Coronavirus

[Leroy]

Remember in May last year when this was the prevailing wisdom?

In normal circumstances, it can take decades to develop and mass-produce a vaccine. In an interview with MSNBC, Dr. Peter Hotez, a co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, said that even a 12-18 month timeline for a vaccine would be "unprecedented."

Scientists warn that attempting to force through the research, development and testing of new vaccines will inevitably create safety concerns, as certain steps may be rushed or even skipped entirely. The last time something similar was tried in the U.S. was in 1976 during Gerald Ford's presidency. A hurried mass immunization program was not only ineffective, but caused severe health complications in several hundred people.

The reality is that the record for developing an entirely new vaccine is four years, and one may not be found for decades – if ever.

The New York Times, in an article under the headline "How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take?", highlighted the dangers of rushing vaccine development, especially at the stage of human trials. "What if a promising vaccine actually makes it easier to catch the virus," the author asks, "or makes the disease worse after someone's infected?"

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Remember in May last year when this was the prevailing wisdom?

In normal circumstances, it can take decades to develop and mass-produce a vaccine. In an interview with MSNBC, Dr. Peter Hotez, a co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, said that even a 12-18 month timeline for a vaccine would be "unprecedented."

Scientists warn that attempting to force through the research, development and testing of new vaccines will inevitably create safety concerns, as certain steps may be rushed or even skipped entirely. The last time something similar was tried in the U.S. was in 1976 during Gerald Ford's presidency. A hurried mass immunization program was not only ineffective, but caused severe health complications in several hundred people.

The reality is that the record for developing an entirely new vaccine is four years, and one may not be found for decades – if ever.

The New York Times, in an article under the headline "How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take?", highlighted the dangers of rushing vaccine development, especially at the stage of human trials. "What if a promising vaccine actually makes it easier to catch the virus," the author asks, "or makes the disease worse after someone's infected?"

Couple things, the last sentence in your quote has been largely disproven already. It's a known issue that can happen and did happen as recently as 2016 (allegedly) with a Dengue vaccine in Philippian children. The issue is antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) where antibodies that are made in response to a vaccine actually make it easier for the virus to thrive in a patients body and therefore patients get sicker (which is obviously bad). With the dengue vax, I think the prevailing thoughts are that there are different serotypes (no idea what that word means) of dengue and if someone that gets the vax gets infected with a different serotype from the one in the vax, ADE occurs (allegedly). Sanofi, the manufacturer of the vax, denies that is happening. But, whatever.

The thing with ADE is, well, if it's happening with covid vaccines, there should be vaxxed people getting sick as [expletive], sicker than those without the vax, and it's been long enough to say that's not happening. It also helps that people are getting infected at such a regular rate to disprove this (consolation prize I guess).
Now, going forward, could the virus mutate in such a way that the antibodies made in response to the vax (or natural infection) cause ADE? I don't know, but I've not heard a single medical professional claim that. The anti-vax lady, Judy something I think, claimed early on ADE would be a problem, but her claim was wrt the original vaccines/virus not some mutation in the distant future.

Also.....yeah, this vaccine development was incredibly quick. It's almost like, dare I say, they had been studying these coronaviruses and knew exactly what to do. Every single vaccine manufacturer that got early approval from AstraZeneca to Pfizer to Moderna all targeted one specific part of the virus, the S protein (spike). Fauci even said back in the summer of 2020 it was a very good idea to do this. The spike was very similar to those on mers and sars but with a very specific mutation allowing it to be more infectious, from my understanding. But, if you want to theorize as to why vaccines were able to be produced so quickly, it's because at least the 3 companies already mentioned all correctly 'guessed' on the first shot at what the best way to target the virus was. I don't know if that's normal, but it was like Day 1: Coronavirus is here. Day 2: Let's target the s protein. Day 3: Make a vaccine to target the s protein. That process, I'm guessing, is the part that usually takes years.

I'd compare it to my experience with Calc 3 in college. Sure, I could have spent a semester trying to understand what a triple integral is and how it can be used to calc volumes and all that [expletive], but it would have been hard, taken a lot of time, and it would have taken brainpower otherwise better spent mastering how to chug a beer from a plastic cup then flip said cup. So, I spent zero time, copied homework, barely passed, and got really good at flip cup. In this analogy, it's almost like Pfizer was given the already completed homework, they then let Biontech show them how to make an mRNA vaccine and then said, eh, thanks for the info but we don't need you anymore Biontech, we got this.

That's really unfair to these companies by the way, even if the tough part was done for them (and we'll never know if that's true or not), there were assuredly many long hours spent by incredibly smart and dedicated people to take the concept to reality and create a vaccine that is incredibly effective. Kudos to them, humanity is in their debt forever.

[GeddyWrox]

Wasn't one of the vaccines already basically developed to target SARS or MERS (can't remember which), but just hadn't been through trials for approval? So they quickly realized, hey, this is a prime candidate for this new coronavirus! And they just tweaked it to account for the new genetic structure of SARS-Covid-2 and got it into trials really quickly due to this. But the trial phases were not short-cut, to my knowledge. We were just fortunate that someone had already done the heavy lifting for a very similar virus.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Oh my [expletive] goodness.

I'm such a [expletive] idiot.

That analogy was trash. On my way home from the office it dawned on me, I had a much better one so I'm going to redo it, bear with me.

Let's say you want to build a new bridge. There are tons of variables but for a decent sized DOT bridge not crossing a major river (like the Mississippi) it'll take let's say 6 months to a year.

But, that's not how long it takes to create a new bridge. If you want to create a new bridge, that's going to take 5+ years because you have to go through all the planning, studies, design, and then construction. Planning and studies alone can take more than a decade and many projects never get past this step. The design process is generally almost as long as the construction time. So, if it's a year to build, it's a year to design roughly. To go from "hey, I want a bridge here" to "here's your bridge" is a long freaking process. For example, we have a road project under construction where we began the planning and studies for it back in 2013. It takes a while.

Obviously, bridge design is different from vaccine development, duh. At the same time, creating anything is going to have similar paths and the point I was trying to make earlier (poorly) is there was no time for the initial step of planning or designing. By March they were already into the 'construction' phase and testing the vaccines in small groups meaning the design part of the process had been completed in, what, 1-2 months? And, in that timeframe they were able to design a vaccine that is 95% effective and by almost any account incredibly safe? That would be the equivalent of giving a contractor $5M to build the aforementioned bridge 'here' and it being built exactly like it would have been designed if the typical design/build process would have been followed. Seems odd. JMO.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Wasn't one of the vaccines already basically developed to target SARS or MERS (can't remember which), but just hadn't been through trials for approval? So they quickly realized, hey, this is a prime candidate for this new coronavirus! And they just tweaked it to account for the new genetic structure of SARS-Covid-2 and got it into trials really quickly due to this. But the trial phases were not short-cut, to my knowledge. We were just fortunate that someone had already done the heavy lifting for a very similar virus.

That would certainly make sense. I recall some manufacturers had been working on a sars vaccine but didn't realize they just took that to the trials.

[GeddyWrox]

Yeah, I remember in the early months, it was big news when scientists had decoded the genetic sequence of the new virus. That was the key to them being able to tweak the mRNA vaccine to go after S-C-2.

[GeddyWrox]

How did we develop a COVID-19 vaccine so quickly?

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articl ... e-research

SARS-CoV-2 is a member of the coronavirus family. According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious DiseasesTrusted Source, there are hundreds of coronaviruses — including four that can cause the common cold, as well as the coronaviruses that sparked the SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, epidemic in 2002 and the emergence of MERS, or Middle East respiratory syndrome, in 2012.

Dr. Eric J. Yager, an associate professor of microbiology at Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Albany, NY, told MNT that scientists have been studying coronaviruses for over 50 years. This meant scientists had existing data on the structure, genome, and life cycle of this type of virus.

Dr. Yager explained, “Research on these viruses established the importance of the viral spike (S) protein in viral attachment, fusion, and entry, and identified the S proteins as a target for the development of antibody therapies and vaccines.” He continued:

“Early efforts by scientists at Oxford University to create an adenovirus-based vaccine against MERS provided the necessary experimental experience and groundwork to develop an adenovirus vaccine for COVID-19.”

Dr. Yager said that thanks to advances in genomic sequencing, researchers successfully uncovered the viral sequence of SARS-CoV-2 in January 2020 — roughly 10 days after the first reported pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China. The ability to fast-track research and clinical trials was a direct result of this worldwide cooperation.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Thanks for posting.

[Leroy]

Probably so Gates and Fauci and China could profit quickly.

[GeddyWrox]

Another thing they did that sped up the process is these companies took a pretty big gamble and started production of the actual vaccines while the trials were still on-going. They normally wouldn't have done this. This trimmed many months - if not years - off of the whole process too.