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Medicine Government United States

US Reaches $1 Billion Deal For Doses of Potential Johnson & Johnson Vaccine (thehill.com) 126

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The Trump administration on Wednesday announced a deal worth approximately $1 billion for the manufacturing of 100 million doses of a potential coronavirus vaccine from Johnson & Johnson that the federal government would then own. The move is the latest in a series of agreements the Trump administration has made with several companies making potential coronavirus vaccines. The goal, through the Operation Warp Speed program, is to make bets on a wide array of vaccine candidates with the hope that at least one and maybe more will end up proving safe and effective through clinical trials. The companies will begin manufacturing the doses even before the results are in to accelerate the process. Johnson & Johnson said its goal is to have 1 billion doses made available throughout 2021, if the vaccine proves to be safe and effective.
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US Reaches $1 Billion Deal For Doses of Potential Johnson & Johnson Vaccine

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  • by fustakrakich ( 1673220 ) on Wednesday August 05, 2020 @07:17PM (#60370929) Journal

    Just stop testing it. That way they won't find any problems

  • Trump (Score:3, Insightful)

    by beep54 ( 1844432 ) <b54oramasterNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday August 05, 2020 @07:19PM (#60370931)
    Before this even happens, we've GOT to figure out what Trump's cut is gonna be. You know he wants a cut.
    • Came here to say this... he seems to want a piece of every pie that passes under his nose.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by quonset ( 4839537 )

        Came here to say this... he seems to want a piece of every pie that passes under his nose.

        Considering how badly he's failed at being a businessman, he needs to grift money wherever he can.

        • When has he tried being a businessman? It's always been grift. All of his businesses have been some type of scam, at best massively overpromising on product and then grossly underdelivering.

    • by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

      Code Orange seems to have chosen Jared as his heir apparent, so maybe "all" he'll demand is that Jared be given a seat on their board so he can take credit for the work.

    • Goes without saying. He's skimming some off the TikTok "deal" too, right?

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      What are you talking about? His cut is called "re-election". He's betting on a dozen different vaccines at once. By paying up front, he de-risks things for the pharma companies, as they go straight into manufacturing, which takes time to ramp up, while they're doing trials. The companies would never do this because it'll cost them boatloads and they don't know if their vaccine works, so by paying them for vaccines that might fail, then if one of them succeeds it hits the market when the results come in.
      • Unrelated (Score:5, Insightful)

        by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Wednesday August 05, 2020 @08:31PM (#60371125)
        That's a huge political win during an election year, as it's still cheaper than $3T of stimulus money the Dems are pushing.

        Those two things aren't related. People are being evicted NOW. People are hungry NOW. People don't have health care right NOW. That's what the Democrats are trying to get 3T in funding for. A vaccine would be nice, if it's even possible, but that does nothing to stop the suffering that is happening right now.
        • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          There are already four recognised mutations, which one does the vaccine work on. That is the problem with the common cold and various, flu, you can only vaccinate for one season and then the new mutation becomes dominant.

          Now when you stop to think about ionising radiation and the impact it has on DNA, you stop to think, they might keep our exposure low but lots of microbes get massive doses near ionising radiation and well, what mutates out of that, mutates out of that.

          They lied all the way through, they li

          • Stop lying. Way more people die from the coronavirus than the flu, despite the lockdowns - the usual confirmed number of flu deaths is a couple of hundreds to a few thousands. And the BCG vaccine does precisely nothing - it used to be compulsory in France until not very long ago yet France is among the worst hit nations.

            • by cb88 ( 1410145 )
              We still have only just now hit the H1N1 numbers... and the highest estimates for H1N1 deaths was 4x the current estimate for COVID (which as we know includes non covid deaths also to some degree).

              Literally nobody freaked out about H1N1.

              If we have a solid treatment in a month or two and vaccines by the end of the year... yeah all of this was a massive overreaction.
          • May I see the evidence you have that a vaccine will only work on one strain? Because it sounds like you have some.

          • That is the problem with the common cold and various, flu, you can only vaccinate for one season and then the new mutation becomes dominant.

            Please learn the difference between mutations, strains, viral families, and (since you mentioned common cold) the overarching word "virus". Some of those words we can effectively vaccinate against, some we can't. So don't ever use examples of each in the same sentence.

        • by cb88 ( 1410145 )
          100T of hand outs would not stop anyone that is currently suffering from suffering.... it would just royally screw the economy.

          There is no reason currently for most people not to work right now. Maybe not at the job they had but at a job of some kind... to provide for themselves. There is no reason for anyone to be suffering. The only reason anyone in the USA is suffering right now is lack of motivation to get off their butts.

          Vaccines and treatments as soon as possible mean everyone can get back to normalcy
          • by DogDude ( 805747 )
            The only reason anyone in the USA is suffering right now is lack of motivation to get off their butts.

            How is "getting off their butts" going to create jobs for all of these people, exactly?
            • by cb88 ( 1410145 )
              How exactly is sitting on their butts going to do *any thing* anything at all... to create jobs or do anything for society at all.... one iota even!

              You do nothing... you get no reward this is a basic law of nature. Violators of it will pay dearly.
        • by Anonymous Coward

          That's a huge political win during an election year, as it's still cheaper than $3T of stimulus money the Dems are pushing. Those two things aren't related. People are being evicted NOW. People are hungry NOW. People don't have health care right NOW. That's what the Democrats are trying to get 3T in funding for. A vaccine would be nice, if it's even possible, but that does nothing to stop the suffering that is happening right now.

          Have you looked at that 3T bill? There are all sorts of non--COVID things in there. It's a liberal democrat wish list that's all inclusive. They are using the Virus as an excuse to spend trillions of dollars on their pork projects. In the mean time, the 1T republican bill which could easily deal with the things you think are important (and does in most cases) sits there, ready to be debated but oh no, we cannot discuss anything short of 3 Trillion...

          Democrats don't want to fix this, they want their who

        • by Agripa ( 139780 )

          Those two things aren't related. People are being evicted NOW. People are hungry NOW. People don't have health care right NOW. That's what the Democrats are trying to get 3T in funding for. A vaccine would be nice, if it's even possible, but that does nothing to stop the suffering that is happening right now.

          Maybe those people should have considered planning ahead before electing our current and previous crops of criminally negligent Democrats and Republicans?

      • Re: Trump (Score:2, Informative)

        by eclectro ( 227083 )

        Actually Bill Gates is doing the exact same thing with his foundation. He's building factories to manufacture millions of vaccines using several candidates. [businessinsider.com] Most of them will never be used. So the concept is very valid - dumping on Trump not so much.

        The response to the coronavirus has been a mixed bag. People do not understand that it's exactly that. The testing has been a sh-tshow from the beginning. However, the other half of the "mixed bag" has not I.e. cranking up valid and working vaccine candidates to

        • Why is it a choice? The world put in 8B at the start of May. Canada put in 850M!

          https://www.google.com/amp/s/w... [google.com]

          • The mistakes with the testing have already been made and were made in middle management in the CDC somewhere. We can argue about masks ad infinitum and not get anywhere. But when it comes to vaccines it's an entirely different story.

            Like a "moonshot" this is a race that can't be lost. The fact that the US decided to go at it alone is a feature and not a bug. The fact is you literally can't have too many vaccine candidates in the world because there is a very distinct chance that non of them will work. One e

            • There is no going it alone. Just because we put money into one bucket doesn't mean we can't scatter that across trials. It foolish to think we alone can do better than a group effort on a group problem. Especially when you consider that all these companies that we would give our monies to are all the same ones that everyone else deals with. Especially when you consider that the US or U.K. results will probably be the ones that everyone uses anyway. Why not let them chip in our efforts too? Because this i

              • You aren't correct. The CDC ramped up a test kit and shipped it out, but made a serious mistake with quality control of reagents that led to a recall. It delayed testing expansion by nearly a month. It's one thing to make a mistake about science because you're guessing, it's entirely another thing to screw up sending a bad batch of reagents in an existing supply chain. And your point about the tests taking too long is moot. That's every test everywhere. It's a by-product of how the virus works, which
                • by orlanz ( 882574 )

                  The US has had covid-19 for 6 months now and its still heavy. We can't still be blaming something that happened 2 months ago let alone 5 months ago! And you are basically backing my point. We went it alone (which is OK) for more reliable tests. That process failed and.... we kept going it alone?!? Thats a bad PM101 type of mistake. Someone's ego got in the way (no, not saying Trump; there are others).

                  As for the tests... all of them take anywhere from 10 _minutes_ to 3 hours! The variation comes in th

    • Trump's medicare / medicaid cuts will cover it.

    • Before this even happens, we've GOT to figure out what Trump's cut is gonna be. You know he wants a cut.

      Yeah. That's why he has been promoting Hydroxychloroquine instead of these vaccines.

    • Re: Trump (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ToasterMonkey ( 467067 ) on Wednesday August 05, 2020 @09:05PM (#60371209) Homepage

      The Trump administration desperately needs a success story out of this whole mess. I think this project is all they have left of any hope for one. It could be a reward in itself for Trump.

      "It's not as bad as the flu" perpetuates, denialism is high, the anti-lockdown protests are cheered, lockdown measures are attacked, the relief measures aren't popular with his own party, etc. This relatively cheap multi-billion dollar side project needs to deliver so they can get to a point of pretending everything else that happened prior wasn't real, ASAP.

      Grab some popcorn if it yields results anywhere near the election because then Trump has to deal with the delivery side of a federal vaccination program. It's going to be a beautiful vaccine, the best, go get your freedom shots today, unless you don't want to, the governors should do the right thing, a lot of people say vaccines cause autism, maybe the doctors should look into it.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Well he has set himself up for failure by only ordering 100 million doses. Last time I checked there 328 million people in the US and 2/3rds of them aren't going to get it.

        Can you imagine how Trump is going to dole these doses out? They will be used as rewards for loyalty and ass kissing. Bend the knee to Trump or your constituents don't get any vaccine. It will end up hurting him more than it helps.

        • I don't recall what type of vaccine the J&J is but the easiest vaccines provide short term safety of about 4 months. Then you need a boost. By then there may be a better vaccine. In the meantime though you can act fairly effectively against the epidemic: you take on the hotspots , the elderly and those with comorbidities first. That way you can hope to restart the economy.

    • Before this even happens, we've GOT to figure out what Trump's cut is gonna be. You know he wants a cut.

      Proof or STFU.

  • good money after bad (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Wednesday August 05, 2020 @07:27PM (#60370955)
    The government sure is throwing a lot of money at something the doesn't exist for a problem that didn't have to exist if the government did the right thing months ago
    • This.

      My $1,200 went fast and I have no goddam idea what we got for 2.2 trillion bucks.

    • I disagree with that, no matter how effective you slow the spread, you can't return to normal without a vaccine.

      Even New Zealand and Australia need it, despite their responses approximating the ideal of eradicating it from their countries. (Yes, due to geographical factors as much as anything they did).

      • Every place that depends on tourism needs to vaccinate no matter how low its case count may be. I live in a tourist town that is one art festival away from total devastation.

    • by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

      The government sure is throwing a lot of money at something the doesn't exist for a problem that didn't have to exist if the government did the right thing months ago

      I think the best-managed countries in the world will still want to get enough vaccinations in their population to hit 70% or whatever the level for herd immunity to covid-19 will be. The problem is out there in the wild, in the world, and every country will want to defend against it.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      The government sure is throwing a lot of money at something the doesn't exist for a problem that didn't have to exist if the government did the right thing months ago

      BS.. This problem was going to exist the second the virus got out of Wuhan. You do understand that the virus was loose in the USA in DECEMBER, long before anybody was ringing alarm bells over it. There was literally NOTHING we could do. There where no specific tests, no known treatments, nothing. There was nothing the government could conceivably do about this, it was what it was and will be what it will be.

      The only thing we can do is play a delaying action, slow down the spread. There was no way to just

  • I have high confidence in modern vaccine tech. They don't use the actual pathogen any more in making the vaccine. Two major types of vaccine today involve either ones with an attenuated mild common cold adenovirus with SARS2 antigens glued on, or an mRNA vaccine which have no virus at all triggers cells to generate a protien antigen to invoke the immune response. This eliminates the problems that scared people about vaccines before, which was having the actual virus injected into them. So these are markedly

    • by nuntius ( 92696 )

      Yes, today's vaccine tech is vastly better than even a decade or two ago. However, it is still experimental, and it is still not wise to vaccinate millions of people with what could end up being a placebo. Safety is not sufficient for good policy. Cost to manufacture, cost to administer, cost in "immunized" people taking risks and getting sick, and the resulting cost in delay and lost trust. Effectiveness is also necessary.

      I am disappointed that leadership seems focused on assigning blame and finding si

      • The J&J vaccine uses an existing virus platform that has been tested already quite a bit long before this pandemic. So we are looking at technology that is already safe and tested safe over and over again. So, its safe right now as we speak.

        The mRNA vaccines are a newer tech but they make up for that in they contain no virus at all and the mRNA has a short half life and is cleared from the body.

        • Vaccine platform rather.

        • Testing is still required. Apparently some vaccines can cause a reaction where the immune system goes out of control. Over my pay grade but experts all seem in agreement phase 3 trials are a must. And yes the experts even feel this can happen with the latest mRNA vaccines. I know crazy to trust experts huh.
      • i will comment on hygene. The goal of the hygene we are doing is to get us up to the point we have a vaccine for this virus. Really. you dont want to overdo hygene. Weak viruses may actually be important to our immune systems being able to develop so they can deal with things that come along. There are a lot of viruses in circulation and many are mild. So the vaccine is really the big solution to this and is what we need. Once we have the vaccine people should stop wearing masks.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    Just lock all those suffering in an elevator in a high rise and vent in Liquid Ass. Only the strong may survive.
  • I'd cancel the order at the last second and told them they shouldn't have thrown their liberal bias weight around in the witch hunt against Youtube during the adpocalypse. Btw I'm a full time Youtuber.
  • Seems like a natural progression for 2020
  • Talcum powder laced with Asbestos, which gave multiple women ovarian cancer, and then they attempted to cover it up. Definitely, totally a respectable, honest, upright company. Let's send them $1B USD.

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