Ebola vaccine is 'potential game-changer' | Hacker News Reader

Ebola vaccine is 'potential game-changer'

bbc.com

110 pointspolskibus38 comments

A friend of mine was one of the primary researcher working on the vaccine in the Winnipeg lab. I remember going out to dinners past few years and keep hearing about him his work on this vaccine. One thing that really bothered me was how the government handled it at the end and how the vaccine was handed to NewLink (Which latter licensed it to Merc) for pretty much nothing.

From what I remember, a year or so before the outbreak and just after the development of the vaccine was pretty much done Health Canada decides that there will be no money in an ebola vaccine since they didn't foresee an outbreak and even if it did happen it would be in a third world country with not much money to go around.

So they put a warp on it and hand it to NewLink for $200,000. Apparently there were emails going around between the lab and the government trying to convince them that this is a shitty deal, but the end response was 200K is the most we'll ever get out of this.

a year later, the biggest outbreak in the history and NewLink licenses the Vaccine to Merck for $50M USD.

My main issue with it isn't that the vaccine was gone for $200K vs $50M, if you have spent god know how many millions and how many years developing a vaccine as part of government program, don't let it go for 200K, are we as a nation really hurting that much to have to recover that 200K? I just can't make any sense of it. and if you were thinking they sold it so it could be mass produced and developed then you are mistaken since NewLink did exactly nothing with it until they licensed it to Merck.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/canadian-ebola-vaccine-develop...

This government has had a bad history of not listening to scientists. Specifically, the long-form census, the fresh water lakes project, the muzzling of scientists...

Conversely, researchers have poor judgement assessing the economic value of their inventions. There was no ebola outbreak at the time the government (and by that, I mean the bureaucracy) was finding a buyer.

it's not about the scientist overestimating the value of their inventions, when you pour in years and millions of dollars on research like this you just don't give it away for pretty much nothing. 200K _might_ be considerable amount in personal finance, but when you enter the world of governments and research it's basically a rounding error. 200K? you might've as well given it away for free. When a bureaucrat sells something like this for so cheap all it tells me is they just wanted to pad a cell in one of their spreadsheet quarter of a percent with no regards on the investment and effort that was put into the project.

Giving it away for nothing would be fine -- put it in the public domain for anyone to use how they can. But selling a monopoly right for $200K? That's stealing from the taxpayers -- and Merck.

Putting it in the public domain sounds great, but someone needs to conduct the human trials needed to make it safe and effective. They aren't cheap and producing a vaccine carries huge liability risks.

Someone like... the government that already spent millions developing it?

and how do governments get their money?

Your thinking soundes like an example of the "sunk costs" fallacy.

It doesn't really matter what you invested. All that matters is what someone will pay for it.

But if someone will only pay you a pittance for it, why not hang onto it?

They have poor judgement for being right? Huh?

Survivorship bias. Look at the research into the abysmal rate of technology transfer from universities into industry.

> Conversely, researchers have poor judgement assessing the economic value of their inventions.

Possibly. Or maybe they thought that for a government-funded vaccine that might save thousands of lives, maximizing availability was more important than maximizing economic value for a completely unrelated company. Because they weren't, y'know, sociopaths.

What hit me most today after is saw the news. For many years ebola killed people and only after it hit mainstream media and it could have been an potential threat to the western world. Money just magical appears and we have a vaccine in less than a year.

Pardon the cynicism if I say that this is how nature works. How often is that only threats make things move ?

I believe the commenters concern is that threats to african lives aren't viewed as significant threats, only threats to western lives.

More generally, policymakers tend to be concerned about their constituents and taxpayers over those who are neither.

Arguably, that's the who point of a representative democracy.

Threats to those with means, but anyway, we're led to believe this should not happen in medicine, a life is a life. It's all very sad anyway.

I expect that's the specific reason "The Hot Zone" and "The Coming Plague" name the victims.

That is, rather than "An African man had Ebola" they would say "Arthur Obama had Ebola".

There's a whole world of difference between the two.

Much social, political and technological progress happens because something/people instigated those with power into believing they might be inconvenienced or harmed.

Huh? That's kind of funny because it has been in the media since the 1970s. There was even a movie about an Ebola like virus in the mid 1990s

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbreak_(film)

It's always been out there, you just didn't notice.

I think you misinterpreted the comment you're responding to.

No, I didn't. The scare of an epidemic in the U.S. has been real for decades.

This sort of snide comment has been made before. In fact, in the "malaria thread" just a few days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9940354

Ma8ee wrote: "Considering the nature of market economies and how the wealth is distributed in the world, it is not particularly surprising that most most medical research is aiming to cure ailments that affect white western men."

In this case this wasn't true, since the vaccine was done and sold before the outbreak.

Vaccines (like everything else in medicine) cost an awful lot to research and test. Somehow somebody's got to pay for that. Many vaccines aren't 100% effective, and add to that the fact that there are a variety of people who can't get vaccinated because they're too young, too old, too sick, or otherwise. When I get my vaccinations, I'm doing my part to protect everyone else. To me, the crucial issue is that vaccines are done for the common good anyways, but we make individuals pay for their own vaccinations. Even if the vaccines are developed by private entities, they should be purchased by governments or coalitions of governments for free-as-in-beer distribution.

How many other small bets did NewLink place on promising technologies coming out of academic labs, and how many of them panned out? Put another way, was 200k a fair market rate for the license at the time they paid it, or do you have reason to suspect corruption or malfeasance?

How could you not assume corruption? This is Ebola we're talking about. It wasn't "if" it was "when".

>This is Ebola we're talking about. It wasn't "if" it was "when"

Before 2014, there had been no outbreaks that had infected more than a few hundred people. ( www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/history/chronology.html )

> How could you not assume corruption? Even after the large 2014 outbreak, Merck claims that they do not view the development of the vaccine as "a commercial opportunity", but rather as being good for PR and for employee retention. ( http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/31/will-merck-ebola-vaccine-make... )

Is the only evidence of corruption the small initial licensing fee? If so, note that the terms of the license to NewLink also include royalties due to the Canadian government in the case of successful commercialization ( http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1126234/0001047469110... ).

There are other hemorrhagic fevers with no vaccine. I don't think we should get too carried away with Ebola just because it has, roughly speaking, a higher mortality rate, and has been kept in the news by this latest outbreak.

The ability to make a vaccine that looks promising a year after a major outbreak occurs is good, but not so impressive. A better achievement is, will be, developing processes to create vaccines for viruses, even previously unknown viruses, rapidly, being able to target viruses in places and stages current vaccines can't handle[1][2], and developing ways of testing a vaccine's efficacy without waiting for a large outbreak.

Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague (readily found by searching for the title in combination with epub) chronicles some encounters and research with various pathogens including several hemorrhagic fevers.

[1] Rabies still kills tens of thousands of people a year in Asia and Africa, in places where "get vaccinated" is not the standard response to getting bitten by a wild animal (the major vector of Rabies there is feral dogs); by the time symptoms appear it's too late. That's more people dead of Rabies per year than have died in the known history of Ebola outbreaks.

[2] Or, for example, HIV.

To me the main benefit of the vaccine is that it will calm the hysteria around Ebola. It's a nasty disease but the infection rate is fairly low. The media play a dangerous game crying wolf every month on what end up being relatively minor outbreaks. The list is now pretty long: Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Mad Cow disease, Ebola. Every time they bring back the spectre of the Spanish flu which wiped out a hundred million of people.

HIV kills about a million people a year. It might be old news but that's several orders of magnitude the scale of Ebola.

The question is, who is gonna pay for vaccinations? I don't believe that Western aid organizations can and will put up the money, and most African countries will not be able to.

Another problem is that many people are led to believe by their religious authorities that vaccines are the devil, white men are the devils... how are these parts of the population going to be protected to prevent creation of virus reservoirs?

The virus reservoirs of Ebola are in monkeys and bats, humans die too fast to be a long term reservoir. Survivors are not contagious.

Anyway, "Who will pay the bill?" is a good question.

This vaccine is for prevention. There is no cure for the infected.

Yet more evidence that vaccines do work and the anti-vaccine people are idiots of the highest order.

"highest order" is a bit strong, no? It's not totally inconceivable that vaccines could have negative health effects.

No, it's not strong. We've forgotten what a true pestilence like polio does because vaccination programs have all but eradicated it. Those diseases killed and maimed - only idiots without understanding of history and suffering would oppose vaccination programs. Bad things happen to people, and sometimes due to medical errors, but vaccination programs are the few things that are simple to implement and reduce human suffering

So we're not supposed to be afraid of Ebola anymore?

Or will the new vaccine conveniently save a Western country from a sudden, mysterious outbreak of Ebola?

The new Ebola vaccine is produced by Merck, and.. Oh look! Former CDC Director Now President of Merck's Vaccine Unit:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/08/0...

>> In the summer of 2011, Merck president Julie Gerberding said in a news interview1 that she's "very bullish on vaccines," as she recounted the various ways she helps Merck sell its products. What she didn't divulge was her motivation for leaving her job as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—an agency charged with overseeing vaccines and drug companies—and join Merck in the first place, back in January 2010.*

I'm sure that's completely unrelated. Nothing to see here, peon, move along!

EDIT:

It gets even "better":

>> The CDC disseminated extremely exaggerated data on the 2009 H1N1 "pandemic" and urged almost everyone in the U.S. to take the new, untested vaccines. When questions arose, they blocked CBS's requests for samples of the swine flu cases and added obstacles to getting information. Despite the many dangers that have since been linked to the hastily developed vaccine—including the confirmed link to narcolepsy—the H1N1 vaccine is now part and parcel of the "regular" seasonal flu vaccine, although most people are completely unaware of this fact. And the CDC is now, for the first time ever, urging the seasonal flu vaccine on everyone in the country, from six months' of age until death.

>> Even more disturbing, the CDC withheld data on miscarriages from the H1N1 vaccines under Gerberding's lead, while insisting that pregnant women be put first in line to receive it.

But you've been told that "anti-vaxxers" are a bunch of conspiracy loonies, so you should just keep laughing and sneering at them, yes?

Well, Pandemrix was never used in US.

The mechanism of narcolepsy was quite interesting. Note that it was linked to surface proteins of the virus itself:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24772-flu-vaccine-hel...

The fact that GSK vaccine managed to replicate exactly those surface proteins exactly that way (I guess better than the virus itself?) was quite unlucky. Maybe that could have been caught in more extensive clinical trials (I don't know).

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