Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[mission27]

38 minutes ago, seriously27 said:

I can tell you for a fact that having a working vaccine by January would not only be a miracle, but would also be a risk as well. None of the vaccine's are even close to finishing their phase three trials yet and most drugs who get to this point fail anyways. That's why there are so many vaccines in the works....because until you get to phase three, a lot of treatments LOOK promising, but don't follow through by actually working or are deemed to have too many dangerous side effects to be a feasible option. Johnson and Johnson are actually closer than Oxford at this point as Oxford has just now found a manufacturing partner for their phase three trials in Astrazeneca, while J and J found one earlier this month and has already started cell production. But the drug production itself takes a while....a month and a half to simply start testing on that scale. One of the 50 or so vaccines in the works right now throughout the world will work, but having it by January is just him spreading positivity and hope. 

But isn't Oxford working off a vaccine platform that was previously shown to be safe and have now shown it works in other primates?  That would seem to be a big leg up

[seriously27]

18 minutes ago, mission27 said:

But isn't Oxford working off a vaccine platform that was previously shown to be safe and have now shown it works in other primates?  That would seem to be a big leg up

Almost all of them are using different variations of vaccines that worked for other viruses. That's why we are talking a year to a year and a half and not three or four years at least. The animal compatibility is a good first sign, but it doesn't always translate very well. They are basically combining their phase 2 and 3 trials, and by doing there is a much higher chance of the vaccine underwhelming in its efficacy. Trust me, I want there to be a fast vaccine as much as anyone and I could care less which company gets there first so I'm hoping they succeed. 

But I think Pascal is just putting it out there a little bit to help their stock numbers get a little bump. It won't look bad on them if they still don't have it until after January because by that time the numbers will show a clearer picture of whether this really is going to be a good candidate. Still, I'll hope it works perfectly and they do get it done by then. 

Edited April 30, 2020 by seriously27

[mistakey]

really curious to the moderna phase 1 trial status

[mistakey]

2 hours ago, mission27 said:

https://nypost.com/2020/04/30/dr-fauci-us-government-could-have-coronavirus-vaccine-by-january/

They want 300m doses of a vaccine produced in the US by next January... aka the goal is be ready to vaccinate everyone within a year of this hitting us

Might be the biggest scientific achievement of our lifetime if they can pull that off tbh

contagion the movie but for real

[seriously27]

31 minutes ago, mistakey said:

really curious to the moderna phase 1 trial status

That trial has an efficacy endpoint of 57 days so you probably won't see the complete results of their phase 1 trials until around May 15th. 

[Shanedorf]

35 minutes ago, mistakey said:

really curious to the moderna phase 1 trial status

Its a "new" method of developing / delivering a vaccine, so the FDA is going to be cautious on the safety side.
But moderna is still moving fast because their technology cuts steps out of the overall development timeline

Here's the moderna page with timelines, FAQs and a video of how it works

https://www.modernatx.com/modernas-work-potential-vaccine-against-covid-19

[vikesfan89]

7 hours ago, WizeGuy said:

I remember when I was a kid I was a bit of an anarchist. I didnt think we needed government control, and wanted true freedom. 

 

These types of news stories show how wrong I was. Yikes...

What do you mean when you say government control? Where do you draw the line?

[Malfatron]

12 minutes ago, vikesfan89 said:

What do you mean when you say government control? Where do you draw the line?

Where the government tells us the line is

[Xenos]

8 hours ago, Xenos said:

They were just easing restrictions in San Diego too. We could walk through the beach with proper social distancing i.e. no congregating or sunbathing. Honestly Newsom should be punishing those cities who kept their beaches open like Huntington Beach instead of everyone.

Glad that's what he ended up doing.

[Xenos]

Why is the Coronavirus so confusing? Interesting article and a long read but I think good for the most part. Part VI is political in nature though.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/pandemic-confusing-uncertainty/610819/

Some things that stood out to me.

Quote

The pandemic’s length traps people in a liminal space. To clarify their uprooted life and indefinite future, they try to gather as much information as possible—and cannot stop. “We go seeking fresher and fresher information, and end up consuming unvetted misinformation that’s spreading rapidly,” Bergstrom says. Pandemics actually “unfold in slow motion,” he says, and “there’s no event that changes the whole landscape on a dime.” But it feels that way, because of how relentlessly we quest for updates. Historically, people would have struggled to find enough information. Now people struggle because they’re finding too much.

 

Quote

Prasad’s concern is that COVID-19 has developed a clinical mystique—a perception that it is so unusual, it demands radically new approaches. “Human beings are notorious for our desire to see patterns,” he says. “Put that in a situation of fear, uncertainty, and hype, and it’s not surprising that there’s almost a folk medicine emerging.” Already, there are intense debates about giving patients blood thinners because so many seem to experience blood clots, or whether ventilators might do more harm than good. These issues may be important, and when facing new diseases, doctors must be responsive and creative. But they must also be rigorous. “Clinicians are under tremendous stress, which affects our ability to process information,” McLaren says. “‘Is this actually working, or does it seem to be working because I want it to work and I feel powerless?’”

 

Quote

The idea that there are no experts is overly glib. The issue is that modern expertise tends to be deep, but narrow. Even within epidemiology, someone who studies infectious diseases knows more about epidemics than, say, someone who studies nutrition. But pandemics demand both depth and breadth of expertise. To work out if widespread testing is crucial for controlling the pandemic, listen to public-health experts; to work out if widespread testing is possible, listen to supply-chain experts. To determine if antibody tests can tell people if they’re immune to the coronavirus, listen to immunologists; to determine if such testing is actually a good idea, listen to ethicists, anthropologists, and historians of science. No one knows it all, and those who claim to should not be trusted.

In a pandemic, the strongest attractor of trust shouldn’t be confidence, but the recognition of one’s limits, the tendency to point at expertise beyond one’s own, and the willingness to work as part of a whole. “One signature a lot of these armchair epidemiologists have is a grand solution to everything,” Bergstrom says. “Usually we only see that coming from enormous research teams from the best schools, or someone’s basement.”

 

Quote

In the final second of December 31, 1999, clocks ticked into a new millennium, and … not much happened. The infamous Y2K bug, a quirk of computer code that was predicted to cause global chaos, did very little. Twenty years later, Y2K is almost synonymous with overreaction—a funny moment when humanity freaked out over nothing. But it wasn’t nothing. It actually was a serious problem, which never fully materialized because a lot of people worked very hard to prevent it. “There are two lessons one can learn from an averted disaster,” Tufekci says. “One is: That was exaggerated. The other is: That was close.”

Last month, a team at Imperial College London released a model that said the coronavirus pandemic could kill 2.2 million Americans if left unchecked. So it was checked. Governors and mayors closed businesses and schools, banned large gatherings, and issued stay-at-home orders. These social-distancing measures were rolled out erratically and unevenly, but they seem to be working. The death toll is still climbing, but seems unlikely to hit the worst-case 2.2 million ceiling. That was close. Or, as some pundits are already claiming, that was exaggerated.

 

[mistakey]

2 hours ago, Shanedorf said:

Its a "new" method of developing / delivering a vaccine, so the FDA is going to be cautious on the safety side.
But moderna is still moving fast because their technology cuts steps out of the overall development timeline

Here's the moderna page with timelines, FAQs and a video of how it works

https://www.modernatx.com/modernas-work-potential-vaccine-against-covid-19

Yeah the rna stuff is dope i just figured they were almost done with phase 1 soon and i havent heard anything.  But figuring out vaccines for viruses is pretty much what AI is made for

[mistakey]

2 hours ago, seriously27 said:

That trial has an efficacy endpoint of 57 days so you probably won't see the complete results of their phase 1 trials until around May 15th. 

Word

[vikesfan89]

1 hour ago, Malfatron said:

Where the government tells us the line is

Not sure if serious

[TVScout]

It used to take 25 years to develop a vaccine.

[Ty21]

Bummed. A manager that was hired at my work over a year ago became one of my best friends and she was let go today after saying she’s too scared to work retail at work while everything is shut down. She’s one of the most passionate and hard working managers we’ve had at work so it’s all ****ed up. It’s a truly stupid reason to fire someone.