that they’ve now privatized, resulting in large death tolls from vaccine inequity in poor countries.
This is an odd complaint for this circumstance.
Those poor countries didn’t materially fund these vaccines’ development. And production was fundamentally constrained; nations entered into bidding wars to secure them. In the end, geopolitics dictated which vaccines—if any—poor people got. Covid vaccines were distributed through non-market channels.
Having publicly-funded research doesn't mean you can ignore profit either — the public funding for mRNA was that the initial research was done at UPenn, which receives NIH grants. But large research universities don't exist on public funding alone — they license the patents they hold to companies to develop them, which is a huge part of their revenue. For the mRNA royalties alone, in 2022 UPenn received over $750 million, which exceeded the total of all of UPenn's NIH grants for that year combined. Even in smaller-revenue years like 2020, public funding represents significantly less than half of UPenn's revenue sources. Take away UPenn's ability to monetize their research, and their ability to fund the fundamental research goes down too.
In my view the default isn't that diseases cure themselves. The default is people die. If pushing forward the state of the art of vaccine tech didn't need money in order to be built, what was stopping anyone else from doing it? And if it does need money, well... Then it needs to be well-funded, meaning it needs to show the potential for profit. I don't think charity has proven an excellent model for funding advanced scientific development of this kind.
Your last point is also hysterical because yes, the research needs massive investment, the state provides it, and then allows private companies to run off with it and charge them again for the very thing they made possible in the first place. It’s about as insane and corrupt as could ever be imagined.
I’ll also highlight that Cuba developed a highly effective COVID vaccine as a poor country, under extreme sanctions, and shared hundreds of millions of doses to other poor countries, which further demonstrates what you claim to be untrue.
A research is only the beginning. It usually takes many years and lot of investment to bring a drug to the market. There is also high risk that none of the investment will be recouped. That’s the role that private companies can do well. They don’t just “run off with it”.
ASML, for example, benefits heavily from EUV research done in the US with public fund. Yet you can’t say they ran off with it. They invested heavily, and it took them many years to perfect the technology.
https://www.modernatx.com/research/product-pipeline
Almost all of them are still long way to go before becoming commercial products, if at all. Does it look like they run off with it as you asserted? Or do they have to shoulder the development cost and risk?
One of the drugs is of course their COVID vaccine which is a home run. It’s the potential of such windfall that makes them willing to bet on all of the other drugs in the pipeline.
You cited Cuba’s COVID vaccine. How many other drugs do they have in pipeline? Right, not so many compared to all of the drugs developed by private money. Ask yourself, with regard to their COVID vaccine, how extensive was the testing? can they scale the production? how widely can they distribute the vaccine?
And if existing tech works well enough — great! Then use it, and don't use the more expensive mRNA ones.
Of course, there are benefits to mRNA vaccines, which is why they were deployed first — Moderna had a working vaccine barely over a month after starting work on it, with only the gene sequence of the virus from Chinese labs to work with. All the rest of the time was just testing. Effectively being able to print a vaccine given a gene sequence is extremely useful.
And again — the state (aka the United States) does not fully fund research. It provides less than half of funding in a non-banner year, and a fraction in boom years. Cutting funding not only would hurt deployment and development, it would also harm fundamental research.
Thus, instead of custom manufacture your distribution system is 34 separate compounds, the patient receives whatever combination would be best for their tumor. Probably not viable at the ordinary pharmacy level, but viable at the cancer center level or a compounding pharmacy.
The problem was that almost everyone who got the vaccine also caught the disease.
Unfortunately, it turned out to mutate quite rapidly (like the flu) and soon the battles weren't always a rout. It still reduces severity, though, and thus is still used.
That's called preventing Covid. Covid is the disease, not simply an infection.
The problem is that the vast majority of people who got the vaccine did in fact notice very well they've had Covid.
> That's what they got against Covid/Wuhan and the world actually did achieve herd immunity--against Covid/Wuhan. (The Wuhan strain has been extinct for some time.)
The Wuhan strain wasn't that relevant even before the vaccines were widely available.
> Unfortunately, it turned out to mutate quite rapidly (like the flu) and soon the battles weren't always a rout.
Which was predicted and expected all along.
> It still reduces severity, though, and thus is still used.
Only if you take really awful studies seriously.
Nobody bothered to test this hypothesis in a proper trial.
And, yes, nobody has tested the severity reduction in a proper trial. It would be expensive, difficult and serve little purpose. What we can observe is that given matched populations the unvaccinated die at a considerably higher rate than the vaccinated. Beware of some bogus "studies" to the opposite--which didn't use matched populations. Those at higher risk are more likely to be vaccinated and a vaccinated high risk individual can easily still be more likely to die than an unvaccinated low risk individual.
No purpose except for actually knowing whether it actually reduces severity.
> What we can observe is that given matched populations the unvaccinated die at a considerably higher rate than the vaccinated. Beware of some bogus "studies" to the opposite--which didn't use matched populations. Those at higher risk are more likely to be vaccinated and a vaccinated high risk individual can easily still be more likely to die than an unvaccinated low risk individual.
The sad reality is that you can't do matched population without a randomized controlled trial. You can't control for confounders you don't understand.
A recent hillarious example is the well-publicized paper that showed a drop of over 90% in Covid-related mortality after the first booster. Other researchers managed to obtain the data and it turned out there was also a similar drop in non Covid related morality. This resulted in the following correspondece, which is well worth reading:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2306683
A choice quote from the authors of the original paper:
> During the B.1.617.2 (delta) wave in the United States, similar associations were observed between the use of mRNA vaccines and lower mortality not related to Covid-191 and mortality from any cause.
They mean that many of the studies showing a drop in Covid mortality after the mRNA vaccines, also showed a similar drops in non-Covid related mortality. In other words, the vaccinated population were healthier at the outset and the drop was bogus.
You need a proper clinical trial here to make this claim, as the observational data is ridiculously confounded.
"No you can't just fight cancer this way, that's cheating, drink this completely natural juice made from pulped fruits and vegetables that have been growing separately for 80 million years."