One of the biggest intellectual oversights the masses dogmatically believe is that Science, as it is conducted today, is pure.
People conflate challenging Science™ with say challenging the scientific method, which has propelled Western Civilization to new heights. When in reality, the challenge is aimed towards the publication, funding, and career-ending ostracism mechanisms behind Science™ today. To say it is pure is to invite corruption to take nest.
Can you say something is a vaccine before it's verified to work? A better title might be 'Around 20 scientists of various quality are using themselves as COVID-19 vaccination guinea pigs'
> So far, the group can’t say if their vaccine works or not. They haven’t published results showing that the vaccine leads to antibodies against the virus, which is a basic requirement for being taken seriously in the vaccine race. Church says some of those studies are now underway in his Harvard laboratory, and Estep is hoping mainstream immunologists will assist the group. “It’s a little bit complicated, and we are not ready to report it,” Estep says of the immune responses seen so far.
Suspicious. A group this hell-bent on deployment should have serological data by now. The lack of anything suggests either: (1) a complication; or (2) no efficacy.
The article mentions that because this is an inhaled vaccine, antibodies would be found mostly in the airways and lungs rather than the blood. Measuring them requires a biopsy, which these volunteers might not want to sign up for.
Lung biopsy is hardly routine (according to my definition of routine). You can collapse the lung, embolisms can occur, infections can be life-threatening, it's incredibly uncomfortable.
There's another risk besides the obvious antibody-dependent enhancement problem: this vaccine could change your response to an official COVID-19 vaccine that you might want to get later. You might be left with enough immune response to squash another vaccine that's trying to help you, but not enough to stop the actual disease. The fact that they're going for mucosal immunity, making their vaccine different from the leading official candidates, makes this bad interaction less likely. Still, I think it's important to mention.
> Antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), sometimes less precisely called immune enhancement or disease enhancement, is a phenomenon in which binding of a virus to suboptimal antibodies enhances its entry into host cells, and sometimes also its replication.[1] This phenomenon—which leads to both increased infectivity and virulence—has been observed with mosquito-borne flaviviruses such as Dengue virus, Yellow fever virus and Zika virus,[2][3] with HIV, and with coronaviruses.[4]
> Some animals that were given experimental Sars vaccines suffered more severe lung inflammation than unvaccinated animals when subsequently infected. Those trials stopped and there is still no effective Sars vaccine.
From confiks answer: They argue that antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) specifically is less likely because the immune response of the intranasal vaccine is limited to the mucosal tissue [2].
“ says Church, who says he has not stepped outside of his house in five months.”
There are people that are underestimating this disease but not stepping outside of your house for 5 months is way overboard. Perhaps the author intended to say he hasn’t left his property in 5 months which is more reasonable but if you literally aren’t going outside in your own yard because of COVID, you are crazy.
If he says he has a house, it's safe to assume he has some sort of outdoor private property, even if it's just the steps leading to his front door. The only people I've ever met that don't have any outdoor area lived in apartments or condos.
> not stepping outside of your house for 5 months is way overboard
Why? There's no magic number for risk. The more you isolate the fewer transmission events you see. The more people willing to do that, the faster the spread will stop.
I mean... just look at the virus curves in the rest of the US. We're CLEARLY not staying home enough. We need more people "going overboard", not less.
Not really. For example yes nyc has a low case incidence rate, but the virus is blowing up in many other parts of America. Even during this period of relatively low travel it’s safe to assume there are people coming into nyc from around the country every day. Testing is delayed by 8-17 days, so the public health data is dangerously out of date. To be safe right now means isolating.
Isolating is not necessarily more healthy, nor required everywhere right now.
For example in Norway, you don't have to isolate. The numbers are relatively low, the clusters are well tracked, the few travelers from dangerous countries like USA have quarantines. You still have to be careful of course.
To compare the Norwegian response to the American response, and to presume any competence in America, seems quite irrational at this point to me. There are people out mixing in nyc in ways that will allow virus transfer when it gets back here one way or another. As time goes on more and more people are out. If there was no testing delay I would absolutely agree with you, but we are looking at a week minimum delay. The conditions bear more and more similarity to March. De Blasio (who deserves no respect on how he has handled any of the problems facing nyc currently) is trying to reopen the schools. Maybe only one of these things would be ok, but this is a disaster in the making.
Yeah, no. You don't get to boss around anybody at any location. If you want to stay home, stay home. Don't tell everyone else what to do when you are able to avoid the virus entirely by just taking your own advice.
I lived through this already, I already live in "civilization."
You know what Manhattan looks like today because of how seriously we took this dumb pandemic? [0] Yeah, real civilized.
Some people don't realize just how uncivilized NYC is without all the people walking around outside, making the grime, dysfunction, inefficiency, and disorder look acceptable and reasonable.
> You don't get to boss around anybody at any location.
Who's bossing around anyone? I responded to someone saying "you don't have to stay home" with "you should stay home". I'm just a random guy on the internet.
So, to clarify: will you please stay home?
> you are able to avoid the virus entirely by just taking your own advice.
I'm trying. But no, I can't avoid all interaction like this guy did. Some people can't avoid interaction at all (i.e. they have "essential" jobs they need to be at in person). All of us need to help.
Your attitude, frankly, is precisely why the US is, well, shitting the bed with this virus when almost literally everyone else in the developed world has it contained.
I did help - by nearly dying. I had to receive emergency care for appendicitis and could not get anywhere in my region to perform the appendectomy because my city decided to shut down all elective surgeries. Why? So that 32,000 morbidly obese octogenarians could die with the best-possible PR spin, which spared the state and their hospital administration staff of any wrongdoing.
I developed sepsis and nearly died as a result. I am a healthy 30 year old who went through a common medical emergency with a more than apparent, streamlined medical solution. I was denied basic care and decency, like many people were, because of all this garbage about there being a pandemic.
I don't care what you say - any 30 year old's life is more valuable than your grandparent bound to a nursing home. So, no, fuck that - I will not stay home. I will fight for my ability to stay alive, thank you very much. If a pandemic can bring down a country simply by forcing people to stay home, we deserve to lose everything we've built towards. I posit instead, however, that things would be just fine - and just the way they are right now - if we completely ignored your ridiculously generalized request.
In what city is an emergency appendectomy an elective procedure? That doesn't make any sense. An infected appendix can be fatal, if you were told it was elective someone lied to you. That's not a covid problem, that's malpractice and you should seriously be reporting whoever did it.
And I still don't see your point. YES, you should be leaving your house to get emergency medical care. Why does that mean you shouldn't stay home for routine stuff where practical?
> In what city is an emergency appendectomy an elective procedure? That doesn't make any sense.
All of them. We got the same results everywhere we tried. And of course, it doesn't make any sense. What about shutting down the hospitals to everything except for one sort of ICU procedure, then under-staffing those ICUs makes any sense?
> you should be leaving your house to get emergency medical care. Why does that mean you shouldn't stay home for routine stuff where practical?
I stayed home after I was denied emergency medical care. I had to stay barely alive through an at-home visiting nurses service where I had terrible antibiotics fed into my veins multiple times per day. It was a traumatic experience for everyone involved and it was totally, completely unnecessary. I was denied this treatment, why? Because I might catch COVID-19, or give it to somebody else. But oh, don't worry about the fact that you have sepsis! Just sleep it off, we have old folks we need to kill with more intubations.
The authorities have no idea what is practical, what is routine, or what is appropriate. If they did, I would have had my surgery and not be dealing with the ongoing consequences of waiting as long as they made me wait.
Imagine if people stayed home, avoided unnecessary gatherings, and the virus didn't spread uncontrolled. People with medical emergencies could get the care they need and the medical system wouldn't be overwhelmed.
If everybody just said "fuck it" and went outside, hospitals would be far more clogged. It's unlikely you'd be telling us about your experience with appendicitis. That's why people are saying we should avoid unnecessarily going outside--so the next person with appendicitis can get immediate care. Ignoring the request is going to result in more deaths, which we can already see in the absolute, unparalleled disaster that is America where people are saying "who cares go outside." The deaths are still rising fast, while other developed countries are doing far better now than they have been in months.
> Imagine if people stayed home, avoided unnecessary gatherings, and the virus didn't spread uncontrolled. People with medical emergencies could get the care they need and the medical system wouldn't be overwhelmed.
Either you didn't read what I wrote, or you are being extremely disingenuous. The medical systems of NYC are ALWAYS overwhelmed. Why on earth would you suggest otherwise? What you describe here is exactly what we did in NYC, and none of those outcomes are what happened.
> The deaths are still rising fast, while other developed countries are doing far better now than they have been in months.
Oh go on, tell me about all those tiny little European countries and how it's their regulatory systems - not their puny surface areas - that make this the case.
People behaving like you are the ones exacerbating the pandemic. You're essentially defending and propagating the exact behavior that led to the experience you describe.
I'm sure it makes sense to you somehow, but it's not remotely rational.
"Staying home" is not what caused the situation you describe, anyway. You're just drawing an irrelevant association which you're responding to emotionally.
> So that 32,000 morbidly obese octogenarians could die with the best-possible PR spin
You have to know that that characterization isn't accurate. You chose a group who you think deserve to die more than you do, which says a lot about your degree of selfishness. But many other people that aren't in that group have also died. What about them? Sounds like you're trying to fool yourself to avoid cognitive dissonance.
> "Staying home" is not what caused the situation you describe
Yes, it is. I had to stay home instead of receiving emergency surgery for a routine medical issue because the hospital did not want to pull the surgeon away from the ICU. They pawned me off onto "essential worker" nurses who visited my home as part of a visiting nurse service, exposing me to far more COVID-19 than had I just received the damn surgery in the first place. And that's what caused me to develop sepsis - having heavy IV medications thrown at me instead of just doing the proper thing. Lawsuit is forthcoming.
> You have to know that that characterization isn't accurate.
That's the only characterization that we KNOW is accurate. That's what happened in NYC. Cuomo's response was hailed as the gold standard of COVID-19 responses. And those results were the celebrated ones, the ones to recreate across the country.
> The more people willing to do that, the faster the spread will stop.
I've seen this line of thinking a few times, usually in reference to self-quarantine and/or wearing a mask, and it doesn't really make any sense to me. This particular virus being novel and so contagious means there's really no hope of stopping its spread, right? It seems the best we can hope for is to slow it down enough that our healthcare system is able to care for the acute cases properly while also concurrently tending the needs of other illnesses/injuries.
I think the messaging around why we are quarantining and wearing masks has been very confusing and its leading people to hope for things that are literally not possible at this point and encouraging unsustainable behavior.
You might be able to write off a year of staying in your home if you believe the following years will allow a return to normal, but is every high risk person prepared to spend the rest of their lives in their current housing? I'm finding way too many people who seem to think this is going to "be over soon" if the general public does a better job following the guidelines but that doesn't seem realistic. It seems much more likely we're going to see this thing continue for years (3+) to come.
> This particular virus being novel and so contagious means there's really no hope of stopping its spread, right?
How do you explain the infection rates in Japan, Korea, or Germany, which were never high and remain very low. Or France, Italy or Spain, which were VERY high and have since been well contained?
Yes, we can keep this under control. It takes discipline and care, and some amount of sacrifice. But it can be done. We're just doing it badly.
But no, not "everyone" needs to literally stay home forever. Wear a mask. Stay 2m from other human beings. Stay outside. In particular avoid "static" indoor environments like restaurants (or bars, cruise ships, theaters, etc...) which have been the source of the bulk of local outbreaks. Work from home as much as possible.
Don't write it off as impossible to contain when it's not. We can do much better, and there are tens (or maybe hundreds) of thousands of lives that can be preserved still.
I think you're reading more than I said. We appear to be saying the same thing, that keeping it "under control" is the only possibility at this point. I think the cost/benefit ratio of masks clearly points to it being a good policy in confined spaces, keeping distance is the best way to keep yourself from being infected, and having crowded indoor spaces like bars, restaurants, or large events is really introducing unnecessary risk.
That being said, there's a non-trivial amount of people, particularly vocal celebrities, who have posted things like "If you idiots wore masks this would be over already" (Seth MacFarlane). Then we've got the other commenters on this post who note they have only left their house twice in the past 6 months. Many of these people believe we are only a few "stubborn people being compliant" away from eliminating the threat, which is just patently untrue. It's here to stay.
This is Professor George Church one of the world experts today in biology and DNA, and age 65.
Consider he may have a better handle on risks, especially long term survival risks (check out the long term survivor risks that surfaced with SARs), than most people. Also he's been a Harvard Professor since forever, so I imagine he has quite a nice house.
Experts can also be morons, these aren't exclusive terms.
(I should clarify - he may have good reasons to stay inside for 5 months and I think that's anybody's prerogative to decide their risk tolerance wrt covid.
But for most people that's absolutely insane, essentially agoraphobic.
I've seen evidence some otherwise completely healthy people are long-haul locked inside their small apartment and it's sad to see.)
The part we aren’t discussing is that he understands that some people can have the disease for months. He is 65 and probably doesn’t want to damage his body. Why take any risk this early in our understanding? A year from now we’re going to know so much more about Coronavirus.
“ reported that as many as one-third of patients who test positive for covid-19 but are never hospitalized battle symptoms for weeks or even months after contracting the virus. “I think that people are highly underestimating this disease,” Church says.“
it's more that being an expert doesn't rid you of biases, and things like recency and availability (not to mention authority and esteem) combined with our robust and unwavering bias against novel dangers, is more potent than our rational brains can often handle, no matter who you are.
George has also survived cancer and at least one heart attack. His mortality risk is probably on the high end compared to the average 65 year old, though he isn't obese.
"Worse" might not be the right adjective. The code he works with scales horizontally to billions of cooperating instances, apparently can produce consciousness, and has been rigorously tested over geological timescales.
While I respect expertise a lot it's not necessarily the case that a disease expert has a more reasonable take on personal behaviour, in fact funnily enough I've met a lot of people in the field who are extreme OCD level germaphobes, that is to say they may be irationally afraid due to their of work
Sort of like software developers turning neurotic about minor glitches because, not despite of their knowledge
Thanks for that. At first I thought his isolation was insane, but his age does put him in a particularly bad risk group.
My father is over that age, and he's also near Atlanta, but isolated in a suburban home, wears a mask, gets food from other family members that are being very careful, etc.
I'm glad he's at least in a place where he can get outside (in his yard). Being in an apartment building and never getting out sounds like prison.
There's a lot of lore about Church. He has reportedly done things like drink nutrient broth from a lab vendor for a year. He also said he was homeless for 6 months. So, if these legends are true, and if he really did not leave his house for half a year, I attribute it to him being weird, and not to him being afraid.
Some people (a) have a sufficient exercise setup inside the house, (b) can get everything they need mail-delivered, and (c) do not enjoy going outdoors. I am such a person, and I've left the property just once since ... probably sometime in March. Edit: More relevantly, I've only left the house when necessary, which has been about four times.
Lots of people live in a condo or apartment building and there is no such distinction.
IMO you can't be "overboard." I've been in self-quarantine since March and have left my property exactly twice, over a month ago, when my dog needed surgery.
The same way the rest of the US will. A complete lack of leadership at the national level. Seriously, there is no individual level response to this.
The hardest part is that I was in New Zealand for the previous 7 months and decided to leave when the US announced they were closing borders (and forgot to mention they would remain open for citizens)
Just speculating, but I think the idea that it is safer to have your groceries delivered (a necessity if you are not leaving property) rather than go to the grocery store yourself is just flat wrong. I know several (admittedly only three) people who have caught COVID but have not left their apartment and/or house since Jan.
I am trying not to speculate too much how we got it but generally I agree. We used alcohol spray and bleach wipes on all our delivered groceries, but in hindsight it seems to me like the delivery drivers were the likely carrier.
In most countries with successful quarantines, these people are regulated and tested, but for us it is kind of the opposite. These are people paid hourly and highly dependent upon a paycheck. It is an incentivized super-spreader paradigm if you think about it.
Not sure what you are getting at here. I agree the delivery drivers are in the grocery store. They probably spend half their workday there and have to travel throughout the store many many times, each time navigating a different cohort of shoppers, and then come in contact with deliveree surfaces (doorbell, etc.) as well. The delivery driver has a dangerous job and is highly likely to get covid. When s/he does, so do all the deliverees.
The takeaway of that article is that cleaning surfaces to reduce the likelihood of contact transmission (which is close to 0), may detract from practices that reduce the likelihood of airborne transmission (which is close to 1.0 if you're near an infected person).
That's a perfectly sensible approach if you're in charge of a school or a retail business. There's a cost vs benefit and lost opportunity calculation.
In our personal lives, taking 1-3 minutes to wipe down all groceries isn't going to cause you to suddenly forget wearing a mask or staying home as much as possible, unless you have extremely bad executive functioning.
That is an extremely poor and dangerous characterization of this pathology.
I'll quote some people smarter than me.
“In the beginning, our model for understanding this infection was to treat it like another respiratory virus like influenza,” said John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program. “I think one of the most unfortunate and interesting things about this virus is that its interaction with us is actually far more complicated than that.”
Please don't imply that 87% of cases suffer long term effects. This study is limited to COVID patients who experienced acute symptoms, a small subset of all COVID patients.
This is not the flu, but if it sounds too scary to believe, it probably is when it comes to COVID.
I suppose it depends on your definition of "acute symptoms" because that is not a distinction made by the paper. The subjects in the study were simply all cases discharged from the hospital with a negative test, not meeting some acute standard you set. only 12% of them were ever admitted to ICU, for instance.
You are free to infer what you want from the lack of data about the other cases which the paper did not cover, but that is not how i interact with science. A complete lack of data should never be the basis of your hypothesis.
Depends on their group test size and what factors they consider when they decide to group or not. It's why they ask if you're a first responder for example (least they do around here).
It's sometimes someone driving to a testing site and then leaving the line. If that's true and they're not rechecking your personal information at the swab, it's unsettling because then everyone's results are now off-by-one (or more).
There are other cases where people have been told they have COVID after never even having been in line for a test. Not that they might have it via contact tracing, but that they tested positive from a test they never took (or got in line for).
Not to mention there was the cast of a Goat and an Orange testing positive in Tanzania:
The virus has a multi-week incubation period, during which you're infectious despite not yet showing symptoms. Even if you never show symptoms, you can still carry and transmit the virus.
Symptoms (or the lack thereof) are not an indicator of whether or not someone has contracted it.
> The chance of them being an asymptomatic carrier is actually pretty low
I'm thinking this may be true. Dr. John Campbell has a fantastic video[1] that suggests we may be overlooking one possible symptom in otherwise asymptomatic populations: Skin rashes. That doesn't mean, of course, that everyone gets skin rashes with COVID-19, but it appears that it may be an early clinical feature of the disease even in people who are otherwise spared the worst.
People doing deliveries are probably the most at risk right now, and the outside of deliveries, the plastic bags, I always treat them as if they are full of Covid-19.
And I'm sure most people don't go to restaurants any more, but they get food deliveries all the time.
What prompted the test - are you experiencing any symptoms? When you say we, I assume you mean a partner. Did they also leave the property? And what kind of test did you get?
Is there any publicly-available data or studies on the behavior patterns of people who caught the virus? I’m very curious about what the relative likelihoods involved. e.g. what % of cases are people that don’t wear masks and brazenly party at bars, versus people who limit their activity to outdoor exercise and 1 or 2 errands a week.
>not stepping outside of your house for 5 months is way overboard.
I'm not so sure. People are eating in restaurants with "outdoor" dining that consists of only one open wall out of four. They are going to pools, and gyms, and the beach, all without masks. This kind of thing isn't safe.
I have been in lockdown for 140 days now, and I still wash the food and stuff I buy from outside, and do the full mask + plastic shield + hand washing ritual every time I have to go outside, which is basically to buy groceries and nothing else.
Given that the virus seems to generate harder symptoms for men, and some young people have died, and the number of cases are still in exponential growth, I see no reason not to avoid the risk.
In my opinion, if you choose to get infected, you are crazy.
It’s hard for me to understand the value proposition of self experimentation.
Probabilistically, It sounds like best case you’re looking at a small level of immunity. Worst case, you’re looking at enhancement.
Doing this to yourself proves little more than you are willing to take a moderate risk. The behavioral changes noted at the end about a change in perception seem particularly dangerous. Assuming you might have immunity makes you behave somewhat riskier. And, if the experiment causes enhancement, combined with your lowered inhibition sounds like a death sentence.
I’m all for moving fast in many things, but I just don’t see how direct human experimentation provides any scientific benefit at this point. Besides, medical sciences that move fast Have the highest likelihood of additional harm/death.
"Best case" is that you then follow with a challenge trial and demonstrate actual immunity much faster than a conventional vaccine, leading to months shaved off the time needed to immunize the general population. That clearly has value, particularly given that people are still dying at a high rate in the US and much of the developing world.
Now... does that mean this is going to work? No idea. But these folks aren't dummies either. I think it has a shot and is worth trying as long as everyone involved (e.g. these are all university scientists) has a clear and solid understanding of the risks.
Aren't there phase 3 trials already? Meaning that we are in fact already giving people experimental vaccines. Maybe if you had done it months ago it would have sped things up.
Phase 3 requires monitoring how many people get sick from the environment. That takes a LOT of test subjects and a decent amount of time -- even in major hot spots covid isn't THAT prevalent. The overwhelming majority of people at any moment, after all, aren't getting sick.
If you have well-informed volunteers like this willing to break with conventional rules, you can do a challenge trial where you deliberately expose them to live virus. That can work very fast indeed.
Or just give major league baseball players the experimental vaccines. We'd be done with phase three in a few weeks if every MLB player who agreed to play volunteered for one of the vaccines currently entering/in phase three.
This question comes up a lot. Someone should really write a blog post about how big sample size you need, and the dangers of using a biased sample (fit men), and spam it to death here.
I think the "fit men" can be an issue when you are testing whether a drug works to reduce severity (treat) an infection. However, the question of whether the vaccine actually prevents infection should be relevant regardless of the level of fitness. You should probably only vaccinate half of them and when inevitably an unvaccinated person gets it, you should have very good data about protection two weeks later. This is all just a thought experiment of course (unless there are volunteers . . .)
> I just don’t see how direct human experimentation provides any scientific benefit at this point.
While historically self-experimentation has led to great scientific leaps, here (from what I understand) the goal was not so much to drive the science forward, but to protect the self-experimenter from infection and harm.
Well-developed vaccines, like every FDA-approved vaccine in the US, are good and save lives.
Just trying something some dude (however well-credentialed and intelligent) whips up in his lab strikes me as patently absurd. What, you think it’s more likely that this dude just happens to hit on the cure first try than you’ll have an adverse immune response? There’s a reason we test things.
Not to mention - MIT Tech Review publishing this as if it’s legit science is irresponsible. You know why they posted a white paper and not a journal article? Because it’s unpublishable.
We have medical testing processes to avoid accidents, medical misinformation, and snake oil. At a time when all 3 are on the rise, failing to point out the obvious dangers of individual medical experimentation only undermines the actual scientific method. We’re not going to biohack our way to a vaccine.
MIT Tech Review Gabe up any real legitimacy years ago. It’s really just a pro-MIT propaganda publication at this point, especially any of the frequent gushing articles about MIT alumni startups.
We can biohack our way to a vaccine candidate or multiple vaccine candidates. Biohackers have a lot less restrictions so they can work faster and take more risks, if they hit upon something good it just needs larger scale testing and it can be deployed. These will be great starting points of the vaccines currently in human trials fail. I'm sure some bigger BioTech company would happily buy up the IP.
Let's suppose they are lucky and nobody dies because the prototype of vaccine caused some problem or for an unrelated cause that is wrongly attributed to the prototype of vaccine.
How much time is it necessary to make all the trials to prove that the effective and safe? How much time do they save using humans instead of mice for the preliminary tests?
>Just trying something some dude (however well-credentialed and intelligent) whips up in his lab strikes me as patently absurd.
All early vaccines were developed by "some dude in his lab", just look up the history yourself. Not sure why your initial reaction to people trying to innovate is anger.
. . . ." To administer its vaccine, the Radvac group settled on mixing the peptides with chitosan, a substance from shrimp shells, which coats the peptides in a nanoparticle able to pass the mucous membrane "
The author is in error, chitin is derived from crustacean shells, but chitosan is an artificial compound created by treating chitin with highly alkaline chemistry. I have samples of pharma chitosan and I can tell you when mixed into aqueous solutions at low conc. and administered onto human mucous membranes it burns like fire . . .
This made me think cyberpunk. I read that in the future some people will embrace technology such as implants and devices we embed in our bodies as well as some humans will be genetically modified in the future to give benefits we are not naturally born with. These are exactly the type of people that push these boundaries.
The most interesting parts of this to me are the uncommon but generalizable techniques being used
1) the vaccine is delivered nasally
2) chitosan is used as the adjuvant
The two seem linked since chitosan seems to be developed in particular to be safer in the context of a nasal vaccine.
One understandable concern of vaccine opponents is the injection of mercury as a preservative. This has now been eliminated from most vaccines, but vaccines also usually use alum (aluminum), which is also concerning. [1] Chitosan might be a much safer alternative.
Polio is so scary. The stories I've heard about kids living in iron lungs. It really puts things into perspective. I've heard that people lined up for the vaccine like black Friday sales or when the iPhone 4 came out.
Regardless of your judgement about self-experimentation, and regardless of the fact that a whitepaper is explicitly not a peer-reviewed journal article, the whitepaper [1] is a very interesting and carefully considered document.
They argue throughout that multi-dose nasal vaccines are a severely underlooked avenue for localized immunization.
A main criticism is that an untested vaccine might unintentionally enhance the actual disease. They argue that antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) specifically is less likely because the immune response of the intranasal vaccine is limited to the mucosal tissue [2].
It's like the people who claim Galileo can't be right. According to all the research and math, Galileo is dead wrong and these ideas have to be regulated because it's just too dangerous! Physics doesn't work like that!
Medicine doesn't work that way too! It's too dangerous!
It sounds like he doesn't take his vaccine very seriously:
>says Church, who says he has not stepped outside of his house in five months
Also not stepping outside of your house in 5 months is absurd, and borderline insane. As a respiratory disease I feel like he would have a better handle on its transmission, its from people and primarily close contact with the infected, the virus doesn't float in like a piece of pollen from miles away and infect you.
> in what appears to be the first “citizen science” vaccine initiative
This isn't true. Josiah Zayner and a few others have been teaching how to make and self-administer a DNA vaccine. Justin Atkin and a group of others used the same sort of vaccine on themselves as well.
There are definitely other groups that have given themselves vaccines of their own creation.
This is just the first one with George Church publicity, I would guess.
If your parents were offered the chance to take an early version of a vaccine that hadn’t been tested as much as usual, what would you recommend they do?
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadPeople conflate challenging Science™ with say challenging the scientific method, which has propelled Western Civilization to new heights. When in reality, the challenge is aimed towards the publication, funding, and career-ending ostracism mechanisms behind Science™ today. To say it is pure is to invite corruption to take nest.
Suspicious. A group this hell-bent on deployment should have serological data by now. The lack of anything suggests either: (1) a complication; or (2) no efficacy.
> Antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), sometimes less precisely called immune enhancement or disease enhancement, is a phenomenon in which binding of a virus to suboptimal antibodies enhances its entry into host cells, and sometimes also its replication.[1] This phenomenon—which leads to both increased infectivity and virulence—has been observed with mosquito-borne flaviviruses such as Dengue virus, Yellow fever virus and Zika virus,[2][3] with HIV, and with coronaviruses.[4]
where [4] is https://www.ft.com/content/f1b25b41-f3cf-4a73-ba8f-582385bc2... that says about SARS (2003):
> Some animals that were given experimental Sars vaccines suffered more severe lung inflammation than unvaccinated animals when subsequently infected. Those trials stopped and there is still no effective Sars vaccine.
[1] https://radvac.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/White-Paper-SA....
[2] See [1] page 6
There are people that are underestimating this disease but not stepping outside of your house for 5 months is way overboard. Perhaps the author intended to say he hasn’t left his property in 5 months which is more reasonable but if you literally aren’t going outside in your own yard because of COVID, you are crazy.
Why? There's no magic number for risk. The more you isolate the fewer transmission events you see. The more people willing to do that, the faster the spread will stop.
I mean... just look at the virus curves in the rest of the US. We're CLEARLY not staying home enough. We need more people "going overboard", not less.
Stay home.
For example in Norway, you don't have to isolate. The numbers are relatively low, the clusters are well tracked, the few travelers from dangerous countries like USA have quarantines. You still have to be careful of course.
You know what Manhattan looks like today because of how seriously we took this dumb pandemic? [0] Yeah, real civilized.
Some people don't realize just how uncivilized NYC is without all the people walking around outside, making the grime, dysfunction, inefficiency, and disorder look acceptable and reasonable.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVSuz1gJkZg
Who's bossing around anyone? I responded to someone saying "you don't have to stay home" with "you should stay home". I'm just a random guy on the internet.
So, to clarify: will you please stay home?
> you are able to avoid the virus entirely by just taking your own advice.
I'm trying. But no, I can't avoid all interaction like this guy did. Some people can't avoid interaction at all (i.e. they have "essential" jobs they need to be at in person). All of us need to help.
Your attitude, frankly, is precisely why the US is, well, shitting the bed with this virus when almost literally everyone else in the developed world has it contained.
I did help - by nearly dying. I had to receive emergency care for appendicitis and could not get anywhere in my region to perform the appendectomy because my city decided to shut down all elective surgeries. Why? So that 32,000 morbidly obese octogenarians could die with the best-possible PR spin, which spared the state and their hospital administration staff of any wrongdoing.
I developed sepsis and nearly died as a result. I am a healthy 30 year old who went through a common medical emergency with a more than apparent, streamlined medical solution. I was denied basic care and decency, like many people were, because of all this garbage about there being a pandemic.
I don't care what you say - any 30 year old's life is more valuable than your grandparent bound to a nursing home. So, no, fuck that - I will not stay home. I will fight for my ability to stay alive, thank you very much. If a pandemic can bring down a country simply by forcing people to stay home, we deserve to lose everything we've built towards. I posit instead, however, that things would be just fine - and just the way they are right now - if we completely ignored your ridiculously generalized request.
And I still don't see your point. YES, you should be leaving your house to get emergency medical care. Why does that mean you shouldn't stay home for routine stuff where practical?
All of them. We got the same results everywhere we tried. And of course, it doesn't make any sense. What about shutting down the hospitals to everything except for one sort of ICU procedure, then under-staffing those ICUs makes any sense?
> you should be leaving your house to get emergency medical care. Why does that mean you shouldn't stay home for routine stuff where practical?
I stayed home after I was denied emergency medical care. I had to stay barely alive through an at-home visiting nurses service where I had terrible antibiotics fed into my veins multiple times per day. It was a traumatic experience for everyone involved and it was totally, completely unnecessary. I was denied this treatment, why? Because I might catch COVID-19, or give it to somebody else. But oh, don't worry about the fact that you have sepsis! Just sleep it off, we have old folks we need to kill with more intubations.
The authorities have no idea what is practical, what is routine, or what is appropriate. If they did, I would have had my surgery and not be dealing with the ongoing consequences of waiting as long as they made me wait.
If everybody just said "fuck it" and went outside, hospitals would be far more clogged. It's unlikely you'd be telling us about your experience with appendicitis. That's why people are saying we should avoid unnecessarily going outside--so the next person with appendicitis can get immediate care. Ignoring the request is going to result in more deaths, which we can already see in the absolute, unparalleled disaster that is America where people are saying "who cares go outside." The deaths are still rising fast, while other developed countries are doing far better now than they have been in months.
Either you didn't read what I wrote, or you are being extremely disingenuous. The medical systems of NYC are ALWAYS overwhelmed. Why on earth would you suggest otherwise? What you describe here is exactly what we did in NYC, and none of those outcomes are what happened.
> The deaths are still rising fast, while other developed countries are doing far better now than they have been in months.
Oh go on, tell me about all those tiny little European countries and how it's their regulatory systems - not their puny surface areas - that make this the case.
I'm sure it makes sense to you somehow, but it's not remotely rational.
"Staying home" is not what caused the situation you describe, anyway. You're just drawing an irrelevant association which you're responding to emotionally.
> So that 32,000 morbidly obese octogenarians could die with the best-possible PR spin
You have to know that that characterization isn't accurate. You chose a group who you think deserve to die more than you do, which says a lot about your degree of selfishness. But many other people that aren't in that group have also died. What about them? Sounds like you're trying to fool yourself to avoid cognitive dissonance.
Yes, it is. I had to stay home instead of receiving emergency surgery for a routine medical issue because the hospital did not want to pull the surgeon away from the ICU. They pawned me off onto "essential worker" nurses who visited my home as part of a visiting nurse service, exposing me to far more COVID-19 than had I just received the damn surgery in the first place. And that's what caused me to develop sepsis - having heavy IV medications thrown at me instead of just doing the proper thing. Lawsuit is forthcoming.
> You have to know that that characterization isn't accurate.
That's the only characterization that we KNOW is accurate. That's what happened in NYC. Cuomo's response was hailed as the gold standard of COVID-19 responses. And those results were the celebrated ones, the ones to recreate across the country.
I've seen this line of thinking a few times, usually in reference to self-quarantine and/or wearing a mask, and it doesn't really make any sense to me. This particular virus being novel and so contagious means there's really no hope of stopping its spread, right? It seems the best we can hope for is to slow it down enough that our healthcare system is able to care for the acute cases properly while also concurrently tending the needs of other illnesses/injuries.
I think the messaging around why we are quarantining and wearing masks has been very confusing and its leading people to hope for things that are literally not possible at this point and encouraging unsustainable behavior.
You might be able to write off a year of staying in your home if you believe the following years will allow a return to normal, but is every high risk person prepared to spend the rest of their lives in their current housing? I'm finding way too many people who seem to think this is going to "be over soon" if the general public does a better job following the guidelines but that doesn't seem realistic. It seems much more likely we're going to see this thing continue for years (3+) to come.
How do you explain the infection rates in Japan, Korea, or Germany, which were never high and remain very low. Or France, Italy or Spain, which were VERY high and have since been well contained?
Yes, we can keep this under control. It takes discipline and care, and some amount of sacrifice. But it can be done. We're just doing it badly.
But no, not "everyone" needs to literally stay home forever. Wear a mask. Stay 2m from other human beings. Stay outside. In particular avoid "static" indoor environments like restaurants (or bars, cruise ships, theaters, etc...) which have been the source of the bulk of local outbreaks. Work from home as much as possible.
Don't write it off as impossible to contain when it's not. We can do much better, and there are tens (or maybe hundreds) of thousands of lives that can be preserved still.
That being said, there's a non-trivial amount of people, particularly vocal celebrities, who have posted things like "If you idiots wore masks this would be over already" (Seth MacFarlane). Then we've got the other commenters on this post who note they have only left their house twice in the past 6 months. Many of these people believe we are only a few "stubborn people being compliant" away from eliminating the threat, which is just patently untrue. It's here to stay.
Consider he may have a better handle on risks, especially long term survival risks (check out the long term survivor risks that surfaced with SARs), than most people. Also he's been a Harvard Professor since forever, so I imagine he has quite a nice house.
(I should clarify - he may have good reasons to stay inside for 5 months and I think that's anybody's prerogative to decide their risk tolerance wrt covid.
But for most people that's absolutely insane, essentially agoraphobic.
I've seen evidence some otherwise completely healthy people are long-haul locked inside their small apartment and it's sad to see.)
“ reported that as many as one-third of patients who test positive for covid-19 but are never hospitalized battle symptoms for weeks or even months after contracting the virus. “I think that people are highly underestimating this disease,” Church says.“
and sometimes you're too close to the issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_students%27_disease
/s
I have yet to see a programmer write code that manifests an artifact as effective, adaptable, and robust as a human body.
Disclaimer: I have a love/hate relationship with sarcasm myself!
Sort of like software developers turning neurotic about minor glitches because, not despite of their knowledge
My father is over that age, and he's also near Atlanta, but isolated in a suburban home, wears a mask, gets food from other family members that are being very careful, etc.
I'm glad he's at least in a place where he can get outside (in his yard). Being in an apartment building and never getting out sounds like prison.
Surely it could be both.
IMO you can't be "overboard." I've been in self-quarantine since March and have left my property exactly twice, over a month ago, when my dog needed surgery.
Yesterday we tested positive.
The hardest part is that I was in New Zealand for the previous 7 months and decided to leave when the US announced they were closing borders (and forgot to mention they would remain open for citizens)
Hope you get well soon!
In most countries with successful quarantines, these people are regulated and tested, but for us it is kind of the opposite. These are people paid hourly and highly dependent upon a paycheck. It is an incentivized super-spreader paradigm if you think about it.
That's a perfectly sensible approach if you're in charge of a school or a retail business. There's a cost vs benefit and lost opportunity calculation.
In our personal lives, taking 1-3 minutes to wipe down all groceries isn't going to cause you to suddenly forget wearing a mask or staying home as much as possible, unless you have extremely bad executive functioning.
It is broken and we were just backpacking through southern hemisphere summer so we haven't bothered.
The latter seems like it would be far more common than the former.
I'll quote some people smarter than me.
“In the beginning, our model for understanding this infection was to treat it like another respiratory virus like influenza,” said John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program. “I think one of the most unfortunate and interesting things about this virus is that its interaction with us is actually far more complicated than that.”
"This virus is unusual and it's hard not to take a step back and not be impressed by how many manifestations it has on the human body" author of https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0968-3
The "majority" (87%) still experience symptoms months later https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768351 including scar tissue on the heart and lungs, blood clots, up to 37% experience acute kidney injury.
This is not the flu, but if it sounds too scary to believe, it probably is when it comes to COVID.
You are free to infer what you want from the lack of data about the other cases which the paper did not cover, but that is not how i interact with science. A complete lack of data should never be the basis of your hypothesis.
I mean, if you group 10 samples from a test center, what's the probability of one of them being positive? Isn't it close to 1.0?
https://www.wsmv.com/news/mt-juliet-man-says-even-with-no-te...
It's sometimes someone driving to a testing site and then leaving the line. If that's true and they're not rechecking your personal information at the swab, it's unsettling because then everyone's results are now off-by-one (or more).
There are other cases where people have been told they have COVID after never even having been in line for a test. Not that they might have it via contact tracing, but that they tested positive from a test they never took (or got in line for).
Not to mention there was the cast of a Goat and an Orange testing positive in Tanzania:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/coronavirus-...
What is going on with these tests?
The actual incidence of this kind of error is incredibly small.
There are people who have flown on flights with actively infectious cases of Covid. Following hygiene practices, none of the passengers got infected.
Symptoms (or the lack thereof) are not an indicator of whether or not someone has contracted it.
OP has stated they've left their home twice in the past 5 months, the last time 4 weeks ago and they just tested positive.
The chance of them being an asymptomatic carrier is actually pretty low, otherwise we wouldn't be doing 14 day quarantines.
Is it possible OP is a rare edge case? Sure. But not likely.
I'm thinking this may be true. Dr. John Campbell has a fantastic video[1] that suggests we may be overlooking one possible symptom in otherwise asymptomatic populations: Skin rashes. That doesn't mean, of course, that everyone gets skin rashes with COVID-19, but it appears that it may be an early clinical feature of the disease even in people who are otherwise spared the worst.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeKDzwhi8nw
The theory is one may find detectable RNA fragments, without the person truly having an active infection (I.e. they’ve already recovered).
There is also just human error with sample handling, contamination, etc.
People doing deliveries are probably the most at risk right now, and the outside of deliveries, the plastic bags, I always treat them as if they are full of Covid-19.
And I'm sure most people don't go to restaurants any more, but they get food deliveries all the time.
I cook instead. One risk less.
I'm not so sure. People are eating in restaurants with "outdoor" dining that consists of only one open wall out of four. They are going to pools, and gyms, and the beach, all without masks. This kind of thing isn't safe.
Have gone in the yard though.
Very risk averse.
Given that the virus seems to generate harder symptoms for men, and some young people have died, and the number of cases are still in exponential growth, I see no reason not to avoid the risk.
In my opinion, if you choose to get infected, you are crazy.
Probabilistically, It sounds like best case you’re looking at a small level of immunity. Worst case, you’re looking at enhancement.
Doing this to yourself proves little more than you are willing to take a moderate risk. The behavioral changes noted at the end about a change in perception seem particularly dangerous. Assuming you might have immunity makes you behave somewhat riskier. And, if the experiment causes enhancement, combined with your lowered inhibition sounds like a death sentence.
I’m all for moving fast in many things, but I just don’t see how direct human experimentation provides any scientific benefit at this point. Besides, medical sciences that move fast Have the highest likelihood of additional harm/death.
Now... does that mean this is going to work? No idea. But these folks aren't dummies either. I think it has a shot and is worth trying as long as everyone involved (e.g. these are all university scientists) has a clear and solid understanding of the risks.
If you have well-informed volunteers like this willing to break with conventional rules, you can do a challenge trial where you deliberately expose them to live virus. That can work very fast indeed.
This question comes up a lot. Someone should really write a blog post about how big sample size you need, and the dangers of using a biased sample (fit men), and spam it to death here.
While historically self-experimentation has led to great scientific leaps, here (from what I understand) the goal was not so much to drive the science forward, but to protect the self-experimenter from infection and harm.
Just trying something some dude (however well-credentialed and intelligent) whips up in his lab strikes me as patently absurd. What, you think it’s more likely that this dude just happens to hit on the cure first try than you’ll have an adverse immune response? There’s a reason we test things.
Not to mention - MIT Tech Review publishing this as if it’s legit science is irresponsible. You know why they posted a white paper and not a journal article? Because it’s unpublishable.
We have medical testing processes to avoid accidents, medical misinformation, and snake oil. At a time when all 3 are on the rise, failing to point out the obvious dangers of individual medical experimentation only undermines the actual scientific method. We’re not going to biohack our way to a vaccine.
Let's suppose they are lucky and nobody dies because the prototype of vaccine caused some problem or for an unrelated cause that is wrongly attributed to the prototype of vaccine.
How much time is it necessary to make all the trials to prove that the effective and safe? How much time do they save using humans instead of mice for the preliminary tests?
All early vaccines were developed by "some dude in his lab", just look up the history yourself. Not sure why your initial reaction to people trying to innovate is anger.
The author is in error, chitin is derived from crustacean shells, but chitosan is an artificial compound created by treating chitin with highly alkaline chemistry. I have samples of pharma chitosan and I can tell you when mixed into aqueous solutions at low conc. and administered onto human mucous membranes it burns like fire . . .
One understandable concern of vaccine opponents is the injection of mercury as a preservative. This has now been eliminated from most vaccines, but vaccines also usually use alum (aluminum), which is also concerning. [1] Chitosan might be a much safer alternative.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4344667/
They argue throughout that multi-dose nasal vaccines are a severely underlooked avenue for localized immunization.
A main criticism is that an untested vaccine might unintentionally enhance the actual disease. They argue that antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) specifically is less likely because the immune response of the intranasal vaccine is limited to the mucosal tissue [2].
[1] https://radvac.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/White-Paper-SA...
[2] See [1] page 6
There will always be scientists who try things on themselves. to block that is to block scientific progress.
I made a pithy comment here expressing the same point and it was downvoted. Hoping yours won't end up the same way
Medicine doesn't work that way too! It's too dangerous!
/sarcasm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-experimentation_in_medici...
>says Church, who says he has not stepped outside of his house in five months
Also not stepping outside of your house in 5 months is absurd, and borderline insane. As a respiratory disease I feel like he would have a better handle on its transmission, its from people and primarily close contact with the infected, the virus doesn't float in like a piece of pollen from miles away and infect you.
This isn't true. Josiah Zayner and a few others have been teaching how to make and self-administer a DNA vaccine. Justin Atkin and a group of others used the same sort of vaccine on themselves as well.
There are definitely other groups that have given themselves vaccines of their own creation.
This is just the first one with George Church publicity, I would guess.
Zayner: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-25/one-bioha...
Justin Atkin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjDH6bXF4ow&t=67m47s