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Medicine EU

Tesla to Make Molecule Printers for Gates-Backed Vaccine Developer (reuters.com) 84

Tesla is building mobile molecule printers to produce a potential COVID-19 vaccine being developed in Germany by CureVac, reports Reuters: CureVac, an unlisted German company, has said it is developing portable, automated mRNA production units that it calls printers and which Musk described as "RNA microfactories". They are being designed to be shipped to remote locations, where they can churn out its vaccine candidate and other mRNA-based therapies depending on the recipe fed into the machine. But for the immediate pandemic use — should its vaccine candidate win market approval — it has production sites with regulatory approval in Germany with a capacity to produce hundreds of millions of doses. The company, based in Tuebingen and backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is a pioneer of the so-called messenger RNA approach, which is also pursued by BioNTech and its partner Pfizer as well as Moderna....

The "microfactories" would be built at Tesla Grohmann Automation in Germany, Musk said in a Twitter thread late on Wednesday night.

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Tesla to Make Molecule Printers for Gates-Backed Vaccine Developer

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  • by NoNonAlphaCharsHere ( 2201864 ) on Monday July 06, 2020 @12:23AM (#60266068)
    First they come up with this "Coronavirus" hoax, so that Bill Gates can act like some kind of humanitarian, giving everybody injections of a supposed "cure", but, come to find out, it's really so Elon Musk can inject you with his nano-bots that self-assemble into mind control chips powered by 5G networks built by the Masons and the Illuminati! You just *CAN'T* make this stuff up.
    • The article says it's backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, actually.
      • by NoNonAlphaCharsHere ( 2201864 ) on Monday July 06, 2020 @12:51AM (#60266120)
        Don't you understand that Melinda Gates is one of the Lizard People? She's a member of a branch of the Rothschild family. She KILLED the real Bill Gates in 1998 and replaced him with a clone! This Coronavirus hoax is just the latest in her clan's plan for world domination! WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!! I have evidence! I've go
        (*^
        &)$%#
        *(*&)&
        NO CARRIER
      • by majorme ( 515104 )
        And backdoored by Musk as the theory you mentioned suggests. Is Elon going to open source the bio code?
      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Well, a lot of the projects funded by that foundation indirectly supported Microsoft, at least around a decade ago. I haven't exactly trusted it after that was revealed. OTOH, if you can figure out how nanobots to track people can support Microsoft, your paranoia is deeper than mine.

        • by cusco ( 717999 )

          Nothing necessarily nefarious, it indirectly supported Microsoft because that was the industry sector that Gates and most of the Foundation knew. They knew that Windows/Office/Sharepoint would do the job and didn't want to waste time, funds and energy reinventing the wheel. Now that the OS and OSS sectors are more developed they'll do things like buy schools Android tablets and finance open source ventilator plans (plus they have a frack of a lot more money now).

    • Sigh...
      The worst part about your post is I am unsure if you believe what you have posted or is just a sarcastic parody.

      As someone who likes to gravitate towards this sort of humor, I have found I needed to tone it down in the past decade. Because there are too many people who don't understand it, and will believe what ever crap they see.

       

      • You can always add a "/s" to indicate you really do intend sarcasm. Works like a charm.

      • by cusco ( 717999 )

        I'm a little surprised to find that the traditional Gates-Hate is being replaced by Musk-Hate. Generally irrational in both cases, and utterly impossible to change the minds of the True Believers with any amount of facts or data.

  • print small one-man submarines to help save kids from pedos.

    • Remember when Elon said he was gonna manufacture ventilators? [cnn.com]
      • They didn't go to the hospitals because all 1 million robotaxis on the road [electrek.co] are equipped with five - one for each passenger. Admit that they're doing much more good there, close to the COVID-20 victims.

      • by Rei ( 128717 )

        Newsom walked back his claims [politico.com] in your article. And they were stupid claims, as hospitals were thanking Tesla left and right for their donations [twitter.com]. But of course, this is how hit pieces work - get the hit out, and nobody notices the retraction.

        Of course, your piece was about donations, not manufacturing. SpaceX was a supplier for Medtronic [medtronic.com], making parts that they were bottlenecked on. Tesla also started developing their own ventilators from car parts [youtube.com], but as Musk tweeted at the time, he expected there to be

        • Don't worry, they'll likely be needed again in Texas, Florida, Arizona, South Carolina if things keep on the way they are.

          • by Rei ( 128717 )

            Even Texas has a major surplus of ventilators right now. What they're short on is ICU beds. It's very unlikely ventilators will be in short supply ever again during this pandemic, given how much time has passed to allow production to catch up.

      • He did. However the need for ventilators never reached the peak that everyone expected, which is a good thing.

  • "it has production sites with regulatory approval in Germany with a capacity to produce hundreds of millions of doses." I'd like to see how the hundreds of millions of beta testers of the new printed vaccine turn out, before I even give taking a printed vaccine a second thought.
    • I'd like to see how the hundreds of millions of beta testers of the new printed vaccine turn out, before I even give taking a printed vaccine a second thought.

      Old days of Slashdot, most readers would have been first in line because they understand and support new technologies. I would be the first volunteer if it were here.

      Nowadays, how many posters to Slashdot could be distinguished from luddites really?

      • by cusco ( 717999 )

        Most of the tech stuff has gotten too easy, Take a Parrot drone out of the box, install the app on the iToy they can barely configure, peek in the neighbor's window, and people think they're a l33t hacker. Once upon a time even commoners could add a line in the Config.sys and Autoexec.bat to make a new sound card load its drivers and use the correct interrupt, now most people don't even know what drivers and interrupts even are but still consider themselves "techies".

        • Most of the tech stuff has gotten too easy

          You make a good point, people may enjoy technology now but it's a lot easier to enjoy without understanding it, they way you used to have to a little bit at least...

        • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Lol. Up your game.

          Parrot drone too easy for you? Build a 3D printer or CnC and design and build your own.

    • I'd like to see how the hundreds of millions of beta testers of the new printed vaccine turn out, before I even give taking a printed vaccine a second thought.

      Meanwhile, I'm going to beta-test the experimental vaccine, while you add one to the death count.

      Fear that leads to inaction has no survival value.

    • You must be of limited intelligence.

      A vaccine is a vaccine. Does not matter if you cook it in some chemicals or use that approach.

      The result is the same, that is the point.

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Maybe. Some of the mRNA vaccines are actually more like purpose-build viruses themselves. The "what could go wrong" is actually pretty deep. I don't know if this is one of the ones like that, some are "less sophisticated". If it gets offered to me, I'll need to do a bunch of research before deciding.

      • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        RNA vaccines are different. Conventional vaccines use bits of actual virus. RNA vaccines are just blueprints that get your own cells to manufacture the bits.

        They're groundbreaking because you can more or less program them for whatever you want. They're also very new. They work quite well in animals, but this will be the first time (I'm aware of) that they've been used in humans.

  • Can't anyone hack that machine to produce a better virus? Then at least we'd get a real pandemic.
    • by cusco ( 717999 )

      I know that you're making a funny, but what this foolishness has amply demonstrated is that our civilization is **NOT** ready for a bio-weapon attack by anyone even vaguely competent. If this had been a disease with similar virulence and incubation time but a 10% critical-care need rather than less than 1% our medical systems would have collapsed and world trade along with it. It would still be difficult and moderately expensive, but it's trust-fund-kid and grad student level now, no longer the domain of

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      No. It's not an organism printer. It assembles a strand of messenger RNA that is a blueprint to produce a single protein.

      I suppose you could theoretically program it to produce a prion, if you knew the code, but you could also do that in your basement using stuff you bought from Amazon.

  • I didn't realize we had the technology to print molecules now. If I were Musky I I'd be printing diamonds, because those motherfuckers are forever.
    • We already grow diamonds in labs that are indistinguishable from extracted diamonds, except for microscopic laser etchings that make them distinguishable. It's almost like diamonds really aren't that rare, and are just rare-ified by a de facto single source provider of a commodity that spends a massive amount of money to prop up their monopoly through marketing and bullshit.

  • You can't just whip up vaccines locally out of some goo better than a big factory full of goo... So something is missing here? Are we back to experimenting on small populations of helpless and desperate people in remote villages again?

  • Ill take the vaccine if my work makes me, and only after one year of not having issues. My fear is that the powers that be will force a vaccine on people that sterilizes them.
    • by cusco ( 717999 )

      Oh, gods, are you one of the loonies responsible for the rising cases of polio because of "The Gates Foundation is sterilizing our children through vaccines" idiocy? People like that deserve to die horribly.

  • Ahh man. So now you have to choose between Windows based Nanobots vs Tesla's Linux based nanobots. Decades old debate continues unabated...

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