Moderna has unraveled
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The technology they invented is incredibly promising for new vaccines and they should be attracting enough investment (through contracts or other deals) to continue innovating and saving lives. Maybe they can license it as a last ditch effort to build revenue, but unfortunately the public perceptions about vaccine efficacy is on the wane and government contracts are no longer there to support this vital work both in the present and as a hedge against future pandemics.
For reference, I get a sore-ish shoulder the next day, and that's it. Also for reference, when I got Actual Covid, I was knocked on my ass for almost two weeks. So for me, at least, the choice is easy.
It's unfortunate that the vaccine has such radically different outcomes within a single household, if it was a flu shot like experience I'd happily get it once per year.
Flu shot experience varies too. The last several have been very low response, but the first few were a miserable couple days and I stopped getting them because certain misery was worse than a chance of misery that I'd never know if it was flu or not, because testing was inaccessible.
COVID-19 may Enduringly Impact Cognitive Performance and Brain Haemodynamics in Undergraduate Students - ScienceDirect https://share.google/49ER4VjJUwipGotZO
When I got Covid later, it was slightly worse chills for 3 days. By the 4th time I got Covid, it was just chills for a day.
If I knew that would be the experience, I'd probably have skipped it. That said, it's completely possible it was having the vaccine that made getting real Covid not so bad.
I'm saying that's not an apples to apples comparison due to the growing evidence of how much long term damage a COVID infection can cause.
I would say people who end up bedridden for 3 days are in the minority for most vaccines immune responses, but people also need to make peace with the idea that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
- Plan to sink $180-500M+ just in R&D
- Factor in failures, regulatory, clinical, recruitment, phase 1/2 trials and you arrive very quickly around $1.3-2.1 BILLION USD per therapy approved.
...there is a 90% chance that you will spend that $1B+ - and it will fail completely.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00043-x
https://greenfieldchemical.com/2023/08/10/the-staggering-cos...
Honestly it doesn't sound that bad considering these pharma revenues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_biomedical_com...
Making pharmaceuticals subservient to the whimsy of the stock market is a bad idea. It introduces incentive distortions where none should be.
Hope such people reconsider their stance when the threat level is high enough. Err, threat to them and theirs as the threat to others isn’t high enough by definition.
Apologies for being morbid, but that's what we call a self-fixing problem, isn't it? On a Darwinistic level, people either adopt an effective threat assessment approach or they die.
EDIT: Following up on some of the comments, note that I didn't actually say whether vaccine deniers do or do not have an effective threat assessment approach - I don't know. While I personally do believe in the effectiveness of vaccines, I definitely am not qualified to be making risk decisions for other people, and it's important for me to say this, because I don't want other people to make decisions for me. For example, I don't want others to tell me to not do extreme sports, or not to go out to the wilderness, or not to drink alcohol, etc, regardless of whether society feels that this increases my health risks. I strongly believe that a core part of being free is being able to make these decisions for oneself. I agree that we should have some way of preventing harm to others, but it can't be something that comes at the cost of removing people's bodily autonomy (or even just denigrating people for choosing differently).
So those vaccine deniers get sick, lose their commitment, go to the ED, get some level of treatment/help/etc, and suck up resources and impact help for the guy who got vaccinated then got hit by someone running a red light....
"Chinese bat flu. Deadly enough to be a problem. Not deadly enough to be a solution"
Which is to say it's a real problem. The flu is a real problem, ask any nurse that works in a hospital. With vaccines Covid is 3X worse. But that's not enough carnage to break through most peoples normalcy bias. No ones getting enlightened, instead they'll get angry and lash out.
As an extreme example, give me a free weekend and I'll get you a mathematical model of how if we force everyone who ever committed a physically aggressive act to go on beta blockers, then we'll significantly reduce violent crime. But having the math worked out doesn't immediately imply that that's what we should do.
But a drug company has to produce new products if she wants to survive. m-RNA tech, although promising in theory and the beginning, couldn't produce a life saving block buster product and now the parent company might die or be buyed out.
"Why is a company whose entire valuation was based on covid-19 vaccine sales struggling now???"
Mysterious!
And if you think that HN believes that AI is the future with no scrutiny, you haven't been paying attention.
I will keep my laminated "Proof of Vaccination" card for life so we don't forget, wasn't allowed anywhere without it (except Black Lives Matter riots)
There is certainly no way to know how Trump would have handled that implementation, but we do know how the Biden administration handled it.
Efficacy figures are bound to change once you go from a ‘small’ study (in this case hundreds of thousands) to a wider population. The original efficacy claims would have been truly astounding, and they ended up being only very good.
80% efficacy (which it ended up as) should be seen as a medical triumph, and certainly worthwhile in the context of a global pandemic.
That’s the problem, the bar was set too high. Things were said like “get the vaccine and you won’t get Covid”, “you won’t be able to spread it if you do get it”, and “you will have a milder case if you do get it”. In short order people realized all of those things were exaggerated and not true. Erodes trust.
It was a huge miscalculation and damage was done.
Was this actually said, or did they say something like “much less likely to get Covid symptoms”?
Because the science never claimed 100% efficacy, at best they said 94%, which is quite a clear indication that some people would still get symptoms. The efficacy rates and R rates were all over the news at the time.
> “you won’t be able to spread it if you do get it”
Again an absolute that was never claimed by science. If you have milder symptoms it reduces the chance of spreading and reduces the viral load when it does. Even a small reduction in symptoms in the population will greatly help reduce the rate of the virus spreading.
> “you will have a milder case if you do get it”.
This part at least is correct.
There was a lot of confusion and bad science communication at the time, but the vaccines worked the same as vaccines always have. R rates and efficacy rates were talked about at length on mainstream and social media (what else did they have to talk about). The problem is that people heard only what they wanted to hear.
People tend to try and excuse it by saying “well, they weren’t the scientists” but the reality is they were the public face of the covid vaccination efforts and their exaggerations and insistence on mandates had a net negative effect on people’s perceptions of the covid vaccine efficacy which has bled into a more general skepticism of public health and other vaccines.
Remember what President Obama purportedly said: “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up”. Applies here.
I personally think “get vaccinated so you don’t get sick and don’t spread it to others” is an acceptable simplification of “get vaccinated so you have less chance of getting severely sick and reduce the risk of spreading it to others”, which is the truth (though I believe the language used was most often closer to the latter than the former).
In any case, they most certainly communicated more detail than you are suggesting. In fact there was a lot of detail.
It’s very hard to buy the notion that Biden was actively misleading that vaccines were going to be 100% effective when in White House briefings the president would hand over to medical staff, who then talked in depth about efficacy rates of less than 100%.
There is nothing acceptable about a message that ends up eroding trust in science and health authorities. Good intentions with poor outcomes hurt more than they help. We shouldn’t excuse it.
There was and continues to be a huge amount of disinformation and anti-science fear spread around, but the correct information was put out there and if you weren’t getting the right information you need to change your sources.
There is no heresy in looking back and evaluating how things were managed and hope that our authorities learn from their mistakes before God forbid any future health crisis comes our way. What we know from the last one is “Sit down, shut up, and take the medicine and don’t trust your lying eyes” doesn’t work and creates distrust. So let’s not do that again.
A public health authority's only coin is the extent to which the public finds it credible, and the US public health establishment may never recover from covid.
Truly alien. Completely beyond understanding.
The politicians lied to our faces and twisted our arms through mandates and threatened us to believe what they told us, not what we were seeing with our own eyes. I don't think the reaction against mRNA vaccines would have been so strong if they didn't try to force us to take it or if they didn't wage a religious war against those that didn't want to take it.
But I still believe mRNA has a great future ahead of it. I have recently bought a large position (for me) in Moderna because I think it will be able to fulfill the promises that we were told it would.
Instead they took the line of "we know better than you and we're going to force you to do this".
Democrats have a real problem with the "we know what's good for you" attitude.
Warp Speed was about being ready to make lots and lots of it once the testing was complete. It did a lot of good, but they probably should have spent more on it.
(Like double what we spent on it would still be relatively minimal and easily would have sped up wide availability in the US and around the world)
I'm fully vaccinated along with a booster. I was the first person outside of medical professionals that I know that got the COVID vaccine. I got COVID 3 weeks after my booster which is when I was supposed to be the most protected. That's when I came to the conclusion that we were lied to.
My kid got COVID and then he was still forced to get the vaccine because the school district/state forced it. That's because they refused to believe that natural immunity existed or that somehow the vaccine was magically better than natural immunity. This also made me realize how religious this has become because now even the scientists were anti-science.
It took years for them to relent and those several years of religious and anti-science beliefs from scientists and politicians destroyed the trust that people had in them.
I do not understand why this doesn’t click with people.
I believe that the word vaccine was misunderstood on a large scale, much to our detriment. I don't know what it should have been called otherwise, but I think the messaging around the mRNA treatments was handled poorly.
So instead they decided to change the goalposts and said "This vaccine that worked on the variant 2 years ago will still protect from severe symptoms" when in fact it did nothing and people kept getting infected.
It wasn't the vaccine itself it was how it was sold to us by Pfizer, Moderna and the politicians.
But we can learn from the experience. And in my view, telling a captive, emotional, and concerned audience "we have a vaccine!" and then not absolutely being a broken record about what that means was a miss.
If the point is that the average person is uneducated and doesn't understand how vaccines work, sure. But if the solution is to use a different word, that new word would need to be applied to every vaccine on the market. And what's the point if that's the case?
Also, I don't recall ever hearing people with actual knowledge claiming it provided a cloak of invulnerability. So again, I'm not sure what those people should have done different. I'd agree that the media distorted scientific truths, but they always do that.
If you're going to be upset about word choice, the thing to be upset about is that it has no connection to cows at all.
No vaccine grants 100% immunity. Some are more effective than others. It's hard to predict efficacy for a novel type of vaccination for a novel virus and there's no vaccines for other viruses in the same family.
Certainly, this could have been communicated better, but it's not like flu vaccines have 100% efficacy either and they've been around for decades.
But "every member of the government needs to communicate flawlessly 100% of the time during a once-in-a-century pandemic alongside a never-before-seen social media misinformation environment, even in their internal communication" is just not a bar that we can meet.
Imagine if they didn't call it a vaccine. "Of course this thing won't work, Fauci isn't even willing to call it a vaccine!"
What stopped the pandemic was omicron that was so explosively contagious that 98+% of the world got it at the time. After that everyone had natural immunity that caused decreasing symptoms every subsequent time you got infected with a new variant.
Source?
There was a study in 2024 that researched what exactly lead to the sudden decline in Covid deaths [0]:
...suggest that a phase transition in the molecular structure of the COVID-19 spike protein made the virus less likely to cause severe infections.
[0] https://www.springer.com/gp/about-springer/media/research-ne... click on the link directly to the study. It's a .pdf.
Please provide actual data supporting your ridiculous claim. You won't because you're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too.
Don't you have some coloring books to fill in or something?
You have zero authority to claim such a thing. If you want to try that route, I'd suggest you actually come with something to back up such a line.
There were plenty of studies comparing immunity through infection and vaccination pretty early on. One interesting aspect initially was that it looked like the combination of vaccination and infection was particularly effective. The infection acted like a booster.
I'm not familiar with the exact handling of this in the US, but in general it is difficult to count infection as a replacment for vaccination. There is likely much more variability there, there was less data about this available and the simple tests for COVID are not that reliable. Not impossible, but far more complex than requiring vaccination.
Natural immunity has been proven time and time again to be much more longer lasting and more effective than vaccination. Once you had COVID, there is no reason whatsoever to force people to get vaccinated. That is simply anti-science.
Now I don't know what "worked" means to you. But we've got a shitload of data on covid deaths post vaccine and the numbers are stark. If you can look at those two lines and say "nah the vaccines didn't do anything" then I really don't know what to say.
It actually was plausible for a time that vaccines could create herd immunity and thus mass vaccination was highly desirable. You’re retconning today’s knowledge onto politicians of five years ago. Knowing what we know now about the vaccines, yeah, it was a bad move, but it was reasonable at the time.
That the virus would mutate this much was not something that scientists could have predicted at that point. I don't mean that it was entirely unexpected, but there simply wasn't any way to forecast how much it would mutate in advance.
The updated vaccines against newer strains still did their job at preventing death and serious illness. But they couldn't prevent infection for the new strains.
Some politicians and parts of the media were quite bad at handling the way the pandemic changed over time. But it was still easily possible to get good information about them.
The common scientific consensus has always been "Don't vaccinate in the middle of a pandemic" because it would cause more variants. This was one of the things they absolutely violated.
> The updated vaccines against newer strains still did their job at preventing death and serious illness.
No this is not true at all. Most deaths occurred after vaccinations rolled out.
You just stated your own view as authority.
IMHO, if someone disagrees with me, they can ask for evidence, and there is plenty. Downvoting makes my post less and less visible, suppressing my opinion, rather than debating it. That's why I think it is cowardly. Of course there is a place for suppression, for example for abusive posts or inciting violence. But here, I politely state my opinion, let people debate.