Covid vaccine makers brace for a variant worse than Delta | Hacker News Reader

Covid vaccine makers brace for a variant worse than Delta

nature.com

44 pointssohkamyung22 comments

Although this is possible, we need to balance out their information with third party analysis as well. The incentives are misaligned as the companies are guaranteed to earn public money for creating these and continually convincing nations and municipalities to purchase them, under any excuse possible.

This doesn't need a polarized political climate to understand, although both conservative and progressive parties within nations do purchase these, despite how their people align to particular parties and correlate to usage/avoidance of these things or even make their choice their entire identity.

It also doesn't require the depth of a conspiracy to understand or invalidate.

Health directors, governors and private organizations are incentivized in differing ways. The ways they talk are never the full picture. The company making a treatment cannot be the only source of the need for the treatment, neither should their publicist, neither should a study funded by them.

Well, considering the guy from Pfizer quoted in this article says they don't believe the vaccines they are currently developing will be needed, and that you say we can't trust them when they tell us about the need for the treatment, I can only assume you're about to argue that we do actually need these new vaccines they are testing.

Seriously, did you even read the article? It's basically just reporting on what Pfizer and the others are actually doing, and it's very clear they're just preparing for something they may need to do in the future. It's not advocating for any particular stance on that even, much less taking a position that would encourage buying anything in particular right now.

I don't see what you're objecting to here.

Ha, that is a form of logic.

I read part of it but I mostly find nature.com to be all over the place quality wise and that makes me roll my eyes now.

> the companies are guaranteed to earn public money for creating these and continually convincing nations and municipalities to purchase them, under any excuse possible.

Basically operant conditioning at the organizational level

  > If an escape variant emerges, RNA vaccine makers such as Pfizer and Moderna could probably design and synthesize an initial prototype jab against it in a few days.

how far away are we from a scenario for something like cancer? take a biopsy, few days later formulate antibodies/immunotherapy, have a targeted treatment within a week... it would be revolutionary...

The rest of the supply chain for clinical studies at least would have to catch up unfortunately these systems are woefully inadequate

I read in a pop science magazine that their are multiple trials in that direction. It could indeed be revolutionary.

It’s already done. It just doesn’t have FDA approval…

It wouldn't work in quite the same way. The advantage with mRNA vaccines is basically as soon as you have the sequence of the virus you can quickly introduce any part of it to someone who hasn't been infected yet with no risk of infecting them. This allows their immune system to get a practice run in, offering a substantial immunity to the virus (the mRNA vaccines do not code for antibodies, your body figures out the antibodies from the parts of the virus coded for in the injected mRNA). It doesn't work at all if they are already infected because their immune system is already fighting the real thing.

If someone is already suffering from cancer, their immune system is already fighting against it and just showing more bits of the cancer to the immune system isn't likely to be super useful (usually cancer which is causing symptoms has already managed to evade the immune system somehow). For mRNA to be a useful therapy you'll need to do something cleverer to induce a useful immune response (or to affect the cancer cells).

Could we perhaps engineer something like a virus to attack the cancer cells or perhaps infect the cells with a virus, and use the mRNA to encourage the immune system to attack the cancer cells infected with said virus?

Sorry if all of this seems too sci-fi or utopian. I am not a biologist nor medical professional.

This is one of those places where it's important to keep in mind that "cancer" is just a class of disease and that there are (at least) hundreds of different things in that class.

Immunotherapy is a thing and shows promise in some cancers. Moderna was founded around using mRNA technology in the cancer space. But as with all advances in cancer treatment, it won't look like a Big Bang "cure for cancer", instead some cancers will realize some (potentially huge) benefit.

mRNA vaccines were originally invented for cancer treatment (late 90s). AFAIK, there wasn't much success.

So they can design a new vaccine in a short time, test it in a few months, but has anyone been working on large scale production for new vaccines? Do we still need to be making the old vaccines while also ramping up the new ones if we need them (the old virus will still be around)? We already don't have enough vaccine for the world yet. Seems like even if we do have the capacity to manufacture a new vaccine we may not have the vials, syringes, and people needed to administer it, especially if China and India decide to close their borders and vaccinate their own populations first. There have not been many news reports on the scale of preparations for a possible new variant that completely breaks through the current vaccines. I've only heard of a $100M attempt to reverse engineer the Moderna vaccine in Africa as part of a manufacturing capacity build up. Would it take yet another two years to roll out a new vaccine to the world, with corresponding lock downs and supply chain problems? Even if it only took a year that would still be a significant impact on the world. It's good that drug companies are working on this initial step, however by itself it is not enough.

Having the labs make a new strain of vaccine is relatively trivial. You just change the sequence that is being replicated.

does it mean that we would need to get a shot for every new variant emerged?

No. There are currently 11 variants listed by the CDC, but only one of that is a variant of concern (delta)

If another variant pops up with mutations that increase how fast it spreads, or how much strain it causes on the body, it may be classified as a variant of concern as well. Those are the ones to look out for, and the ones most likely to get special attention from vaccine manufacturers.

when what's the point of making a vaccine for specific variants if you are not going to re-vaccinate already vaccinated people

Exactly. When a new variant comes out, all vaccinated people become unvaccinated all over again.

We need at least 3 shots for each variant.

Except for those unvaccinated and relying on natural immunity. Those people don't need any shots for each variant.

Even those people ought to get vaccinated. Vaccination is the best way to stop the spread of disease. We don't rely on natural immunity to fight measles, and we shouldn't do it for COVID-19.

I find it funny that people are so worried about un-vaccinated killing those who are vaccinated, by spreading a virus that they can still get and spread even with their vaccine.

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