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Comment by native_samples | Hacker News Reader

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>

https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/

https://www.statnews.com/2017/07/27/moderna-alexion-partners...

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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.

It was never going to work.

> 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.

> I sense some frustration behind that comment.

Perhaps if the goalposts didn't continually keep shifting...

The drug is itself what becomes toxic not the delivery methods. Read the last paragraphs again carefully.

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.

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