Several Pharmaceutical Companies Are Racing To Develop a Coronavirus Vaccine (morningstar.com) 76
"The race for a vaccine to combat the new coronavirus is moving faster than researchers and drugmakers expected," reported Dow Jones News Services this week, "with Pfizer Inc. joining several other groups saying that they had accelerated the timetable for testing and that a vaccine could be ready for emergency use in the fall."
Pfizer said Tuesday it will begin testing of its experimental vaccine in the U.S. as early as next week. On Monday, Oxford University researchers said their vaccine candidate could be available for emergency use as early as September if it passes muster in studies, while biotech Moderna Inc. said it was preparing to enter its vaccine into the second phase of human testing... If the vaccine shows signs of working safely in the study, Moderna said the third and final phase of testing could start in the fall. The company said it could seek FDA approval to sell the vaccine by year's end, if it succeeds in testing...
Merck & Co., a longtime maker of vaccines, said it is talking to potential partners about three different technologies to manufacture coronavirus vaccines... Johnson & Johnson said earlier this month it shaved months off the usual timelines for developing a vaccine, and expects to start human testing of a coronavirus candidate as soon as September, with possible availability on an emergency-use basis in early 2021.
SFGate also reports that GlaxoSmithKline and the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi "expect their vaccine will be ready for human testing in the second half of 2020."
And the Associated Press notes that America's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) "is tracking at least 86 active different approaches among pharmaceutical companies, academic researchers and scientists around the globe." Dr. Peter Marks, director of the agency's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, adds "We expect about two dozen more to enter clinical trials by this summer and early fall."
Merck & Co., a longtime maker of vaccines, said it is talking to potential partners about three different technologies to manufacture coronavirus vaccines... Johnson & Johnson said earlier this month it shaved months off the usual timelines for developing a vaccine, and expects to start human testing of a coronavirus candidate as soon as September, with possible availability on an emergency-use basis in early 2021.
SFGate also reports that GlaxoSmithKline and the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi "expect their vaccine will be ready for human testing in the second half of 2020."
And the Associated Press notes that America's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) "is tracking at least 86 active different approaches among pharmaceutical companies, academic researchers and scientists around the globe." Dr. Peter Marks, director of the agency's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, adds "We expect about two dozen more to enter clinical trials by this summer and early fall."
Open source (Score:4, Interesting)
There's also at least 20 open source vaccine design efforts that have no publicity for example:
https://github.com/feraliscatu... [github.com]
Re: Open source (Score:1)
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I think the idea is to create one that can't be patented by a single company that charges 1000%+ of the fair market value.
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What is the fair market value?
Re:Fair market value (Score:5, Interesting)
So, "non-abusive" means "don't do development, wait for someone else to do so, then wait out the lifetime of the patent, and then we can make the stuff in 14 years"? Which is what the generic-drug makers do.
One thing to keep in mind about drug/vaccine development is that the development costs are about the same for a drug treating a very common ailment as they are for an exceedingly rare ailment. And the coronavirus qualifies (or will, till we get a reliable vaccine distributed) as "very common". Which means they can amortize the costs of development over literally billions of doses....
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The same happened with Penicillin.
Fleming declined to patent it, falsely believing this would speed up its production.
Instead, the pharmaceutical companies declined to produce it since they saw no profit in a generic product.
It wasn't until WW2 that the government compelled production for the war effort.
Fortunately, we aren't making the same mistake with C19. While the left is squabbling over the best way for socialism to deal with the disease, capitalism is producing solutions.
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At least for those that can afford them.
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You presented the solution right in your post. Penicillin was wildly successful once the public good was actually considered. What good would a vaccine be if half the population can't afford it at all and most of the rest will be left unable to help re-start the economy?
I agree we shouldn't make the mistake of waiting for a war to take the necessary action.
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Governments should get together and fund this R&D and then make the drugs available patent free.
The whole global pharma industry only spends about $35bn/year on R&D which is not a lot compared to how much nations spend on things like defence. Well how about some defence against viruses?
Re: Fair market value (Score:2)
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Except they can't because vaccine makers have special immunity. Privatize the gains, socialize the losses.
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A fair market value would be the cost of reagents + production + single-digit markup to recover development expenses over time.
Why is a single-digit markup fair? Is 9% equally as far as 1% even though it's an order of magnitude larger?
Re:Fair market value (Score:4, Informative)
Why is a single-digit markup fair? Is 9% equally as far as 1%?
Neither is "fair". Development and testing costs for drugs are typically about 1000% of production costs, not 10%.
Expecting drugs to sell for their production costs is as absurd as expecting software to sell for the cost of transferring a file.
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Many people develop software for fun, and most of the time there's no risk that the software can injure or kill someone. The cost of a modern software development system is well under $500.
The cost of a vaccine development laboratory is much greater, particularly if good precautions are taken to prevent release of the disease being studied. It's not a popular hobby.
I'd expect a lot more than an "attaboy" if I saved a million lives.
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The only absurdity is pretending medicine/software is impossible without rent-seeking.
Non-rent-seeking software is obviously possible since it exists alongside software that is rent-seeking.
So far there is no non-rent-seeking drug development.
Let's not throw out a system that sorta-works before we have a proven replacement.
One proposal I have heard is to completely separate drug R&D from production. A company would develop a new drug, license it for a flat fee directly to the government (or insurance companies), who would then be free to have it mass-produced.
So pricing would no longer
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Adobe proves you wrong.
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So you're saying that Smith dude was full of it and probably a Communist?
I wish! (Score:2)
> A fair market value would be the cost of reagents + production + single-digit markup to recover development expenses over time.
Yeah that would be nice if doing all the research and development on twenty different medications in order to find one that works well, and is safe, and gets approved, were a tiny single-digit percentage of the materials cost for one of them.
Oh AND there are dozens of companies working on this, only one of which will end up being the recommended vaccine, if any. So you can fig
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What is the fair market value?
A fair market value would be the cost of reagents + production + single-digit markup to recover development expenses over time.
This would be like paying a photographer in "exposure." A better idea is to contract for production of a large enough number of doses to yield a meaningful result in shielding a population and a good profit for the manufacturer at a price that works out to reasonable per dose. Everybody can win.
Furthermore, this isn't some orphan disease we're talking about. So many Covid-19 vaccine
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This would be like paying a photographer in "exposure."
No, it would be like paying a photographer for his time effort, materials and a bit for developing his skill.
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Vaccines aren't terribly profitable for pharma. Pills for rich people is where you make your money. Treating penises and high blood pressure, that kind of thing.
Vaccines are low cost products in the first world, and typically given away at a loss everywhere else.
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Whatever COMPETITION will bear. A company with a monopoly will never charge anywhere near the fair market.
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What is the fair market value?
Whatever these american pesos are worth after economic collapse.
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If the price isn't reasonable, a compulsory licensing order would probably be a best case scenario for someone trying to squeeze pretty much the entire world's governments for money.
Given the amount of doses needed world-wide, I wouldn't even be surprised to see some sort of compulsory licensing to competitors even if there's no price gouging - simply to make use of as much production capacity as fast as possible.
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Almost certainly true, in this case.
In a more general sense, an open sourced vaccine would help show what fair market, with competition would actually be, rather than let a predatory corp charge whatever the bloated US insurance framework will let them reap (and screw anyone without coverage).
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I demand a distributed blockchain-based antibody! How else can trust be maintained?!
Go to the source, skip the middlemen. (Score:3)
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Especially this post [sciencemag.org], now titled "A Close Look at the Frontrunning Coronavirus Vaccines As of May 1 (updated)".
And if you're looking for something to take your mind off COVID-19, try this category [sciencemag.org]... :)
Re: Vaccine Pipe Dream (Score:3)
This is definitely unprecedented speed. But really thatâ(TM)s unsurprising, as itâ(TM)s also an unprecedented effort at unprecedented scale to tackle an unprecedented challenge.
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By 2025 we should have herd immunity unless we've all been locked down and we starved to death.
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Even six months from now, there won't be Covid-19 to worry about, so a CV-19 vaccine is rather pointless. Viruses mutate quickly, and we could no more use the same CV vaccine two years in a row than we could the same flu vaccine two years in a row.
What needs to be built is the infrastructure and process for cranking out CV vaccines. Much like researchers pick one strain of flu each year, and it only takes a few weeks to start cranking out that year's flu vaccine, we need to ability to do the same for CVs.
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It looks like one Covid vaccine might do the trick for quite a few years. https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Are you just extrapolating from AIDs and the flu?
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Viruses mutate quickly
Some viruses mutate quickly. Some don't.
Smallpox never significantly mutated. This was bad because it never adapted to become less lethal. But also good because a stable virus is easier to eradicate.
Influenza and the common cold mutate particularly quickly.
Covid appears to mutate at a slower pace than influenza.
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Smallpox is a dsDNA [wikipedia.org] virus. They tend to be quite stable. Coronaviridae are ssRNA [wikipedia.org] viruses. They tend to have very high mutation rates.
Please, PLEASE don't add to the confusion. It's already bad enough. For the interested, there is the Baltimore classification [wikipedia.org] of viruses. For the even more interested ones, there is a very, very good introductory course on viruses by the Columbia University here [youtube.com]
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Sorry, that should've gone one level higher up to the one you replied to.
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Shockingly, there are a lot of different kinds of viruses, and they mutate at wildly different rates. Coronaviruses mutate much more slowly than does influenza. Even for influenza, a vaccine for a particular antigen typically remains effective for several years. The seasonal flu vaccine is a cocktail of a bunch of vaccines against several strains becuase there are always a bunch circulating. The effectiveness of the vaccine is more about whether the people who plan these things were correct in their estimat
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Decedents tend to be immune, too.
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Wanna bet?
Depressions last a long time if repressive governments cause them to last a long time. This can be seen in the 1930's as the repressive Roosevelt regime extended the U.S. great depression, while economic penalties exacted by governments other than Germany kept Germany in a depression.
There are already signs of a rebellion developing against repressive governors in the U.S.. I doubt that people generally are going to let government continue to worsen their lives.
Religious people have been claiming
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"No human vaccine has ever been developed and widely deployed in less than four years."
What does that even mean? Frankly it comes off as a weaselly statement when you think about it. Vaccines for new seasonal flu strains have been developed and deployed in well under four years. The smallpox vaccine, you could argue took 3000 years to develop, or just one day. And "widely deployed" .. that too can depend on what you mean by widely deployed .. every human has gotten it?
We already have vaccine designs for SAR
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The last comparable global pandemic was in 1918.
A few things have changed since then.
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Just a friendly reminder (Score:2, Insightful)
These timetables are being presented by companies and research groups which spent the last 20 years trying to develop an HIV vaccine. We still don't have it. There's a strong possibility that we won't have a working C19 vaccine _at all_, not just this fall, but for years to come.
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These timetables are being presented by companies and research groups which spent the last 20 years trying to develop an HIV vaccine. We still don't have it. ...
...but also a further friendly, if somewhat cynical, reminder: As large as HIV's potential vaccine-market surely is, there's never been one comparable to COVID's...
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Further reminder that pharmaceutical companies are racing to collect grants to research a vaccine. A goodish portion of this is more properly viewed as pharmaceutical companies racing to the trough while fear is still high.
Apparently risking research with the possibility that it might be unprofitable doesn't fit into this newfangled capitalism.
And so (Score:2)
So answer this. "Not-so-effective" is less of a problem. We aren't so concerned with snake oil possibilities slowing introduction down.
But what about "bad for you"? Are vaccines that cause long-term issues (that are bad enough it is not worth the risk vs. the disease) a problem with vaccine development?
And don't say crap like autism because it's not true. And don't respond to that, goobers.
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But what about "bad for you"? Are vaccines that cause long-term issues (that are bad enough it is not worth the risk vs. the disease) a problem with vaccine development?
Considering that the long-term issues other than death caused by SARS-CoV-2 include a stroke or permanent lung damage - that's asking quite a lot for the vaccine/cure to be worse than the disease.
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Sure. Some of the early polio vaccines would give you polio. Besides the people who got polio from it, that little oopsie set back polio eradication quite a bit. Some people still don't trust vaccination programs because of it.
Many of the COVID-19 vaccines use a new method where the vaccine consists of some messenger RNA that enters your cells and causes them to produce a particular protein from the virus, which your immune system learns to attack. That process seems to work great in animals, but has never
Cake in my head (Score:1)
No shortcut for safety and efficacy (Score:2)
Careful testing to make sure it doesn’t hyper sensitize people to make covid-19 90% fatal in days or create life altering debilitating conditi
Low risk for R&D (Score:1)
Quantum computing (Score:2)