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Comment by abfan1127 | Hacker News Reader

the Covid19 vaccine was pretty impressive... it certainly didn't threaten our species survival, but impressive none the less.

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Yes indeed, I reckon what Humanity is doing right now is winning our biggest ever war yet(1). We shut down huge tracts of human life and attendant economies to save the lives of the oldest and weakest. We're still doing it.

mRNA is bigger than a bomb, and fully peer reviewed.

1. preventing suicide by ecocide is next

> Yes indeed, I reckon what Humanity is doing right now is winning our biggest ever war yet(1).

I study WW2, and just off the top of my head, the Manhattan, B-29 and V-2 projects took longer and cost around $2 billion each in 1945 dollars. The economies involved spent over 50% of GDP on war materiel. So no, corona wasn't even the biggest war project.

> We shut down huge tracts of human life and attendant economies to save the lives of the oldest and weakest. We're still doing it.

I'm not sure it was a good tradeoff, and I would say there wouldn't have been a lockdown if there was enough ICU capacity, which BTW didn't seem to increase in the past year (China built new hospital buildings, but I don't know if they were equipped.)

I would argue that corona was the first smartphone pandemic, which pushed control down from the federal govt. to state govt. and individuals, causing sensationalism and distraction (ie. "do masks work or not?", "omg the number of patients increases every day!", "how is this going to affect my White House run (Newsom)", etc.)

> mRNA is bigger than a bomb, and fully peer reviewed.

WW2 arms were amply demonstrated.

There's very little "new" in the vaccine compared to the standard vaccines developed every year for various flu strains. The development was impressive, but not even comparable to the scale of the Manhattan Project.

I think this is not correct - existing flu vaccines are definitely not MRNA based like the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and AFAIK even the adenovirus based vaccines (Astra-Zeneca, J&J, Sputnik) are pretty modern stuff.

The fact that at least five different groups were able to achieve it in roughly the same amount of time kinda proves my point. Impressive, but nowhere near Manhattan Project.

Some of the Covid-19 vaccines are the traditional type, but he mRNA vaccines are pretty new.

The science behind them is well established. The economics just never made sense until now.

Still, going from "we know how this would work" to "we're actually using this in a wide-scale vaccination effort" seems like a pretty big step forward. These are the first mRNA vaccines licensed for use in humans.

You could say a similar thing about the atomic bomb: the science was well established, but actually building one was still a pretty big undertaking.

Fission was discovered only in December 1938. The science was established almost simultaneously as the bomb was being built.

Fair enough. Special relativity was published in 1905, which suggested that enormous amounts of energy were potentially available from small amounts of matter, so the possibility of making a bomb was probably on the back of people's minds for a long time before someone actually built one. But yeah, as you say, they didn't really figure out the mechanics of how to build a bomb until quite a bit later.

1938 to the Trinity test in 1945 was about seven years.

Going by the wikipedia article on RNA vaccines, people have been experimenting with them since 1989, but there was a major advance in 2010 on getting mRNA into cells without triggering an immune response. Even then, there were a lot of attempts at treating various diseases and viruses that didn't pan out. So, it sounds like mRNA vaccines were kind of a long slow slog of running into problems and fixing them, whereas in the case of the atomic bomb, the idea was around for a long time but no one really knew how to get started until suddenly they did, and they immediately got busy building it.

It's not over. Developing the vaccine was the easy part--getting it in 6 billion+ arms is the hard part that's just barely starting. That's a Manhattan project level of work IMHO.

That's kind of like the Manhattan Project itself, where the scientists at Los Alamos were only the tip of an iceberg, the rest of it being an enormous engineering and logistics exercise to produce the plutonium and enriched uranium needed.

Yeah, for some reason last year, I was under the impression that once the vaccine had been invented and approved, that would be basically the end of it. But now the prediction is that Australia won't be done until the end of the year and all experts are calling that date optimistic marketing bullshit.

Turns out giving billions of people multiple doses is actually a hard problem.

It’s more the convincing them than the giving. Demand is cratering thanks to a year of insanity and propaganda.

In Australia this is not a problem. There is massive demand but there is no supply. All the vaccines are going to the US and EU first.

*US and UK, because they've got export controls.

The very few EU facilities have to supply the entire rest of the world (sans RU, CN). And now the US is talking about doing a third dose per patient before exporting any doses at all.

Vaccine efficacy on mutated strains is a debated topic. Let's wait for another 3-5 years before declaring the new-fangled vaccine as a great human achievement. Also lets solve all the blood-clot issues associated with the adenoviral vaccines.

https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2021031...

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/two-thirds-epidemiol...

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