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From the Associated Press today:
Government official: Coronavirus vaccine trial starts Monday
By ZEKE MILLER
an hour agoWASHINGTON (AP) — The first participant in a clinical trial for a vaccine to protect against the new coronavirus will receive an experimental dose on Monday, according to a government official.
The National Institutes of Health is funding the trial, which is taking place at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle. The official who disclosed plans for the first participant spoke on condition of anonymity because the move has not been publicly announced.
Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine.
Testing will begin with 45 young, healthy volunteers with different doses of shots co-developed by NIH and Moderna Inc. There’s no chance participants could get infected from the shots, because they don’t contain the virus itself. The goal is purely to check that the vaccines show no worrisome side effects, setting the stage for larger tests.
Dozens of research groups around the world are racing to create a vaccine as COVID-19 cases continue to grow. Importantly, they’re pursuing different types of vaccines — shots developed from new technologies that not only are faster to produce than traditional inoculations but might prove more potent. Some researchers even aim for temporary vaccines, such as shots that might guard people’s health a month or two at a time while longer-lasting protection is developed. …
There are a whole bunch of different ways to come up with a vaccine, so trying them all makes sense.
Even if initial safety tests go well, “you’re talking about a year to a year and a half” before any vaccine could be ready for widespread use, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
From the KOMO in Seattle on March 5th:
Kaiser Permanente recruits volunteers for 1st coronavirus vaccine trials
by Karina Mazhukhina | KOMO News Thursday, March 5th 2020
AASEATTLE – As Washington state grapples with coronavirus, one Seattle research institute is taking matters into their own hands.
Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute got the OK to begin its vaccine trials, the first of its kind. Its research team is enrolling 45 healthy people, ages 18 to 55, from the Seattle-area over the course of 14 months.
“[The trial] does not include any form of the live virus, and the trial will not expose participants to the virus,” said Rebecca Hughes, senior media consultant with Kaiser Permanente.
The trial is part one of three-phases that will study the safety of the vaccine and how well the immune system responds to it. …
Participants will receive $100 for each of the in-person study visits. People who complete every visit will get $1,100.
So it apparently took about 11 days between the public announcement of recruitment of volunteers and the beginning of the tests. One question would be whether higher compensation could cut, say, a week from that process in the future? Was recruitment immediate or did it take a week or more to find enough volunteers?
This isn’t a time to penny-pinch on paying volunteers.
Why not just give it to any very sick, elderly person who wants it? If you are 87 and very ill why not try it?
I do some work with pharma companies, and lots of folks wonder why it takes so long to get an effective vaccine.
First you have to figure out what specific biological form that active ingredient the vaccine should take.
Second you have to figure out what excipients should be used so the active ingredient remains active through a manufacturing and distribution process.
Third, you have to figure out the range of dosages you have to test.
Fourth, you have to test those range of dosages across a N number the accurately reflects the demography of your patient pool. This first test is not to test effectiveness but to test for side effects as as well as potency. As part of this phase, if there are side effects, you have to make a decision whether those side effects are worth it. Not easy.
Fifth, you need to do a double blind with a sufficient N across the demography reflecting your patient pool to see if the vaccine is in fact preventative.
Time and money. Typically lots of both.
E.g., try various biological forms, try various excipients on each of them simultaneously, try simultaneously various dosages for these many forms,and excipients.
Sure, it's a lot more expensive since only one path will ultimately be chosen, but money should be no object.
There has been a rapid increase in the occurrence of autoimmune diseases that correlates with the rapid increase in volume of immune system hacking vaccines. It would be good to know if we were trading the prevention of what for most people are unlikely (e.g. Tetanus) or nuisance (e.g. childhood Varicella) for lifelong chronic illnesses.
According to NPR, genetically engineered mice are being pressed into service as well. The absolute best part of the article, however, is to learn that a woman named “Cat Lutz” is in charge of the Mouse Repository.
I bet when she’s away . . . oh, never mind.
.
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/14/815624878/mouse-hunt-lab-races-to-grow-mice-for-covid-19-research
Corona viruses have been around forever yet there aren’t any corona virus vaccines.
A zillion dollars awaits the inventor of an effective corona virus vaccine (corona viruses cause the common cold) yet it has never happened.
It would require a quantum leap in medicine to develop a corona vaccine that actually works and is not a stunt.
The motivations behind rolling out what will be a guaranteed ineffective vaccine are dark.
The clinical trials will show the vaccine doesn't work.
They will single source fake data that says it does work.
A few years in to mass inoculating everyone they can get their hands on, the CDC will be forced to admin it ins't effective at all, but you should get it anyway (sound familiar - like Flu vaccine?).
The wreckage caused by a hastily made non-functioning vaccine will be swept under the rug.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-018-00392-7Or else, if you're a cow:
https://www.nbc15.com/content/news/Rock-Co-dairy-farmers-use-vaccine-to-prevent-bovine-coronavirus--568783911.htmlAlso, note that one of the reasons it's so hard to find a vaccine is because the coronavirus is so mutable. But that in turn makes it more likely that the virus will mutate into some less deadly form (as may have happened with the Spanish flu). Viruses that become deadly and virulent enough to make headline are stepping out on a limb, evolution-wise, because that attention makes medical personnel and even common folk more vigilant to its progression, and makes it more likely for the infected to be quarantined before they can infect others.For example, SARS hasn't infected anyone in over a decade. That's one of the main reasons it has been difficult to marshall the resources and funding required to create a vaccine.
I say this is one time we should allow immigrants to do the jobs that Americans just won’t do.
Or, why not see if there’s anybody in prison that wants a few years reduced from a sentence?
This is a rapidly mutating RNA virus. Evidence of benign behavior emerging…
Are there now very mild strains out there? Is it the humidity issue? Is it simply good hygiene? Is it the Purell?
—-CPAC conference supposed super spreader … didn’t infect anyone!?
—-Argentine & Brazilian Mar-a-Lago visitors failed to spread the virus also?
—-Diamond Princess spouses went uninfected after long term sharing of small cabins
—-Grand Princess cruise shaping up as non-disaster: 1 death out of 2700 passengers
I’ve read that CPAC had Purell stations everywhere. I’ve read that Trump World are Purell maniacs.
All in all I don’t see how the St Patty partiers can be blamed. They’re not the target demo. And this thing doesn’t exactly spread like measles outside of dysfunctional countries and nursing homes etc. Or maybe it spreads like crazy but it’s so mild the infected don’t even realize they have it.
A zillion dollars awaits the inventor of an effective corona virus vaccine (corona viruses cause the common cold) yet it has never happened.
It would require a quantum leap in medicine to develop a corona vaccine that actually works and is not a stunt.
The motivations behind rolling out what will be a guaranteed ineffective vaccine are dark.
Citation needed.
"Viral upper respiratory infections, otherwise known as the common cold, are the most common diseases among humans. The self-limited, and often self-diagnosed, acute mild catarrhal illness is usually a nasopharyngitis of 5 to 7 days duration. The major virus groups causing colds are the Picornaviridae, Coronaviridae, Paramyxoviridae, Orthomyxoviridae, and Adenoviridae families."
First you have to figure out what specific biological form that active ingredient the vaccine should take.
Second you have to figure out what excipients should be used so the active ingredient remains active through a manufacturing and distribution process.
Third, you have to figure out the range of dosages you have to test.
Fourth, you have to test those range of dosages across a N number the accurately reflects the demography of your patient pool. This first test is not to test effectiveness but to test for side effects as as well as potency. As part of this phase, if there are side effects, you have to make a decision whether those side effects are worth it. Not easy.
Fifth, you need to do a double blind with a sufficient N across the demography reflecting your patient pool to see if the vaccine is in fact preventative.
Time and money. Typically lots of both.
Is there any way some of these steps can be done in parallel, so that many paths are explored at once?
E.g., try various biological forms, try various excipients on each of them simultaneously, try simultaneously various dosages for these many forms,and excipients.
Sure, it’s a lot more expensive since only one path will ultimately be chosen, but money should be no object.
You can do lots of parallel vaccine OPTIONS -- the only thing that that takes is more money and testing resources -- but it's very hard to compress the time line.
You would think -- "Hey, this antibody we just concocted in the lab and tested in a bunch of ex vivo environments really disrupts the virus' lipid layer -- woo hoo, let's make a bunch of it at scale, put it in vials, and have the nurse practitioers inject 300 milliion people -- and pandemic solved.!!"
But that's a recipe for ultimate ineffectiveness...or worse, catastrophe. While nature is parsimonious, it is also very complex and stuff happens in the immune system that we are only beginning to understand.
A lot of folks recall their high school biology and think, "Cowpox provides immunity against smallpox..how hard would it be to find the cowpox for Covid-19?" Well, it's really hard. That's why the flu shot you might get for this season is only partially effective because the world of viruses is evolution at light speed. And because vaccines take time to make and verify, you always seem to be fighting the last war.
Covid-19 is an RNA virus, which means it's relatively simple and mutations for the time being shouldn't invalidate an effective vaccine. But maybe at some point.
Of all the sub species of medicine/biology, immunology is really a huge frontier we have yet to fully exploit. If anyone out there has kids interested in biology or medicine, I would urge them to go into immunology. There's gold in them there hills, and for a lucky few, some Nobel Prizes.
We are just starting -- recent immunological approaches against cancer, like CAR-T, are tremendously exciting, yet still in their infancy. I bet Alzheimers given the recent findings is a viral generated syndrome. The landscape is positively replete with possibilities.
The old and sick may be most at risk for the coronavirus, but I assume they would also be most at risk for the side effects of a vaccine. So, it’s a technical tradeoff question that the researchers would have to weigh based on the estimated mortality of the virus vs. an experimental vaccine.
(Also, while trying to measure the safety and efficacy of a proposed vaccine they would presumably want to test it on subjects representing a reasonable cross-section of age and health conditions.)
Notwithstanding the math, however, there is normally a strong institutional bias toward letting people die from lack of treatment vs. killing them with an imperfect vaccine.
Some of this bias comes from legal liability concerns, and some of it comes from political concerns. And some of it comes from the normal human impulse to assign more moral blame to one who actively causes harm rather than one who passively fails to prevent it.
Hopefully, a mechanism can be put into place to override all these biases and just make the vaccine approval decision according to a cold-blooded cost/benefit assessment.
(((NWO))) trial balloon just went up in Champaign, IL:
Illinois Mayor Grants Herself Power To Ban Gun Sales And Alcohol During Coronavirus Epidemic
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/illinois-mayor-grants-herself-power-ban-gun-sales-and-alcohol-during-coronavirus-epidemic
Unsurprisingly, the mayor is a hideous (((AWFUL))).
Polio Vaccine Found “Safe And Effective” 60 Years Ago: What Would Salk Think Today?
I thought any illegal in the country was implicitly giving consent for whatever experiments we need to run? Why “inform” them each time?
I understand your point, but 45 volunteers at $1,100 per ($100/visit x 11 visits) totals $49,500. There will be additional trials I am sure, and payments could easily reach into seven figures with no guarantee of payback.
As an aside, you’re doing a remarkable job of bringing the latest, most relevant information to the forefront. Kudos, etc.
Don’t get your hopes high. Moderna’s is an mRNA approach. It’s likely to be very safe but very unlikely to work. If making effective vaccines were as easy as injecting a single pathogen surface protein, making vaccines would be trivial. But the reality is that it’s not – single protein approach is rarely effective. mRNA does nothing to solve this fundamental difficulty.
In the short term, a far better bet is Gilead’s antiviral, remdesivir. Several clinical trials of it are already ongoing.
A safe and effective vaccine? Wait a year or two.
More money to the Synagogue - Ivy League - FDA complex, in a country where most big cities ran out of toilet paper and hospital masks.
I had no idea Sailer was this powerful. He’s like shadow emperor, and his emissary Tucker informed Trumpet of the decree.
He calls for zero tolerance war on Corona, and next week, my local library is closed for two weeks. There is WWTP raging all over America. Whole nation is shutting down and going on war footing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/15/world/europe/cornonavirus-vaccine-us-germany.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
It sounds to me that Trump made an offhand hail-fellow-well-met jokey comment to the German guy during a photo op, and this somehow took off as an orange-man-bad industrial espionage fever dream story in the hands of the Trump-hating media and German government.
Review from 1995: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7761711
“Viral upper respiratory infections, otherwise known as the common cold, are the most common diseases among humans. The self-limited, and often self-diagnosed, acute mild catarrhal illness is usually a nasopharyngitis of 5 to 7 days duration. The major virus groups causing colds are the Picornaviridae, Coronaviridae, Paramyxoviridae, Orthomyxoviridae, and Adenoviridae families.”
Who cares if there are “worrisome side effects”? What kind of side effects could there be?
From Vaccines.gov:
How about serious side effects?
Two people maybe die out of a million? That’s the risk rate of driving to the supermarket.
Of course, this is from vaccines that have gone through “testing and validation,” but lets say that without such testing 200 out of a million die. Is my math right? Is that only 1/5 of a percent? Bring it on!
And destroying the national economy by shutting down for a year is not going to be really great for morbitity and mortality.
This seems like another case of overregulation designed for situations not like the present, the same as with the testing hurdles.
Lower the acceptable risk thresholds, pay people a lot to participate in testing, and/or let any volunteer become a guinea pig get the test vaccines in their various dosages. Then release it and tweek it as more becomes known.
Now that it is become clear that the entire world economy has been crashed as a result of Chinese (un)sanitary habits, we should especially not be playing this "no one is to blame - let's not associate this disease with any particular race" game. This is part of the war on noticing.
If you want to be a guinea pig for a POTENTIAL vaccine that hasn't been adequately tested, be my guest.
Make sure you're all set so that if your immunological system generates a cytokine storm, your heirs are ready.
Coronavirus: UK panic buying continues despite government call to stop
https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=awArO_1584274880
After viewing the video BoJo may not have other policy options.
does it seem to you that this fauci character in enjoying his time in the limelight a bit too much.
His dire warnings are going to drag the us into an unprecedented depression with 100 million unemployed. anyone not sitting on a pile of cash in the bank or having a cushy govt job with a guaranteed paycheck every two weeks will be bankrupt in a month
This video is interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=yn074EB5NNY&feature=emb_logo
How come so many of these types of people never retire? We have so many politicians in their 70's too.
Offer a lifetime supply of bottled water and toilet paper.
His dire warnings are going to drag the us into an unprecedented depression with 100 million unemployed. anyone not sitting on a pile of cash in the bank or having a cushy govt job with a guaranteed paycheck every two weeks will be bankrupt in a month
The guy is 79 and still working. He certainly likes his job.
This video is interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=yn074EB5NNY&feature=emb_logo
How come so many of these types of people never retire? We have so many politicians in their 70’s too.
Via Ryan Girdusky’s excellent National Populist Newsletter, another vaccine (and an Israeli vaccine is also mentioned):
We’ve Got The Vaccine, Says Pentagon-Funded Company
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2020/03/breaking-weve-got-vaccine-says-pentagon-funded-company/163739/
DARPA funded it to develop fast vaccine techniques. Twenty days to vaccine, then quickly 10 million doses per month. Except, FDA …
And it’s vegan!
https://ryangirdusky.com/newsletter/
The NYT on this here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/15/world/europe/cornonavirus-vaccine-us-germany.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
It sounds to me that Trump made an offhand hail-fellow-well-met jokey comment to the German guy during a photo op, and this somehow took off as an orange-man-bad industrial espionage fever dream story in the hands of the Trump-hating media and German government.
I’m really worried. It’s obvious that we are very near a stock market crash. This thing is about to go off the cliff very quickly.
Where are you guys putting your money now? What do you think we should do? Any advice from savy investors and market watchers on here?
Gold is in freefall this morning. I'd wait a day or two to see how far it drops, then look for cheaper bullion on eBay.
Flippers?
In the short term, a far better bet is Gilead's antiviral, remdesivir. Several clinical trials of it are already ongoing.
A safe and effective vaccine? Wait a year or two.
You seem to know what you are talking about. Any hints about why this class of broad spectrum antivirals – the equivalent of penicillin for viruses – did not get any funding nor any mention years after being proven to work in lab mice?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRACO
Not to get too conspiratorial, but why would someone deface the wikipedia article, in which the name of the inventor disappeared and also it is claimed that the drugs were working in vitro against few viruses. Anyone who has read the paper knows that DRACO was safe and worked against different types of viruses in vivo, which means the compound was administered to mice and cleared diverse viral infections without hurting the animals. Maybe the difference is trivial to the casual reader, but claiming something works and it is safe in vivo vs only in vitro makes a world of difference in drugs research.
See the red text in the following pic
Compare it to the dodgy wiki article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRACO
https://riderinstitute.org/discovery/
Dietmar Hopp, co-founder of the sofware-company SAP is invested in bio-medical firms and in the Tübingen based CureVac too. He said there was an offer by Trump to take over CureVac, but they’ve turned it down. The former CEO Daniel Menichella, who did talk to Trump about a vaccine in the White House, is gone though.
https://riderinstitute.org/discovery/
Yet years after discovery, the project is dead. Any ideas as to what happened with this seemingly abandoned gold mine?
To address the question of payments to test subjects: they currently are allowed to compensate people for their time and any other expenses accrued but not beyond that. This is because the medical ethics community decided that paying people for more than just their time is immoral. You can’t ”coerce“ people to be test subjects using financial incentives. Now, on the ground, $1100 means more to some people, and the payment is a factor. But there isn’t just a regulation in the way of say tripling that payment – there’s a medical ethics concern. And those are harder to change on the fly. To be clear though, companies absolutely would pay more if they could. Direct payments to participants are a pittance compared to overall trial expenses.
To focus only on the virus is a mistake.
What’s killing people and causing hospitals (mainly in Italy) to overflow isn’t the virus.
It’s this: bilateral interstitial pneumonia.
What we want to avoid is bilateral interstitial pneumonia.
The virus is necessary but not sufficient to cause bilateral interstitial pneumonia.
To get bilateral interstitial pneumonia you need the Covid-19 virus + some X factor.
What is the X factor?
All the informatics, “big data” science, google algorithms and the worlds’ collective computing prowess should be out to solving this problem. All the people (especially the young) who have contracted bilateral interstitial pneumonia should be studied with a fine tooth comb (genetics, diet, physiology, contact history, behavior) to determine the X factor.
Once we know the X factor, public health officials can focus on treatment, mitigation of that, and the rest of us can get on with our lives and get over this common cold.
Doctors want to treat coronavirus with blood from recovered patients
https://nypost.com/2020/03/15/doctors-want-to-treat-coronavirus-with-blood-from-recovered-patients/
Where have I heard this before? Greg Cochran? It sounds like a good idea, as long as the blood is from gay men, since I would have to do a chick-fil-a-esque boycott of the treatment otherwise.
https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1239311267501944834
Where are you guys putting your money now? What do you think we should do? Any advice from savy investors and market watchers on here?
Market crashed already, this is beyond market crash territory.
https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1239311267501944834
Where are you guys putting your money now? What do you think we should do? Any advice from savy investors and market watchers on here?
Cash.
Gold is in freefall this morning. I’d wait a day or two to see how far it drops, then look for cheaper bullion on eBay.
1) Portability, still a valid medium of exchange short-term.
2) To take advantage of the eventual rebound, once Corona is under control.
3) You're not trapped in the market if things get so bad they suspend access for everyone but the Fed, MMs, central banks, and large institutions, which is exactly what they will do if things get bad enough.
Doesn't cash spread bacteria and viruses? (I got laryngitis once from handling cash from foreigners.)
It seems like this strain eats away brain cells.
Gold is in freefall this morning. I'd wait a day or two to see how far it drops, then look for cheaper bullion on eBay.
The three main reasons to hold cash are:
1) Portability, still a valid medium of exchange short-term.
2) To take advantage of the eventual rebound, once Corona is under control.
3) You’re not trapped in the market if things get so bad they suspend access for everyone but the Fed, MMs, central banks, and large institutions, which is exactly what they will do if things get bad enough.
In the short term, a far better bet is Gilead's antiviral, remdesivir. Several clinical trials of it are already ongoing.
A safe and effective vaccine? Wait a year or two.
To be more specific, none of the vaccines we currently use are RNA-based. FDA went put of its way to make easy for Moderna to get approval for a Zika vaccine. But there is zero chance they will ever work.
More money to the Synagogue – Ivy League – FDA complex, in a country where most big cities ran out of toilet paper and hospital masks.
What's killing people and causing hospitals (mainly in Italy) to overflow isn't the virus.
It's this: bilateral interstitial pneumonia.
What we want to avoid is bilateral interstitial pneumonia.
The virus is necessary but not sufficient to cause bilateral interstitial pneumonia.
To get bilateral interstitial pneumonia you need the Covid-19 virus + some X factor.
What is the X factor?
All the informatics, "big data" science, google algorithms and the worlds' collective computing prowess should be out to solving this problem. All the people (especially the young) who have contracted bilateral interstitial pneumonia should be studied with a fine tooth comb (genetics, diet, physiology, contact history, behavior) to determine the X factor.
Once we know the X factor, public health officials can focus on treatment, mitigation of that, and the rest of us can get on with our lives and get over this common cold.
Google algorithms have never solved anything. They spied on me for two decades, and still their “personalized” search is worse than useless. Why would they suddenly work?
I don’t know. Never heard about it. I’ll have to read about it and try to understand what’s stopping it. On the surface of it, does sound too good to be true. And Tom Rider’s personality might be a factor: “How German-Speaking Scientists and Engineers Invented The Modern World And What We Can Learn From Them”
A zillion dollars awaits the inventor of an effective corona virus vaccine (corona viruses cause the common cold) yet it has never happened.
It would require a quantum leap in medicine to develop a corona vaccine that actually works and is not a stunt.
The motivations behind rolling out what will be a guaranteed ineffective vaccine are dark.
So, do we watch the same movie again?
The clinical trials will show the vaccine doesn’t work.
They will single source fake data that says it does work.
A few years in to mass inoculating everyone they can get their hands on, the CDC will be forced to admin it ins’t effective at all, but you should get it anyway (sound familiar – like Flu vaccine?).
The wreckage caused by a hastily made non-functioning vaccine will be swept under the rug.
E.g., try various biological forms, try various excipients on each of them simultaneously, try simultaneously various dosages for these many forms,and excipients.
Sure, it's a lot more expensive since only one path will ultimately be chosen, but money should be no object.
You can do lots of parallel vaccine OPTIONS — the only thing that that takes is more money and testing resources — but it’s very hard to compress the time line.
You would think — “Hey, this antibody we just concocted in the lab and tested in a bunch of ex vivo environments really disrupts the virus’ lipid layer — woo hoo, let’s make a bunch of it at scale, put it in vials, and have the nurse practitioers inject 300 milliion people — and pandemic solved.!!”
But that’s a recipe for ultimate ineffectiveness…or worse, catastrophe. While nature is parsimonious, it is also very complex and stuff happens in the immune system that we are only beginning to understand.
A lot of folks recall their high school biology and think, “Cowpox provides immunity against smallpox..how hard would it be to find the cowpox for Covid-19?” Well, it’s really hard. That’s why the flu shot you might get for this season is only partially effective because the world of viruses is evolution at light speed. And because vaccines take time to make and verify, you always seem to be fighting the last war.
Covid-19 is an RNA virus, which means it’s relatively simple and mutations for the time being shouldn’t invalidate an effective vaccine. But maybe at some point.
Of all the sub species of medicine/biology, immunology is really a huge frontier we have yet to fully exploit. If anyone out there has kids interested in biology or medicine, I would urge them to go into immunology. There’s gold in them there hills, and for a lucky few, some Nobel Prizes.
We are just starting — recent immunological approaches against cancer, like CAR-T, are tremendously exciting, yet still in their infancy. I bet Alzheimers given the recent findings is a viral generated syndrome. The landscape is positively replete with possibilities.
When they were trying to create a vaccine for SARS (they never did – the funding disappeared when the disease died off) they found that some of the test vaccines had a paradoxical effect in the animal trials – instead of making the disease more mild, it made it worse. This may be because the real danger from Chinese bat soup flu (we should call it that from now on because China and the WHO are busy retconning history) in some individuals comes not from the disease itself but as collateral damage from your immune response.
Now that it is become clear that the entire world economy has been crashed as a result of Chinese (un)sanitary habits, we should especially not be playing this “no one is to blame – let’s not associate this disease with any particular race” game. This is part of the war on noticing.
I am always very skeptical of “I invented a device that boosts your gas mileage to 99 MPG but Big Oil suppressed it” type claims. If there was really an “antibiotic for viruses” that worked, someone would have brought it to market. If not in the US, then somewhere else.
Remember, we’re talking about side effects from Vaccines that have been VALIDATED.
If you want to be a guinea pig for a POTENTIAL vaccine that hasn’t been adequately tested, be my guest.
Make sure you’re all set so that if your immunological system generates a cytokine storm, your heirs are ready.
What's killing people and causing hospitals (mainly in Italy) to overflow isn't the virus.
It's this: bilateral interstitial pneumonia.
What we want to avoid is bilateral interstitial pneumonia.
The virus is necessary but not sufficient to cause bilateral interstitial pneumonia.
To get bilateral interstitial pneumonia you need the Covid-19 virus + some X factor.
What is the X factor?
All the informatics, "big data" science, google algorithms and the worlds' collective computing prowess should be out to solving this problem. All the people (especially the young) who have contracted bilateral interstitial pneumonia should be studied with a fine tooth comb (genetics, diet, physiology, contact history, behavior) to determine the X factor.
Once we know the X factor, public health officials can focus on treatment, mitigation of that, and the rest of us can get on with our lives and get over this common cold.
The main X factor is being old, so as soon as we find the fountain of youth, we will be all set.
What's killing people and causing hospitals (mainly in Italy) to overflow isn't the virus.
It's this: bilateral interstitial pneumonia.
What we want to avoid is bilateral interstitial pneumonia.
The virus is necessary but not sufficient to cause bilateral interstitial pneumonia.
To get bilateral interstitial pneumonia you need the Covid-19 virus + some X factor.
What is the X factor?
All the informatics, "big data" science, google algorithms and the worlds' collective computing prowess should be out to solving this problem. All the people (especially the young) who have contracted bilateral interstitial pneumonia should be studied with a fine tooth comb (genetics, diet, physiology, contact history, behavior) to determine the X factor.
Once we know the X factor, public health officials can focus on treatment, mitigation of that, and the rest of us can get on with our lives and get over this common cold.
I can tell you what the major X factors are right now: COPD — bronchitis and emphysema — along with asthma, Type 1 diabetes, MS, Lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis. If you’re taking the very effective medicines for small cell lung cancer, you are also at a much higher risk.
If anyone out there is taking Humira/Enbrel or its equivalent, I cannot stress how important it is that you erect a barricade around your life for the next few months.
There’s a lot of talk that if you’re young, you’ll be fine if your get it. But not if you are a Type 1 diabetic or a severe asthmatic. You are in trouble.
A zillion dollars awaits the inventor of an effective corona virus vaccine (corona viruses cause the common cold) yet it has never happened.
It would require a quantum leap in medicine to develop a corona vaccine that actually works and is not a stunt.
The motivations behind rolling out what will be a guaranteed ineffective vaccine are dark.
“Corona viruses have been around forever yet there aren’t any corona virus vaccines.”
That’s not true. If you’re a camel/alpaca, there’s at least this (though it’s not a silver bullet by any stretch):
https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-018-00392-7
Or else, if you’re a cow:
https://www.nbc15.com/content/news/Rock-Co-dairy-farmers-use-vaccine-to-prevent-bovine-coronavirus–568783911.html
Also, note that one of the reasons it’s so hard to find a vaccine is because the coronavirus is so mutable. But that in turn makes it more likely that the virus will mutate into some less deadly form (as may have happened with the Spanish flu). Viruses that become deadly and virulent enough to make headline are stepping out on a limb, evolution-wise, because that attention makes medical personnel and even common folk more vigilant to its progression, and makes it more likely for the infected to be quarantined before they can infect others.
For example, SARS hasn’t infected anyone in over a decade. That’s one of the main reasons it has been difficult to marshall the resources and funding required to create a vaccine.
It’s a college town. Enough said.
Gold is in freefall this morning. I'd wait a day or two to see how far it drops, then look for cheaper bullion on eBay.
Huh? Shouldn’t gold go up in an emergency? Arbitrary numbers on worthless paper is of more value now?
Doesn’t cash spread bacteria and viruses? (I got laryngitis once from handling cash from foreigners.)
It seems like this strain eats away brain cells.
On the bright side, if you have physical cash, it should be worth more now than it was a month ago.
Doesn't cash spread bacteria and viruses? (I got laryngitis once from handling cash from foreigners.)
It seems like this strain eats away brain cells.
Normally, yes.
The actual price action in gold and silver over the past five days indicates otherwise.
I believe PM prices are being suppressed by the Fed, central banks, and market makers to prop up the USD.
Near term I would use this artificial drop in PM prices to keep stacking!!
Nothing really makes sense at present.
Airline shares are tremendously overbought right now because they are talking to the US Govt about a $50 billion bailout. There is literally no reason to buy and hold these for the next 2-3 months, yet share prices are marching upwards as I type this.
Yes. This situation may be used to push for a cashless society.
Then again, viruses love to live on plastic surfaces for days at a time. Like all those little plastic buttons and touchscreens on the card readers at the supermarket checkout.
Doesn't cash spread bacteria and viruses? (I got laryngitis once from handling cash from foreigners.)
It seems like this strain eats away brain cells.
“Shouldn’t gold go up in an emergency?”
that gold went down too, like 150 dollars per ounce, shows that we’re in sheer panic mode. no brain cells are being operated here. this is pure fight or flight stuff.
boomers, largely, are just selling everything and going to US dollars, i assume. or whatever the older people around the world with investments are doing for their native currency. but maybe they don’t even want to hold euros, pounds, yen. i’m not sure.
we have now crashed the world economy for something much less dangerous than TB, polio, small pox, HIV, or severe influenza strains.
Doesn't cash spread bacteria and viruses? (I got laryngitis once from handling cash from foreigners.)
It seems like this strain eats away brain cells.
Gold going down sounds like deflation.
On the bright side, if you have physical cash, it should be worth more now than it was a month ago.
http://www.atsnotes.com/catalog/banknotes-pictures/antarctica/antartica-07.JPG
You can do lots of parallel vaccine OPTIONS -- the only thing that that takes is more money and testing resources -- but it's very hard to compress the time line.
You would think -- "Hey, this antibody we just concocted in the lab and tested in a bunch of ex vivo environments really disrupts the virus' lipid layer -- woo hoo, let's make a bunch of it at scale, put it in vials, and have the nurse practitioers inject 300 milliion people -- and pandemic solved.!!"
But that's a recipe for ultimate ineffectiveness...or worse, catastrophe. While nature is parsimonious, it is also very complex and stuff happens in the immune system that we are only beginning to understand.
A lot of folks recall their high school biology and think, "Cowpox provides immunity against smallpox..how hard would it be to find the cowpox for Covid-19?" Well, it's really hard. That's why the flu shot you might get for this season is only partially effective because the world of viruses is evolution at light speed. And because vaccines take time to make and verify, you always seem to be fighting the last war.
Covid-19 is an RNA virus, which means it's relatively simple and mutations for the time being shouldn't invalidate an effective vaccine. But maybe at some point.
Of all the sub species of medicine/biology, immunology is really a huge frontier we have yet to fully exploit. If anyone out there has kids interested in biology or medicine, I would urge them to go into immunology. There's gold in them there hills, and for a lucky few, some Nobel Prizes.
We are just starting -- recent immunological approaches against cancer, like CAR-T, are tremendously exciting, yet still in their infancy. I bet Alzheimers given the recent findings is a viral generated syndrome. The landscape is positively replete with possibilities.
I appreciate that one can’t just go through all steps at once in parallel (rather than serially) and expect a good outcome. It probably wouldn’t be feasible, just in terms of resources, in any case.
My suggestion was that some of these steps might be done in parallel, rather than serially. Any such parallelization would speed up the timeline considerably, though at considerable cost.
Parallelization of some steps might have little impact on safety or ultimate efficacy.
Perhaps this method has already been incorporated to the extent possible, but I don’t know why we should believe that’s so: economics has always been an overriding concern in the past.
Moreover, efficacy relies on statistical inferences, and statistical inferences also take time to determine.
Meanwhile, if the drug/vaccine has a bad safety profile, and you do safety and efficacy simultaneously, you've screwed up a larger N. It's another reason why companies try drugs out on monkeys first -- yes, ladies and gentlemen, we do inject our primate cousins, and some with really high dose levels, though drug companies are moving away from that.
Yes, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!! Or at least some of it.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780124171442/the-nonhuman-primate-in-nonclinical-drug-development-and-safety-assessment
(Sorry, that wasn't aimed at you. Back to our originally scheduled comment).
I think the implication you are getting at is right -- money should not be an object, so failures that were fast tracked, even though more expensive, would be acceptable, especially in this crisis situation. And maybe we'll hit the jackpot faster.
Someday, maybe not in my lifetime or yours, some enterprising person/organization is going to figure out an ex-vivo model that could do the entire process without getting people involved. Computers along with CRISPR are churning out a ton of antibody possibilities. But the stuff has gotta go into humans, and humans are notoriously tricky.
First you have to figure out what specific biological form that active ingredient the vaccine should take.
Second you have to figure out what excipients should be used so the active ingredient remains active through a manufacturing and distribution process.
Third, you have to figure out the range of dosages you have to test.
Fourth, you have to test those range of dosages across a N number the accurately reflects the demography of your patient pool. This first test is not to test effectiveness but to test for side effects as as well as potency. As part of this phase, if there are side effects, you have to make a decision whether those side effects are worth it. Not easy.
Fifth, you need to do a double blind with a sufficient N across the demography reflecting your patient pool to see if the vaccine is in fact preventative.
Time and money. Typically lots of both.
Double blind placebo tests are never done for vaccines. Instead of using an inert placebo they test against just the adjuvants or against a currently used vaccine. We don’t actually know what the casualty rate is for any given vaccine due to side effects.
There has been a rapid increase in the occurrence of autoimmune diseases that correlates with the rapid increase in volume of immune system hacking vaccines. It would be good to know if we were trading the prevention of what for most people are unlikely (e.g. Tetanus) or nuisance (e.g. childhood Varicella) for lifelong chronic illnesses.
If only sailer were that powerful. We should be so lucky.
More money to the Synagogue - Ivy League - FDA complex, in a country where most big cities ran out of toilet paper and hospital masks.
I wouldn’t want to say “zero chance” but the likelihood is very low indeed. The NIH probably just clutched that straw because it felt that they had to clutch something and at the time that was the only thing available.
Theoretically you could do excipients, safety testing, and efficacy testing more or less fast tracked/simultaneous, but if one leg doesn’t work out, you would have to go back to the very beginning and start over. And doing safety testing and efficacy testing together is tough, because you need a much larger N to do efficacy than safety.
Moreover, efficacy relies on statistical inferences, and statistical inferences also take time to determine.
Meanwhile, if the drug/vaccine has a bad safety profile, and you do safety and efficacy simultaneously, you’ve screwed up a larger N. It’s another reason why companies try drugs out on monkeys first — yes, ladies and gentlemen, we do inject our primate cousins, and some with really high dose levels, though drug companies are moving away from that.
Yes, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!! Or at least some of it.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780124171442/the-nonhuman-primate-in-nonclinical-drug-development-and-safety-assessment
(Sorry, that wasn’t aimed at you. Back to our originally scheduled comment).
I think the implication you are getting at is right — money should not be an object, so failures that were fast tracked, even though more expensive, would be acceptable, especially in this crisis situation. And maybe we’ll hit the jackpot faster.
Someday, maybe not in my lifetime or yours, some enterprising person/organization is going to figure out an ex-vivo model that could do the entire process without getting people involved. Computers along with CRISPR are churning out a ton of antibody possibilities. But the stuff has gotta go into humans, and humans are notoriously tricky.
On the bright side, if you have physical cash, it should be worth more now than it was a month ago.
What if it’s in Antarctic banknotes?
A zillion dollars awaits the inventor of an effective corona virus vaccine (corona viruses cause the common cold) yet it has never happened.
It would require a quantum leap in medicine to develop a corona vaccine that actually works and is not a stunt.
The motivations behind rolling out what will be a guaranteed ineffective vaccine are dark.
Coronaviruses cause something like 25% of common colds. IIRC there are something like 200 known viruses that do so.
I bet when she's away . . . oh, never mind..
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/14/815624878/mouse-hunt-lab-races-to-grow-mice-for-covid-19-research
Reminds me of that story from a little while back featuring a proud Lesbian named “Cat Packer”.
It’s just “…from KOMO in Seattle…” Steve, not “from the KOMO in Seattle” – the same way it is “I’m at WKRP in Cincinnati” (not “I’m at the WKRP in Cincinnati.”).
Please don’t start writing like yet another of these Chinese coolies who randomly omit and insert articles both definite and indefinite.