I’m looking forward to seeing progress on things like this and equivalent work on HPV (for the other HPV variants and the massive bulk of the population that either because of age or gender didn’t get the now widespread HPV vaccine)
It may not be a cure for HIV but it’s also the sort of thing that would be nice to eliminate from the variables at play in “healthy” that affect basically everything to do with medical science. Taking a few more variables out of the equations will hopefully make other things easier to study.
CRISPR is most likely the cure for HIV as it can be used to modify embryonic DNA to create permanent immunity. That is actually what the first CRISPR embryo experiment tried to achieve a few years back in China.
I still remember the video with the doctor explaining what he had done. Made me feel in a gattaca-like sci-fi movie. Shame that governments try to stomp over such people instead of embracing innovation.
I'm not familiar with CRISPR technology, but afik the issue with HIV is you would have to target some deep reservoir cells within adult humans whereas targeting embryo cells would be easier.
But I don't know how CRISPR is delivered to edit DNA in live cells.
CRISPR will not be used to cure HIV (not in the way experimented in China) because the same mutation that confers resistance to HIV makes people more susceptible to infections by influenza and West Nile virus and it is associated with autoimmune conditions like Crohn’s disease and type 1 diabetes
MRNA vaccines could be monstrous - we have no long-term data on them.
Most of our vaccine experience is with weakened or dead virii, but MRNA is a different thing. Note that MRNA, RNA and DNA are interchangeable genetic mechanisms and can transcript into each other. (There are recent papers published about this in 2021.)
I just hope corona and MRNA vaccines don't turn out to be as dangerous as Zika, which started out as a curiosity in the press, and turned into a deadly threat to newborns. Corona attacks female reproductive tissues, so we'll learn over time.
How about they actually combat COVID first? Like, without needing to re-take them every few months.
Recall that Moderna was failing to progress beyond animal trials as recently as 2017. The reason was their mRNA delivery tech became toxic given multiple doses. They had struggled with this problem for years but found a neat solution: pivot to vaccines, because as everyone knows, vaccines don't need multiple doses. They protect you for life. <facepalm>
> How about they actually combat COVID first? Like, without needing to re-take them every few months.
I sense some frustration behind that comment.
Two points
1) We don't see a decrease in Vaccine Effectiveness for Covid. The headlines you see confuse efficacy with effectiveness. There's no meaningful way to directly measure effectiveness and therefore, some studies use anti-bodies as a proxy. However, it should be noted that just because you do not have anti-bodies doesn't mean the effectiveness is reduced. The human body (T-Cells, B-Cells) are able to produce anti-bodies "on demand" as and when required.
2) The non-mRNA vaccines also reduce efficacy and we don't stop researching their benefits on other viruses. So, both of them are not mutually exclusive.
Of course you can meaningfully measure effectiveness. Effectiveness (real world) is measured by comparing reported infection rates between the vaxxed and unvaxxed. Those not only fall with time (why do you believe otherwise?) but are now negative in the UK, where I'm from: vaccinated people are getting COVID at a higher rate and nobody has a good explanation of why ("behavioural differences" being the government's current choice). This real world data is then adjusted to try and turn it into efficacy (ideal conditions, vaccine only).
It's not so easy to measure. Because the groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated are not randomly distributed.
Behavior has something to do with it, I'm sure. But most likely is that the older, most susceptible, poor health people are vaccinated while the younger, healthier populations are less likely to have been vaccinated.
The data is age stratified. Wrt different levels of health, yes, but there's some good analysis of this that shows it looks like the least healthy aren't vaccinated at all (probably because they're already dying) and this creates an artificial boost to the vaccines effectiveness against death. In the UK at least.
No, anything based on their mRNA tech became toxic after multiple doses. That's why they refocused on vaccines even though vaccines were historically considered much less profitable than other kinds of drugs: they're less profitable exactly because you get one once, and then you're done for life. Thus by making vaccines instead of the other kinds of drugs they originally planned to make, they could work around their unfixable toxicity issues.
Except now, endless dosings of that very same tech are being mandated. Note: no announcements at any point about how they found some fix for this problem.
I've updated my original post with a second story from the same site that makes this problem clearer (spells it out in different words):
"But that hasn’t worked out so far. Moderna’s attempts to make actual drugs from mRNA have been repeatedly hamstrung, proving either too weak or too dangerous to test in clinical trials, former employees and partners said. The company has instead prioritized vaccines, which can be dosed just once and thus avoid the safety problems that have plagued more ambitious projects."
I’m completely ignorant on the topic, but there’s still a pretty big difference between taking something every 6 months as opposed to every day or week. If you take double the max dose of Tylenol every 6 months you’re probably not doing all that much liver damage. If you do it every day, not so much.
Yeah but if the only problem was Tylenol style toxicity with unneeded levels of overdose they'd never have abandoned the tech for drugs. They'd have just determined that the safe dose was larger than the needed dose and slapped a warning label on it.
The articles are quite clear that they didn't want to make this decision but felt forced into it, because many years of investor funding had failed to bring a single drug to market. Vaccines were the Hail Mary move to save the company from extinction, even if it made investors unhappy. Then COVID came along and suddenly, vaccines were big business and nobody worried about toxicity anymore.
Few experts believe we are planning for eternal boosters. In fact, many vaccines are 3 series before lasting immunity is achieved. There are some data showing a big increase in lasting immunity after the 3rd shot and time will tell if it remains high.
A few experts believe no more boosters? So, eternal boosters are right around the corner then.
It amazes me anyone is still willing to use the E word on anything COVID related. It's just embarrassing at this point. The "experts" assured us just months ago the vaccines were 95%+ effective. The fact that effectiveness declined so fast surprised them and now they're trying to rewrite history to claim it was known all along.
There appear to be no experts in COVIDS, viruses or vaccines. They're all in denial that their self-proclaimed experts beliefs have been invalidated dozens of times over since the start of this.
Yeah, this has been yet another PR failure for Fauci. We went from the vaccine being "virtually 100% efficacious" to needing a booster every 6 months, and even then you can still catch, spread, or die from the virus.
And yes, I know that this is common for vaccines. No vaccine is 100% effective. Which is why Fauci's testimony to the contrary was so irresponsible.
No, it's not common for vaccines. That's a myth. Only the flu vaccine. It depends on the complexity of the mechanism of entering human cells. If the complexity is simple, mutations are not likely to screw up that mechanism, and vaccines are quite short lived, like the seasonal flu. When the complexity is high, like measles, mutations have a much higher chance of screwing something up, so evolution is retarded and vaccines are effective for a lifetime.
This issue is being so pigheaded as to think that 16 billion vaccines can be created, deployed, and put in arms in a short enough time span to defeat a brand new, somewhat fast evolving virus before it selects to get around the vaccine.
I interpret the GP comment as like "we" are going to find a vaccine for one STD, and later for another, an a few months/years later a third one, and later ...
Not really? On a language level, sure, but with native IO, web workers, shared memory and Node.js clusters, I don't think it's fair to say JavaScript has no concurrency.
Javascript APIs expose callback interfaces, and the callbacks are called on the thread that scheduled it. The real concurrency happens behind the scenes and is handled by the browser. So no, Javascript is not single-threaded in practice.
I don't think "move fast and break things" is a great example for healthcare products. We've used this product under emergency use guidelines, which allowed it to skip many steps, we should probably do those steps before we presume much more out of this platform.
At least one mRNA vaccine now has full approval. No steps were skipped, they were just done in a more parallel manner than usual. The usual way is just cheaper, not more safe.
Since you asked, the point could be more accurately stated as referring to vaccines meeting the pre 2020 definition of the term
(which “mRNA vaccines” do not).
As opposed to mrna vaccines which are significantly different than traditional vaccines. Which you knew, but for some reason, you want to deflect and prevent discussion of anything potentially negative about mrna vaccines? I'm not sure what the charitable interpretation could be.
Machiavellian people co-opted the word vaccine because it has a generally positive connotation. They then retconned the word as if it has always included mRNA and viral vector therapeutics.
Things like longterm efficacy. Longterm safety. Anything that usually requires years of controlled studies, basically. Which, again, you know, but... why is it important to you that vaccines not be criticized honestly?
The notion that vaccines normally don't get FDA approval without multi-year long-term follow-up studies is absurd enough. That's not how any of this works.
All observed "vaccination damage" has been observed in very close proximity to the injection. The talk about "long-term" effects is almost entirely based on FUD spread about the measles vaccine which is in turn based on a fraudulent pseudoscientific article claiming a link between one specific measles vaccine and autism by a guy who tried to push an alternative vaccine. If you still worry bout vaccination damage as a serious concern in 2021 you're on the tail end of a failed marketing campaign.
I think you should be lauding our society's ability to swarm a problem and massively increase efficiency/remove red tape to fulfill a common purpose rather than resting on how things were done before (when things were "normal") as to what is suppose to happen.
We're suppose to be able to do things like this in order to save ourselves. Imagine if COVID was deadlier, had a higher R-naught, etc. Would you still be advocating for "taking it slow"? If hundreds of thousands were dying per day should we still be waiting years for a vaccine?
Applauding their efforts but retaining a critical eye for the usual long term safety considerations are not mutually exclusive.
You can also laud the mrna vaccines and be critical of the obscene profits being made.
In fact, you can also promote vaccinating as widely as possible, and at the same time harshly condemn the politicization of medicine, the creation of second class citizens, and the nonsense power games being fought that seem to exclusively benefit massive corporations that fund political campaigns.
I wonder how things would have turned out if COVID had different properties. With COVID, some people shrugged it off like a mild cold, while others were in the ICU with multiple organ failure. Risk factors tilt the odds but on the whole, the virus is weirdly random. This leads to people having wildly different personal experiences - someone knows a 60-year old who caught COVID and recovered with chicken soup, while someone else knows a family whose children were orphaned by the loss of their young, healthy parents. That randomness is fuel on the fire for partisan divides.
I think even with a 10% CFR, there'd be droves of vaccine skeptics, unless the virus hits people with more or less uniform symptoms.
...or maybe it even has nothing to do with lethality at all, look at the ebola vaccine rollouts in Africa.
Almost pathological aversion to "move fast and break things" has gotten us moving forward at a turtle's pace, instead of already having 20 years longer lifespans, not to mention 20-30 years longer productive years. I'm not talking science-fiction, I'm talking simply having done the things we know are possible.
I've gotten downvoted once here for saying this, but bioethicists will be put in history in the "genocide" chapter: we didn't do challenge trial for Covid.
Just try to wrap your mind around this concept: we knew since early spring of 2020 that Covid is not particularly dangerous for young healthy people. We had plenty of volunteers - there were sites up I think since February. We had countless questions: how does it spread? is it airborn? do masks help? which masks? how is it acting? what drugs help? DO VACCINES WORK?
But no. We chose, and I underline, chose, not to answer any of those questions because nobody had the balls to cross the line already drawn in the sand.
Of course medicine has downsides. Of course at times we fuck up. But ... god, Thomas Sowell should be required reading in highschool. Everything is a tradeoff. You can't say "we have to move slow" - you have to say "moving too fast or too slow has the following tradeoffs". If you're not keeping in mind what you're losing by moving in one direction, you'll keep steering in that direction until you get to the point of ignoring such low hanging fruits as challenge trials while watching people die.
How is "researching multiple things in parallel" == "move fast and break things"? It's not like people are calling for emergency use authorization or other accelerated steps for a herpes vaccine, it's merely being considered as thing that can be done.
The covid vaccines were not granted special "emergency use" anything, at least not in the EU. They just parallelized some of the trials and didn't encounter any setbacks. No steps were "skipped". The mRNA technology had also already been in development for a while, just not applied as a medical product (much like how multi-touch had been around for a long time before the iPhone capitalized on it).
They were also handled with an abundance of caution, which is why many countries suspended the Oxford vaccine after initial reports of adverse effects in young women despite the extremely low frequency hinting at sampling bias rather than genuine side-effects.
> Meanwhile...the FDA says it needs 55 years to release Pfizer data.
This is crazy to be honest. If there was some malfeasance during the development of the vaccines, the people responsible will be long dead by then and cannot be punished. In that case Pfizer would just pay some fine and continue business as usual.
The vaccine could be developed very quickly, I don't understand why there is the needs to wait so long to release the data - the data itself (emails, scientific documents and such) should be quite limited. I believe Pfizer claimed it's too much data to process and they need many years, but I find this quite unbelievable.
With full details for all the participants etc and revisions the scientific data is probably quite a lot, so I can imagine that the blanked "we want all documents!" is actually the claimed 300k pages by some metric. But obviously "and it's ok if we only prepare 500 pages per month for release" is a very questionable position to take in such a situation, even if legal. Smells like usual bureaucracy crap, with no sense for the somewhat special situation here.
The request is against the government, not the company. Now I wonder if they could release their copy of at least their data if they wanted, or if that is under some kind of restriction.
> But the FDA can’t simply turn the documents over wholesale. The records must be reviewed to redact “confidential business and trade secret information of Pfizer or BioNTech and personal privacy information of patients who participated in clinical trials,” wrote DOJ lawyers in a joint status report filed Monday.
> The FDA proposes releasing 500 pages per month on a rolling basis, noting that the branch that would handle the review has only 10 employees and is currently processing about 400 other FOIA requests.
Science and especially critical products cannot use the tech mantra "Move fast and break things". Clearly looking at the data from Israel - the most vaccinated country in the world - mRNA vaccines are not working as expected.
MRNA is a revolution in bio-tech, but the last place that Hype has a place is in healthcare. The response of the governments and rushing towards a "solution" has created a climate in which critical thinking and peer review processes are replaced by political agendas , and labeling with conspiracy anything that is not "approved".
Like Ivermectin which clearly is working and some countries are in clinical trials as we speak.
> Israel - the most vaccinated country in the world
You should be aware that Israel's vaccination rate (62%) is only modestly above that of the United States (58%) and well below that of Japan (77%) and Canada (76%).
Israel was fortunate to deploy vaccines much earlier than most countries, and have the benefit of deploying additional boosters, but they are far from the most vaccinated country.
> Clearly looking at the data from Israel - the most vaccinated country in the world - mRNA vaccines are not working as expected.
What do you mean exactly?
A quick back of the envelope calculation shows that Israel's approach is equivalent to saving half a million lives in the US! 500,000!
Data from [1]
> Like Ivermectin which clearly is working and some countries are in clinical trials as we speak.
Turns out the countries where Ivermectin is most effective are the ones, where parasites are most prevalent [2].
You are slow with the downvotes:)
It is funny and sad at the same time.
And to clarify, focus on my links. There is no conspiracy in bad government decisions. Which are everywhere.
3. The review process for the mRNA vaccines was as thorough as any, just with the bureaucracy pipelined. In fact, due to the massive rollout and scrutiny, Corona vaccines are probably the most analysed vaccines in history now
4. You are making vague claims about conspiracies and silencing critical thinking, without doing your part in giving specific, well defined critiques. If you can show places where such critique was silenced and they hold up under scrutiny, e.g. the data wasn't falsified or a protocol was broken, we are all happy to have that conversation. Until then, this is not a helpful comment in my eyes
Ivermectin is a perfect storm of technically true but ultimately misleading experimental results combined with a pattern of results that for all the world looks like a conspiracy.
If you're too lazy to read a few pages of text that can save your life, I'll summarise it for in in a TL;DR:
Ivermectin works! This was demonstrated by at least one high-quality study with no signs of fraud or other serious faults.
It really will improve your odds of recovery from COVID-19!
Unfortunately, the entirety of that benefit stems from a high endemic load of parasites in places like India and Pakistan, where the high-quality successful studies were run. Those parasites will kill you within days if you're given the kind of steroids routinely used to treat COVID.
You know what kills parasites?
Ivermectin.
Even a single pill will save you from a death... from parasites. Not COVID, per-se.
That's why studies in western countries couldn't reproduce the results. They weren't trying to "cover up the truth", or whatever X-Files bullshit conspiracy theory you want to cook up. No, they just couldn't improve people's odds of survival simply because people on most western countries don't have parasite infections.
Ivermectin will not save you from a COVID infection.
Take one pill anyway. It's harmless and will save your from any parasites you might have.
I don't have any scientific papers, but I can tell you it's frequent to read in the local newspaper here (east of France) about some cardiac problem on amateur football (soccer) fields.
The last I read last week the guy's heart stopped 2 times before he could be rushed to the hospital.
There's also a list that is circulating on social medias of celebrities that had problems after their vaccines.
Is it linked? I don't know, but before the vaccines these kind of problems were almost unheard of.
Then let's wait until we have real data before jumping to conclusions. Your environment may just be a statistical outlier. Or you are more attuned to it because of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
> a peer reviewed study in a well known scientific journal.
Isn't that a bit naive? Hypothetically, if the conspiracy theories were true, why would an established publisher take the risk to go against a genocidal cabal? It's infinitely easier (and healthier) to align yourself with the winning side.
Well if you believe in conspiracy theories like this you are done anyway. No amount of data will convince you since of course everyone is part of the conspiracy.
Given there are 24 vaccines made by competing businesses authorised by the regulatory bodies of multiple independent nations that don’t all like each other (e.g. America vs. Cuba, North Korea, Afghanistan; or Israel vs. Iran), given that almost no nation has an incentive to plan its own depopulation and in many cases nations are actively trying to boost childbirth rates, given that many other vaccines are already basically universal, given that COVID-19 symptoms include lower fertility, given that nations have not even yet managed to make binding agreements on limiting carbon emissions even though this started to be a big thing 30 years ago and the consequences of failure will affect everyone?
I think the simplest model which fits all that would be to start by demonstrating that I am the star of The Truman Show — there is neither the means, the motive, nor the opportunity for what you suggest in anything resembling the world we actually live in.
Myocarditis rates are something like 30x higher in COVID infection cases vs. vaccination. So even if this phenomenon was real 1) you'd have to rule out it actually being because of COVID infection, and 2) the baseline for "it wasn't like this before" should compare to what happens with the statistically inevitable infection with COVID vs. in the presence of vaccines.
The reality is we have COVID, it's not going away and the effects are far worse, so this is the control scenario now.
CDC of US links COVID mRNA vaccines with increased risk of heart inflammation among young adult men, with a note that this is rare and these risks are smaller than risks of COVID.
Not really, because the risk of myocarditis/pericarditis when contracting Covid is several times larger than through the mRNA vaccines.
Makes sense given that you are exposed to fewer viral particles through the vaccines.
There is also a difference between Moderna and Biontech/Pfizer, which is why many countries vaccinate under 30s only with Biontech.
And yes, SARS-Cov-2 will very likely become endemic, like the other human corona viruses before it. As a result close to 100 percent of everybody, including young healthy adult men, will contract the virus.
Thanks for this. Unfortunately it is only an abstract and thus is a little short on the details (for instance if they excluded people with Covid infections from their cohort). Also it is difficult to assess if a rise in inflammatory markers would still be considered normal for instance when comparing to other vaccines or not. Compare for instance similar publication of influence vaccine https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15976761/
I think that's what underlies a lot of this disagreement. Risk, and what risk is manageable, and who gets to shoulder it.
These allegedly affected athletes (if that's what really caused their issue), probably have a very different feeling and assessment about the manageability of their myocarditis vs covid risk, and they by-and-large didn't get to choose - the decision was made for them, in part because the risk of Covid in > 80s is 1000x+ higher. There wasn't any sort of democratic discussion and consensus about what risks we were willing to accept in either Covid or in possible vaccine effects, people were just told by the authorities what they were going to accept. So people with different risk profiles and people with different amounts of risk-willingness are are major levels of disagreement, even if they don't always frame it in those terms.
EDIT: Brief correction that the risk I was thinking of is in 85+ year olds, and it's only 570x the risk of 18-29 year olds, not more than 1000x.
This is one of those things i want to talk about any every time this subject comes up but i just don’t have the energy to sustain it because the arguments always turn into spreadsheet politics. So i 100% agree with you and i think exploring this aspect of the conversation is an essential part of healing it.
You are certainly right that risk assessment is hard, but with manageable I primarily meant that the myocarditis which was detected was primarily mild in the young age group(at least in Germany where I followed the reports) and didn't lead to any deaths or severe impairments.
The risk for myocarditis from Comirnaty for 12-17 aged men is given at 4.8 in 100.000 vaccinations. Of those the larger than expected analysis showed that 10 out of the 78 total cases would have been expected without vaccination.
Manageable means that it can be treated and in most cases is not a life altering inflammation.
And I don't know where you take your numbers, but the numbers to me seem to clearly favor getting a vaccine rather than risking myocarditis from Covid:
I think you are failing to account for the incredibly low infection rate of the young and healthy with no comorbidities. The pericarditis rates from vaccine and infection are fairly comparable, ranging from 200 per million to high 700s per million.
However, given low infection rates of those young/healthy, the equation is fundamentally changed.
Please account for that before you provide half-baked advice.
Ok I'll bite... that's not how this works, that's not how ANY of this works!
First off, vaccinations are done via intermuscular injections, not bloodstream injections.
Second, as cells produce the foreign proteins, they are captured and displayed by the MHC molecules, so this notion that 'spike protein coursing through the body' is a wild fabrication.
The body is good at degrading proteins. And honestly if you are worried about the mRNA vaccines doing bad things to you... I have news for you, SARS-CoV-2 injects a lot more mRNA into your cells, and lots more of those 'spike proteins' you're worried about are created, in a self-replicating pattern, until possibly you die. So you probably want to avoid SARS-CoV-2 a lot more than the mRNA vaccines.
> First off, vaccinations are done via intermuscular injections, not bloodstream injections.
The spike protein doesn't remain in the arm, it has been found everywhere in the body, including the brain, after vaccination. It was in the news a couple months ago.
I'm not commenting on the other points since I don't know enough. However I'll echo the worries of Factorium, I believe we should wait and see what are the long term results of this round of ARN vaccines before we start administering new ones massively.
FWIW the "bloodstream injection" claim is related to a dubious study that intentionally injected an excessive amount of the vaccine into the bloodstream of lab animals and observed heart issues. So we're not just talking about "accidental bloodstream injections" (which is extremely unlikely to begin with) but also massively overdosing by orders of magnitude.
Are you referring to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34406358/? The same amount was injected into the veins as into the muscles, and the injections into the muscles were not found to cause myocarditis in the lab animals, while those into the veins were. Which at least suggests that a given quantity is more dangerous if injected into the blood than into the muscle.
>Second, as cells produce the foreign proteins, they are captured and displayed by the MHC molecules, so this notion that 'spike protein coursing through the body' is a wild fabrication.
1. These are case reports. Like... three (and they didn't all get the mRNA covid vaccine). The most likely explanation is that these happened by random chance.
2. This is about Herpes Zoster, not the "normal" Herpes Simplex. There already is a vaccine for Herpes Zoster.
Since Herpes Zoster reoccurrence can be triggered by stress, or many other environmental factors, the base rate is that there would be some reoccurrence after a vaccination. In fact if this number was 0, that would be it's own paper and a PhD waiting for someone righ there.
The base-rate fallacy drives a lot of 'but the vaccine did X'. Plus it's publish or perish you know.
FWIW in Germany the vaccination center I was at had ads for a free official app for tracking symptoms post-vax in scheduled intervals. The app explicitly insisted you list all symptoms even if you believe them to be unrelated. If you got the flu a week after your shot or get digestive issues from the all you can eat two days later, those symptoms go in the app. Since the base rate is generally unknown, it's safer to track everything and then list side-effects based on frequency.
This is all normal and unconcerning. The only thing unusual is how much data we have on the vaccines because we have literally billions of people vaccinated world-wide and an intense public and political interest in observing the outcomes.
Most advanced countries have surveillance in place for all medical interventions. In the UK we have the "Yellow card scheme". Most submissions are by medics but patients can write up their own reports too. Lying doesn't really matter because they're looking for patterns, so a few people writing nonsense doesn't trip the process up (but of course, please don't lie).
However, we don't have good baseline data. One thing that surprised me was, for the HPV vaccine which was initially being given specifically to teenage girls, they didn't have baseline menstruation symptom data. So, does having the HPV jab tend to make your period late? early? heavier? How often? We have no idea because we had no baseline data. Maybe the reports you get are actually normal - prompted only by the recent vaccination. Or maybe they aren't. If you were going to pick a group of patients likely to freak out because of minor and inconsequential menstrual changes you would pick teenage girls, but nobody had this data. Not just in the US, everywhere doesn't have this data. For easy stuff like "Do people drop dead when they take this vaccine?" we know long before authorisation if there's a big problem. But for subtle effects it's invisible until surveillance and without a baseline we have to guess what's important unless the numbers are overwhelming.
This statement seems to assume that a limited duration of protection is a given. We don't know that. It could also as well be that it is actually impossible to clear out all reservoirs of the virus in the body once someone was infected.
No need to assume nefarious intent (i.e. it being designed to keep people sick) right from the beginning.
It was more of "If I would have to make sure there will be a steady revenue stream in the future, I would also try to achieve a limited time protection effect".
What's good about open markets is that if someone else finds a permanent protection, then people will stop using your product and start using his/hers. This gives you an incentive to create such product yourself.
Nah. Talk to the other producer(s) in secret and make a gentleman's agreement not to create a permanent cure. The regulations surrounding pharmaceuticals is enough to prevent other companies from entering the market. Illegal as shit but crimes have happened before.
Transparency, or a bigger push towards crowd science platforms for open source drugs. Basically people who have in interest in medicines because it’s their passion work together like how the open source community works together. And then people like us find those projects. Idk health is not something we should pick and choose who gets what, that is causing a ton of unease under the surface that is bubbling up. You can only gas something so much before the amount of gas build up faster than released. But hopefully we start by making it illegal for politicians to own stock while in office.
well there is innovation, what was scarce years ago became less scarce through creative thinking, we have not arrived at the end of a thought yet, things evolve and what we call scarce today is not even a tip of the resources the future will see. the more minds we have working on something the more we realize of previous definition of scarcity was just in thought and not in product
there is no simple solution which can be summed up for a ycombinator comment.
that doesn't mean that the issue isn't real or isn't happening, because capitalism very much incites this kind of behaviour. That doesn't mean that abandoning capitalism is the right approach either, because that also solved other issues that would come back without it. Its just not an easy situation, but its nonetheless a reality that we have to admit that this kind of behaviour is highly rewarded with our current system and expect corporations to do whatever they can get away with, because most of the people that reach the highest position are amoral, simply because you cannot get to this kind of position without having that character trait
There is no simple solution is because Capitalism without regulation is tyranny. Regulations are good things, and if regulators need regulation that is far better than the tyranny that would arise without regulation, or enforcement of regulations. Similar to the cherry picking of enforcement, and regulation capture all too prevalent now.
Checks and balances are rational, while no checks and balances is insane and a recipe for mass corruption. This down vote demonstrates the success propaganda.
The problem is usually not one of legality but of optimization, so it's hard to "fix" without using a heavy hand. You can't force companies to invest in cures rather than treatment, especially at the cost of profit. And many individual parties will reach the same conclusion independently, with no need for collusion [0]. In this case it's not hard to arrive at the conclusion that:
> While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.
> the success of [the cure] has gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients
Ugh, those dumb "withholding the cure" conspiratorial tropes. Have you looked at infamous asset striping companies and corporate raiders? Or even the short-termism of most companies? They don't think beyond optimizing next quarter share price and this is the default the business model of a publicly traded company which bucks the trend is noted when describing a company and not the other way around. That is a 0-bit compression case.
There is thus absolutely no shortage of people who are willing to burn perfectly profitable companies for big enough short term gain. In this case they would wind up eating an entire submarket. I think orders of magnitude more qualifies as a temptation.
The situation is also inherently a prisoner's dilemma - pharmaceutical companies know that they are not special and that anything they let sit quietly buried may be discovered by another company who may benefit from the short term cash.
This is before getting into how immensely valueable the "ashes" are for any company who goes the cure route successfully. They have a reputational premium and have a collective team whose appraised value has risen. Given the choice between your average team of X years of experience and a disease curing team with X years of experience guess which one would appraise higher in share prices by a considerable margin?
> if someone else finds a permanent protection, then people will stop using your product and start using his
Whoever creates the permanent solution is likely to maximise profits, charging a premium which people may begrudgingly pay to not have the inconvenience of renewing their protection.
I expect there would be a balance point for those who can afford and those who cannot.
In practice everyone will collude to have chronic treatments and do bullshit clinical trials that prove non inferiority. And regulators are asleep at the wheel.
At the less extreme end, you have FDA authority to approve a product. At the more extreme end, you have the entire corporate media establishment lined up against you and doctors threatened with disbarment for prescribing (or even just advising) off-label.
> This statement seems to assume that a limited duration of protection is a given. We don't know that.
you can be sure they will design it like that or select the right versions that have such properties. Thats what you end up with MBAs leading businesses everywhere.
No need to pretend not to know that it's possible for a researcher to do their honest best and arrive at a subscription service palliative, and at the same time for the c-suite to think "nice".
> Combined with effect being limited in time (say, for half a year) this would create a steady revenue stream.
Why would the effect be limited? I mean it could be, but it could also cause people to turn green, not sure why we would consider either of those to be likely though without more info.
If you are assuming the effect will be limited because the effect of the covid vaccine is limited, this may be more related to covid than to mRNA vaccines, especially since the non mRNA covid vaccines seems to be less effective than the mRNA vaccines, and not more so. And after all, the mechanism of action for mRNA vaccines and non mRNA vaccines are not fundamentally different, both induce an immune response to a pathogen without giving you a disease.
The second half of the quote? At least I think that's the implication. i.e. No incentive to make it unlimited, or even an incentive to make it limited if unlimited found first. (Or both, and way mark-up the unlimited one.)
Not saying I agree/am quite that suspicious/pessimistic necessarily, but that's how I read it.
Okay, sure, but this would be quite the feat of medical engineering to hack the immune system to the point where it no longer operates as normal, as the normal function of the immune system is what determines the immune response to a vaccine and the resulting immunity.
I mean they could make one that turns you green and then mark up the one that does not also, that has not been the case, and generally vaccines produced by private companies without government involvement have significantly outperformed every vaccine made with government involvement, and every government action in US and most of the west in relation to these covid vaccines has been to favor pharmaceutical companies that make them over it's own citizenry, so basically it seems that the pharmaceutical companies that made these vaccines are much more deserving of public trust than many governments.
I mean if the pharmacutical companies abducted your children in the middle of the night and ransomed them back to you that would also create a steady revenue stream, not sure why it would be something to consider.
I am pretty sure that it would be illegal to give people a vaccine designed to induce gene therapy that suppresses your immune system in order to ensure people need to get it more than once. And still, I actually trust the pharmaceutical companies to not do this more than I trust governments to not give them permission to do it, as they have been much better actors in the pandemic than almost every government.
Obtaining a steady revenue stream is something that makes perfect sense in any business. And it's literally documented that curing a disease is a questionable business proposition for the companies that could rather sell the treatment instead. [0]
On the other hand turning people green or any other such random proposition makes no sense. This is a weak analogy fallacy, dismissing a strong argument that has been observed in practice again and again by attacking an "analogous" but worthless pseudo-argument like "of course they're not turning people green". And I don't even want to get into the whole "if the pharmacutical companies abducted your children in the middle of the night and ransomed them back to you" nonsense. It's not making the point you think it's making, it just makes it look like you don't understand the discussion.
> This is a weak analogy fallacy, dismissing a strong argument
If you have to back your argument up by some analyist saying companies woudl make more money if they did something other than they were doing, then that does not make your argument strong.
> that has been observed in practice again and again by attacking an "analogous" but worthless pseudo-argument like "of course they're not turning people green".
And yet instead of citing an actual case of this, you cite an analyst that says companies would make more money by not curing diseases. Companies would also make more money if they kidnapped people's children and ransomed them back than if they did not do that, ignoring pesky things like legality and all that of course, but who knows, I'm sure politicans that would allow them to do this would be a dime a dozen anyway.
You take some effort to reject my arguments with far weaker ones (ridiculous even) yet you don't propose anything realistic. All evidence is pointing at the same conclusion. From a business perspective in some case treating a problem generates more revenue than curing it so going that route is a sound business decision.
- the green people "argument" - yes, they could turn people green. But what sells is turning people white, something many black celebrities actually do (skin whitening, look it up).
- the even more ridiculous "kidnap your kids" idea - they could but the kidnapping model triggers a response that grows exponentially towards life threatening for the kidnappers, making it particularly risky, expensive, and difficult to implement. Not a good business proposition, hence it only happens in some countries where victims have few protections, and the response from authorities can be "mitigated" cheaply.
- it's "just a report" - but one with uncontested premise and conclusion, and even confirmed in practice. Pharma companies routinely jack up prices by orders of magnitude even for drugs that are cheaper to make than ever, because they are needed in ongoing treatment (basic things like insulin, 70 years old anti-parasitic drugs, or epi-pens).
Planned obsolescence cartels have been doing the same thing a century ago [0], after not seeing much value in kidnapping kids or turning people green (presumably with green light bulbs).
You made for some really low quality conversation. I wouldn't regret I spent my time on this if I knew it got you past the "green people" and "child abduction" level of argumentation. Alas.
How cute.. Even a trees can only grow where the gardener lets them.
The mRNA vaccines aren't a conspiracy to milk and control the population, some people are trying their very best to do good. ALSO, there are people that have a sole "job" of milking every cent possible and others that use this as an opportunity to gain influence and advance whatever political/business career they pursuit.
This happens everywhere and every time.
Yes, this "they are in this to get us" get's tiring but let's not put the "scientists" in a pedestal, because they are people e many of them aren't even scientists.
To your point, opioids are a great example of meds in a profits- first world.
That aside, it certainly possible to have infinite respect for the scientific method, but at the same time be mindful that method meets reality via (often very flawed) humans. Questioning the human element in this equation doesn't make you anti-science (because there's a difference between the two).
This has nothing to do with scientist motivations and everything to do with scientific advancement.
If you think you scientists have multiple options in front of them and can pick the most financially opportunistic one, you have no idea what R&D is like
Considering research “paths” are often measured in decades I’d be massively impressed if a scientist could guess what would be profitable 20 years from now.
> If you think scientists can intentionally design something to be transient
Not to be alarmist, but this does happen. There are many classes of drugs that both offer temporary and permanent treatments. Often times, these have different tradeoffs.
You're right, but maybe missing the point? Everything is subject to capitalism and market viability. There are a lot of hard problems that have commercially unviable solutions. mRNA vaccines were largely in this category until COVID. Anything that makes a solution less commercially viable (e.g. permanence) reduces R&D funding.
It takes a while until the voting takes effect. Scrolling through the replies in a Covid or vaccine related post shortly after posting is an eerie experience.
"Garbage in, garbage out" means nothing in this context yet you keep throwing it around to punctuate a very confusing and misguided point.
Also loving this typical cop-out argument of "If you don't see the problem then there's no hope". Either explain your weird stance further or stop getting fussy when people decide they don't want to listen to you. We're not lemmings, we're capable of analyzing situations with a critical eye.
Is the inadequacy of existing mechanisms to protect against STDs your primary impediment for having sex at the moment?
I somehow doubt it given that the mechanisms to protect against STDs are much better than before, the treatments when you do get them are much better than before, and even with all of this Millennials and Gen Z are having much less sex than older generations.
> Is the inadequacy of existing mechanisms to protect against STDs your primary impediment for having sex at the moment?
Consider scale. There are plenty of people who would love to take part in giant group orgies, at least once in a while, if there were no risk of communicable disease.
Everyone has their own idea of what a utopia might look like, I suppose.
Show me that at scale people are happier if they have lots of anonymous sex and giant group orgies.
But fair enough, if your primary impediment to having sex is that you want to engage in group orgies and just do not feel this is safe enough without better STD vaccines, then the mRNA vaccine revolution may be the silver bullet you have been looking for, hope it delivers for you.
But of course, if you just can't get off unless you are having unprotected sex with people you can't trust to not have STDs, then yes, I'm sure the mRNA revolution holds some promise. Hope it works out for you.
> Is the inadequacy of existing mechanisms to protect against STDs your primary impediment for having sex at the moment?
It doesn't need to be a primary impediment. Look at it in an economics sense: fear of and precautions over STDs impose an additional, unnecessary cost on sexual interaction. Like a tax, that imposes a deadweight loss where some sex doesn't happen that otherwise would occur.
Back in the real world, sex is certainly not a commodity, but someone who is particularly interested in sex with non-fully-vetted partners (particularly in casual or near-anonymous settings) would be more strongly affected by the STD deadweight loss.
I'm pre-millenial, and for me STDs are definitely a reason to hold slightly back, sexually. Also, not needing to be so careful with condoms is a pretty big plus for many of us that prefer it without for several reasons.
I also look forward to having the serious ones cured.
Chlamydia and gonorrhoea are easy to test for and not too bad if caught early. In Sweden we can just log in to a government health care web site, click a button and get a free test kit sent home.
Having herpes out of the way would be great. HIV/AIDS doesn't seem to be that big of a thing anymore, at least not in my awareness.
Not sure what is then left to be afraid of, except unwanted pregnancies and hurt feelings.
I don't think STD's are the primary deterrent, or even all that significant of a deterrent, to people having sex today. If sexual activity is taking a dip, then I would attribute it to:
(1) A progressive moral counterpart to the conservative moral prudishness behind the mid-20th century sexual revolution. It's strange. In some ways, sex positive feminism has prevailed. And yet, sex in general seems more loaded and viewed with suspicion than it was back in the 1990's when I entered my late teens and early 20's.
(2) Internet-driven pornography addiction, social anxiety, and an all-around trend toward increased isolation and atrophied social skills.
TL;DR - Sex is down because too many young women are patriarchy-triggered by sexual advances, and because too many incel dudes have no game and get their needs met through OnlyFans. I don't think it's because people fear the clap.
mRNA vaccines are almost the opposite of what vaccines are supposed to do. Instead of building immunity in a society, it generates what is needed to stop the spread. The danger here is that the natural immunity to new diseases will disappear on the long term.
Can you please expand on how mRNA vaccines are doing the opposite of building immunity in society? I don't really grasp this leap of logic in your argument, mRNA vaccines are just another way to trigger an immune response as far as I understand it.
Herpes is likely one of the causes of Alzheimer's.
mRNA technology is so promising I bought some biotech ETFs early in the year (they're all underwater at the moment, but I'm looking for a 10-20 year payoff, so that's no problem).
Indeed. It's concerning enough to me to warrant getting the chickenpox vaccine as a fully-grown adult. Though I realise HSV-1 != Herpes zoster, the effect of later life shingles does show the recurrent, latent effects of the herpes virus family enough to push me towards it.
Currently countries with higher mRNA COVID vaccine coverage have (slightly) higher covid-mortality than countries with low/lower vaccine coverage, so I'm not hopeful. I think crispr might have better odds.
"Even though vaccinations offers protection to individuals against severe hospitalization and death, the CDC reported an increase from 0.01 to 9% and 0 to 15.1% (between January to May 2021) in the rates of hospitalizations and deaths, respectively, amongst the fully vaccinated"
Correct. But also, its not something you can draw that many conclusions from. For instance, I would need to see which variants were responsible for those admissions, as the vaccine might have better results on some than others. But nevertheless its important to collect as much data as possible.
The sentence immediately before it provides important context as to what it's referring to:
> A substantial decline in immunity from mRNA vaccines 6-months post immunization has also been reported [9].
>Even though vaccinations offers protection to individuals against severe hospitalization and death, the CDC reported an increase from 0.01 to 9% and 0 to 15.1% (between January to May 2021) in the rates of hospitalizations and deaths, respectively, amongst the fully vaccinated [10].
It's referring to an increase in hospitalization/death 6 months after vaccination, compared to when you're first vaccinated. That's very very different from your statement that "countries with higher mRNA COVID vaccine coverage have (slightly) higher covid-mortality than countries with low/lower vaccine coverage".
As I stated in another comment, its hard to draw big conclusions from this data alone. The authors conclude that everyone should get vaccinated despite quickly diminishing returns. Looking a total morbidity in Denmark, I'm just not convinced.
Very nice. Too bad this probably won't work with the worst virus in the herpes family, Cytomegalovirus, for the same reason our immune system struggles to keep up with it.
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207 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 4479 ms ] threadPretty amazing. I hope this ends up passing clinical trials soon.
It may not be a cure for HIV but it’s also the sort of thing that would be nice to eliminate from the variables at play in “healthy” that affect basically everything to do with medical science. Taking a few more variables out of the equations will hopefully make other things easier to study.
CRISPR is most likely the cure for HIV as it can be used to modify embryonic DNA to create permanent immunity. That is actually what the first CRISPR embryo experiment tried to achieve a few years back in China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th0vnOmFltc
But I don't know how CRISPR is delivered to edit DNA in live cells.
Most of our vaccine experience is with weakened or dead virii, but MRNA is a different thing. Note that MRNA, RNA and DNA are interchangeable genetic mechanisms and can transcript into each other. (There are recent papers published about this in 2021.)
I just hope corona and MRNA vaccines don't turn out to be as dangerous as Zika, which started out as a curiosity in the press, and turned into a deadly threat to newborns. Corona attacks female reproductive tissues, so we'll learn over time.
Recall that Moderna was failing to progress beyond animal trials as recently as 2017. The reason was their mRNA delivery tech became toxic given multiple doses. They had struggled with this problem for years but found a neat solution: pivot to vaccines, because as everyone knows, vaccines don't need multiple doses. They protect you for life. <facepalm>
https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/
https://www.statnews.com/2017/07/27/moderna-alexion-partners...
I sense some frustration behind that comment.
Two points
1) We don't see a decrease in Vaccine Effectiveness for Covid. The headlines you see confuse efficacy with effectiveness. There's no meaningful way to directly measure effectiveness and therefore, some studies use anti-bodies as a proxy. However, it should be noted that just because you do not have anti-bodies doesn't mean the effectiveness is reduced. The human body (T-Cells, B-Cells) are able to produce anti-bodies "on demand" as and when required.
2) The non-mRNA vaccines also reduce efficacy and we don't stop researching their benefits on other viruses. So, both of them are not mutually exclusive.
Perhaps if the goalposts didn't continually keep shifting...
Behavior has something to do with it, I'm sure. But most likely is that the older, most susceptible, poor health people are vaccinated while the younger, healthier populations are less likely to have been vaccinated.
Except now, endless dosings of that very same tech are being mandated. Note: no announcements at any point about how they found some fix for this problem.
I've updated my original post with a second story from the same site that makes this problem clearer (spells it out in different words):
"But that hasn’t worked out so far. Moderna’s attempts to make actual drugs from mRNA have been repeatedly hamstrung, proving either too weak or too dangerous to test in clinical trials, former employees and partners said. The company has instead prioritized vaccines, which can be dosed just once and thus avoid the safety problems that have plagued more ambitious projects."
The articles are quite clear that they didn't want to make this decision but felt forced into it, because many years of investor funding had failed to bring a single drug to market. Vaccines were the Hail Mary move to save the company from extinction, even if it made investors unhappy. Then COVID came along and suddenly, vaccines were big business and nobody worried about toxicity anymore.
It amazes me anyone is still willing to use the E word on anything COVID related. It's just embarrassing at this point. The "experts" assured us just months ago the vaccines were 95%+ effective. The fact that effectiveness declined so fast surprised them and now they're trying to rewrite history to claim it was known all along.
There appear to be no experts in COVIDS, viruses or vaccines. They're all in denial that their self-proclaimed experts beliefs have been invalidated dozens of times over since the start of this.
And yes, I know that this is common for vaccines. No vaccine is 100% effective. Which is why Fauci's testimony to the contrary was so irresponsible.
This issue is being so pigheaded as to think that 16 billion vaccines can be created, deployed, and put in arms in a short enough time span to defeat a brand new, somewhat fast evolving virus before it selects to get around the vaccine.
It was never going to work.
It's not like that someone will go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexually_transmitted_infection make a list, prepare a vaccine combos for all of them and release it in a big announcement.
Parallelizing calls without synchronicity problems
Those are likely the most tested vaccines in history.
.... what?
All observed "vaccination damage" has been observed in very close proximity to the injection. The talk about "long-term" effects is almost entirely based on FUD spread about the measles vaccine which is in turn based on a fraudulent pseudoscientific article claiming a link between one specific measles vaccine and autism by a guy who tried to push an alternative vaccine. If you still worry bout vaccination damage as a serious concern in 2021 you're on the tail end of a failed marketing campaign.
We're suppose to be able to do things like this in order to save ourselves. Imagine if COVID was deadlier, had a higher R-naught, etc. Would you still be advocating for "taking it slow"? If hundreds of thousands were dying per day should we still be waiting years for a vaccine?
You can also laud the mrna vaccines and be critical of the obscene profits being made.
In fact, you can also promote vaccinating as widely as possible, and at the same time harshly condemn the politicization of medicine, the creation of second class citizens, and the nonsense power games being fought that seem to exclusively benefit massive corporations that fund political campaigns.
I think even with a 10% CFR, there'd be droves of vaccine skeptics, unless the virus hits people with more or less uniform symptoms.
...or maybe it even has nothing to do with lethality at all, look at the ebola vaccine rollouts in Africa.
I've gotten downvoted once here for saying this, but bioethicists will be put in history in the "genocide" chapter: we didn't do challenge trial for Covid.
Just try to wrap your mind around this concept: we knew since early spring of 2020 that Covid is not particularly dangerous for young healthy people. We had plenty of volunteers - there were sites up I think since February. We had countless questions: how does it spread? is it airborn? do masks help? which masks? how is it acting? what drugs help? DO VACCINES WORK?
But no. We chose, and I underline, chose, not to answer any of those questions because nobody had the balls to cross the line already drawn in the sand.
Of course medicine has downsides. Of course at times we fuck up. But ... god, Thomas Sowell should be required reading in highschool. Everything is a tradeoff. You can't say "we have to move slow" - you have to say "moving too fast or too slow has the following tradeoffs". If you're not keeping in mind what you're losing by moving in one direction, you'll keep steering in that direction until you get to the point of ignoring such low hanging fruits as challenge trials while watching people die.
They were also handled with an abundance of caution, which is why many countries suspended the Oxford vaccine after initial reports of adverse effects in young women despite the extremely low frequency hinting at sampling bias rather than genuine side-effects.
lol.
This is crazy to be honest. If there was some malfeasance during the development of the vaccines, the people responsible will be long dead by then and cannot be punished. In that case Pfizer would just pay some fine and continue business as usual.
The vaccine could be developed very quickly, I don't understand why there is the needs to wait so long to release the data - the data itself (emails, scientific documents and such) should be quite limited. I believe Pfizer claimed it's too much data to process and they need many years, but I find this quite unbelievable.
"Just give me all of it" is easy to request, but hard to implement.
Gathering this data would be a breeze.
> The FDA proposes releasing 500 pages per month on a rolling basis, noting that the branch that would handle the review has only 10 employees and is currently processing about 400 other FOIA requests.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/wait-what-fda-wants...
Like Ivermectin which clearly is working and some countries are in clinical trials as we speak.
Some critical information about Pfizers new drug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufy2AweXRkc
Some thoughts on spike protein in vaccines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Unt03UBhbU
More thoughts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jNo0on8vhg
You should be aware that Israel's vaccination rate (62%) is only modestly above that of the United States (58%) and well below that of Japan (77%) and Canada (76%).
Israel was fortunate to deploy vaccines much earlier than most countries, and have the benefit of deploying additional boosters, but they are far from the most vaccinated country.
https://www.science.org/content/article/grim-warning-israel-...
What do you mean exactly? A quick back of the envelope calculation shows that Israel's approach is equivalent to saving half a million lives in the US! 500,000! Data from [1]
> Like Ivermectin which clearly is working and some countries are in clinical trials as we speak.
Turns out the countries where Ivermectin is most effective are the ones, where parasites are most prevalent [2].
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29249686
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLWQtT7dHGE
2. What data from Israel are you referring to?
3. The review process for the mRNA vaccines was as thorough as any, just with the bureaucracy pipelined. In fact, due to the massive rollout and scrutiny, Corona vaccines are probably the most analysed vaccines in history now
4. You are making vague claims about conspiracies and silencing critical thinking, without doing your part in giving specific, well defined critiques. If you can show places where such critique was silenced and they hold up under scrutiny, e.g. the data wasn't falsified or a protocol was broken, we are all happy to have that conversation. Until then, this is not a helpful comment in my eyes
A fantastic summary of the whole mess is here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...
This was discussed recently here on YC News just 5 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29249686
If you're too lazy to read a few pages of text that can save your life, I'll summarise it for in in a TL;DR:
Ivermectin works! This was demonstrated by at least one high-quality study with no signs of fraud or other serious faults.
It really will improve your odds of recovery from COVID-19!
Unfortunately, the entirety of that benefit stems from a high endemic load of parasites in places like India and Pakistan, where the high-quality successful studies were run. Those parasites will kill you within days if you're given the kind of steroids routinely used to treat COVID.
You know what kills parasites?
Ivermectin.
Even a single pill will save you from a death... from parasites. Not COVID, per-se.
That's why studies in western countries couldn't reproduce the results. They weren't trying to "cover up the truth", or whatever X-Files bullshit conspiracy theory you want to cook up. No, they just couldn't improve people's odds of survival simply because people on most western countries don't have parasite infections.
Ivermectin will not save you from a COVID infection.
Take one pill anyway. It's harmless and will save your from any parasites you might have.
The last I read last week the guy's heart stopped 2 times before he could be rushed to the hospital.
There's also a list that is circulating on social medias of celebrities that had problems after their vaccines.
Is it linked? I don't know, but before the vaccines these kind of problems were almost unheard of.
What kind of proof would convince you that the 'vaccine' is in fact the biggest blunder or the biggest planned depopulation event in history?
A written confession from Arch Lector Sult?
Isn't that a bit naive? Hypothetically, if the conspiracy theories were true, why would an established publisher take the risk to go against a genocidal cabal? It's infinitely easier (and healthier) to align yourself with the winning side.
I think the simplest model which fits all that would be to start by demonstrating that I am the star of The Truman Show — there is neither the means, the motive, nor the opportunity for what you suggest in anything resembling the world we actually live in.
The reality is we have COVID, it's not going away and the effects are far worse, so this is the control scenario now.
Source of this please?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7199677/
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/circ.144.suppl_1.107...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm
(influenza vaccine effect - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15976761/) et al
I'm not sure, specifically, where the 30x claim comes from. There are a myriad of studies showing a measurable increase.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/my...
That is not "rare" as some people advocating vaccinating large populations.
Given that the super low infection rate, and miniscule mortality among young healthy adult men, it violates do no harm / NNT.
Makes sense given that you are exposed to fewer viral particles through the vaccines.
There is also a difference between Moderna and Biontech/Pfizer, which is why many countries vaccinate under 30s only with Biontech.
And yes, SARS-Cov-2 will very likely become endemic, like the other human corona viruses before it. As a result close to 100 percent of everybody, including young healthy adult men, will contract the virus.
The myocarditis risk in young males seems to be manageable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29298178
These allegedly affected athletes (if that's what really caused their issue), probably have a very different feeling and assessment about the manageability of their myocarditis vs covid risk, and they by-and-large didn't get to choose - the decision was made for them, in part because the risk of Covid in > 80s is 1000x+ higher. There wasn't any sort of democratic discussion and consensus about what risks we were willing to accept in either Covid or in possible vaccine effects, people were just told by the authorities what they were going to accept. So people with different risk profiles and people with different amounts of risk-willingness are are major levels of disagreement, even if they don't always frame it in those terms.
EDIT: Brief correction that the risk I was thinking of is in 85+ year olds, and it's only 570x the risk of 18-29 year olds, not more than 1000x.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...
The risk for myocarditis from Comirnaty for 12-17 aged men is given at 4.8 in 100.000 vaccinations. Of those the larger than expected analysis showed that 10 out of the 78 total cases would have been expected without vaccination.
And I don't know where you take your numbers, but the numbers to me seem to clearly favor getting a vaccine rather than risking myocarditis from Covid:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm
However, given low infection rates of those young/healthy, the equation is fundamentally changed.
Please account for that before you provide half-baked advice.
First off, vaccinations are done via intermuscular injections, not bloodstream injections.
Second, as cells produce the foreign proteins, they are captured and displayed by the MHC molecules, so this notion that 'spike protein coursing through the body' is a wild fabrication.
The body is good at degrading proteins. And honestly if you are worried about the mRNA vaccines doing bad things to you... I have news for you, SARS-CoV-2 injects a lot more mRNA into your cells, and lots more of those 'spike proteins' you're worried about are created, in a self-replicating pattern, until possibly you die. So you probably want to avoid SARS-CoV-2 a lot more than the mRNA vaccines.
The spike protein doesn't remain in the arm, it has been found everywhere in the body, including the brain, after vaccination. It was in the news a couple months ago.
I'm not commenting on the other points since I don't know enough. However I'll echo the worries of Factorium, I believe we should wait and see what are the long term results of this round of ARN vaccines before we start administering new ones massively.
That's not true. The body continues to produce circulating exosomes expressing the spike protein for 4+ months after vaccination: https://www.jimmunol.org/content/early/2021/10/11/jimmunol.2...
1. These are case reports. Like... three (and they didn't all get the mRNA covid vaccine). The most likely explanation is that these happened by random chance.
2. This is about Herpes Zoster, not the "normal" Herpes Simplex. There already is a vaccine for Herpes Zoster.
The base-rate fallacy drives a lot of 'but the vaccine did X'. Plus it's publish or perish you know.
This is all normal and unconcerning. The only thing unusual is how much data we have on the vaccines because we have literally billions of people vaccinated world-wide and an intense public and political interest in observing the outcomes.
However, we don't have good baseline data. One thing that surprised me was, for the HPV vaccine which was initially being given specifically to teenage girls, they didn't have baseline menstruation symptom data. So, does having the HPV jab tend to make your period late? early? heavier? How often? We have no idea because we had no baseline data. Maybe the reports you get are actually normal - prompted only by the recent vaccination. Or maybe they aren't. If you were going to pick a group of patients likely to freak out because of minor and inconsequential menstrual changes you would pick teenage girls, but nobody had this data. Not just in the US, everywhere doesn't have this data. For easy stuff like "Do people drop dead when they take this vaccine?" we know long before authorisation if there's a big problem. But for subtle effects it's invisible until surveillance and without a baseline we have to guess what's important unless the numbers are overwhelming.
Combined with effect being limited in time (say, for half a year) this would create a steady revenue stream.
It's not possible for everyone to get the best of everything. After all, markets are about distributing scarce resources, not abundant ones.
that doesn't mean that the issue isn't real or isn't happening, because capitalism very much incites this kind of behaviour. That doesn't mean that abandoning capitalism is the right approach either, because that also solved other issues that would come back without it. Its just not an easy situation, but its nonetheless a reality that we have to admit that this kind of behaviour is highly rewarded with our current system and expect corporations to do whatever they can get away with, because most of the people that reach the highest position are amoral, simply because you cannot get to this kind of position without having that character trait
> While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.
> the success of [the cure] has gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...
There is thus absolutely no shortage of people who are willing to burn perfectly profitable companies for big enough short term gain. In this case they would wind up eating an entire submarket. I think orders of magnitude more qualifies as a temptation.
The situation is also inherently a prisoner's dilemma - pharmaceutical companies know that they are not special and that anything they let sit quietly buried may be discovered by another company who may benefit from the short term cash.
This is before getting into how immensely valueable the "ashes" are for any company who goes the cure route successfully. They have a reputational premium and have a collective team whose appraised value has risen. Given the choice between your average team of X years of experience and a disease curing team with X years of experience guess which one would appraise higher in share prices by a considerable margin?
I expect there would be a balance point for those who can afford and those who cannot.
At the less extreme end, you have FDA authority to approve a product. At the more extreme end, you have the entire corporate media establishment lined up against you and doctors threatened with disbarment for prescribing (or even just advising) off-label.
you can be sure they will design it like that or select the right versions that have such properties. Thats what you end up with MBAs leading businesses everywhere.
Why would the effect be limited? I mean it could be, but it could also cause people to turn green, not sure why we would consider either of those to be likely though without more info.
If you are assuming the effect will be limited because the effect of the covid vaccine is limited, this may be more related to covid than to mRNA vaccines, especially since the non mRNA covid vaccines seems to be less effective than the mRNA vaccines, and not more so. And after all, the mechanism of action for mRNA vaccines and non mRNA vaccines are not fundamentally different, both induce an immune response to a pathogen without giving you a disease.
Not saying I agree/am quite that suspicious/pessimistic necessarily, but that's how I read it.
I mean they could make one that turns you green and then mark up the one that does not also, that has not been the case, and generally vaccines produced by private companies without government involvement have significantly outperformed every vaccine made with government involvement, and every government action in US and most of the west in relation to these covid vaccines has been to favor pharmaceutical companies that make them over it's own citizenry, so basically it seems that the pharmaceutical companies that made these vaccines are much more deserving of public trust than many governments.
I mean if the pharmacutical companies abducted your children in the middle of the night and ransomed them back to you that would also create a steady revenue stream, not sure why it would be something to consider.
Is it? We had immunosuppressors for decades, we know about about AIDS and gene therapy. Doesn't sound like such an extreme feat to me.
On the other hand turning people green or any other such random proposition makes no sense. This is a weak analogy fallacy, dismissing a strong argument that has been observed in practice again and again by attacking an "analogous" but worthless pseudo-argument like "of course they're not turning people green". And I don't even want to get into the whole "if the pharmacutical companies abducted your children in the middle of the night and ransomed them back to you" nonsense. It's not making the point you think it's making, it just makes it look like you don't understand the discussion.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/curing-disease-n...
If you have to back your argument up by some analyist saying companies woudl make more money if they did something other than they were doing, then that does not make your argument strong.
> that has been observed in practice again and again by attacking an "analogous" but worthless pseudo-argument like "of course they're not turning people green".
And yet instead of citing an actual case of this, you cite an analyst that says companies would make more money by not curing diseases. Companies would also make more money if they kidnapped people's children and ransomed them back than if they did not do that, ignoring pesky things like legality and all that of course, but who knows, I'm sure politicans that would allow them to do this would be a dime a dozen anyway.
- the green people "argument" - yes, they could turn people green. But what sells is turning people white, something many black celebrities actually do (skin whitening, look it up).
- the even more ridiculous "kidnap your kids" idea - they could but the kidnapping model triggers a response that grows exponentially towards life threatening for the kidnappers, making it particularly risky, expensive, and difficult to implement. Not a good business proposition, hence it only happens in some countries where victims have few protections, and the response from authorities can be "mitigated" cheaply.
- it's "just a report" - but one with uncontested premise and conclusion, and even confirmed in practice. Pharma companies routinely jack up prices by orders of magnitude even for drugs that are cheaper to make than ever, because they are needed in ongoing treatment (basic things like insulin, 70 years old anti-parasitic drugs, or epi-pens).
Planned obsolescence cartels have been doing the same thing a century ago [0], after not seeing much value in kidnapping kids or turning people green (presumably with green light bulbs).
You made for some really low quality conversation. I wouldn't regret I spent my time on this if I knew it got you past the "green people" and "child abduction" level of argumentation. Alas.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
When you work on hard problems like this you’re thankful it works at all.
The mRNA vaccines aren't a conspiracy to milk and control the population, some people are trying their very best to do good. ALSO, there are people that have a sole "job" of milking every cent possible and others that use this as an opportunity to gain influence and advance whatever political/business career they pursuit.
This happens everywhere and every time.
Yes, this "they are in this to get us" get's tiring but let's not put the "scientists" in a pedestal, because they are people e many of them aren't even scientists.
That aside, it certainly possible to have infinite respect for the scientific method, but at the same time be mindful that method meets reality via (often very flawed) humans. Questioning the human element in this equation doesn't make you anti-science (because there's a difference between the two).
If you think you scientists have multiple options in front of them and can pick the most financially opportunistic one, you have no idea what R&D is like
I’ve been in the lab, have you?
Not to be alarmist, but this does happen. There are many classes of drugs that both offer temporary and permanent treatments. Often times, these have different tradeoffs.
Garbage in, garbage out.
If you don't see the problem with that, it's already too late for you.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Also loving this typical cop-out argument of "If you don't see the problem then there's no hope". Either explain your weird stance further or stop getting fussy when people decide they don't want to listen to you. We're not lemmings, we're capable of analyzing situations with a critical eye.
So capable that you believe the colors of words on a screen relate to the validity of the ideas presented.
Good luck with that.
2. It gets tiring having the same discussion over and over again. Often it is better for the community to just downvote and move on.
So for u and mods to shutdown certain opinions, is just pure ignorance and ego. U shouldnt be so happy about that.
Open discussion and different opinions should always be allowed, as long they are civil. If not, it means something is going on that isnt right.
I somehow doubt it given that the mechanisms to protect against STDs are much better than before, the treatments when you do get them are much better than before, and even with all of this Millennials and Gen Z are having much less sex than older generations.
Consider scale. There are plenty of people who would love to take part in giant group orgies, at least once in a while, if there were no risk of communicable disease.
Everyone has their own idea of what a utopia might look like, I suppose.
Show me that at scale people are happier if they have lots of anonymous sex and giant group orgies.
But fair enough, if your primary impediment to having sex is that you want to engage in group orgies and just do not feel this is safe enough without better STD vaccines, then the mRNA vaccine revolution may be the silver bullet you have been looking for, hope it delivers for you.
But of course, if you just can't get off unless you are having unprotected sex with people you can't trust to not have STDs, then yes, I'm sure the mRNA revolution holds some promise. Hope it works out for you.
It doesn't need to be a primary impediment. Look at it in an economics sense: fear of and precautions over STDs impose an additional, unnecessary cost on sexual interaction. Like a tax, that imposes a deadweight loss where some sex doesn't happen that otherwise would occur.
Back in the real world, sex is certainly not a commodity, but someone who is particularly interested in sex with non-fully-vetted partners (particularly in casual or near-anonymous settings) would be more strongly affected by the STD deadweight loss.
I also look forward to having the serious ones cured. Chlamydia and gonorrhoea are easy to test for and not too bad if caught early. In Sweden we can just log in to a government health care web site, click a button and get a free test kit sent home. Having herpes out of the way would be great. HIV/AIDS doesn't seem to be that big of a thing anymore, at least not in my awareness. Not sure what is then left to be afraid of, except unwanted pregnancies and hurt feelings.
(1) A progressive moral counterpart to the conservative moral prudishness behind the mid-20th century sexual revolution. It's strange. In some ways, sex positive feminism has prevailed. And yet, sex in general seems more loaded and viewed with suspicion than it was back in the 1990's when I entered my late teens and early 20's.
(2) Internet-driven pornography addiction, social anxiety, and an all-around trend toward increased isolation and atrophied social skills.
TL;DR - Sex is down because too many young women are patriarchy-triggered by sexual advances, and because too many incel dudes have no game and get their needs met through OnlyFans. I don't think it's because people fear the clap.
mRNA technology is so promising I bought some biotech ETFs early in the year (they're all underwater at the moment, but I'm looking for a 10-20 year payoff, so that's no problem).
source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/?fbclid...
"Even though vaccinations offers protection to individuals against severe hospitalization and death, the CDC reported an increase from 0.01 to 9% and 0 to 15.1% (between January to May 2021) in the rates of hospitalizations and deaths, respectively, amongst the fully vaccinated"
> A substantial decline in immunity from mRNA vaccines 6-months post immunization has also been reported [9]. >Even though vaccinations offers protection to individuals against severe hospitalization and death, the CDC reported an increase from 0.01 to 9% and 0 to 15.1% (between January to May 2021) in the rates of hospitalizations and deaths, respectively, amongst the fully vaccinated [10].
It's referring to an increase in hospitalization/death 6 months after vaccination, compared to when you're first vaccinated. That's very very different from your statement that "countries with higher mRNA COVID vaccine coverage have (slightly) higher covid-mortality than countries with low/lower vaccine coverage".
As I stated in another comment, its hard to draw big conclusions from this data alone. The authors conclude that everyone should get vaccinated despite quickly diminishing returns. Looking a total morbidity in Denmark, I'm just not convinced.
https://denovo.substack.com/p/cytomegalovirus-the-worst-herp...
It says need to know for biosecurity/policymaking, so I'm guessing it's something about weaponization.