Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Medicine United States Science

Fauci Wants To Make Vaccines for the Next Pandemic Before It Hits (nytimes.com) 267

If funded, a government program costing several billion dollars could develop "prototype" vaccines to protect against 20 families of viruses. From a report: In one sense, the world got lucky with the new coronavirus. By sheer chance, scientists just happened to have spent years studying coronaviruses, developing exactly the tools needed to make Covid vaccines as soon as the virus's genetic sequence was published. But what will happen if the next pandemic comes from a virus that causes Lassa fever, or from the Sudan strain of Ebola, or from a Nipah virus? Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is promoting an ambitious and expensive plan to prepare for such nightmare scenarios. It would cost "a few billion dollars" a year, take five years for the first crop of results and engage a huge cadre of scientists, he said. The idea is to make "prototype" vaccines to protect against viruses from about 20 families that might spark a new pandemic. Using research tools that proved successful for Covid-19, researchers would uncover the molecular structure of each virus, learn where antibodies must strike it, and how to prod the body into making exactly those antibodies.

âoeIf we get the funding, which I believe we will, it likely will start in 2022,â Dr. Fauci said, adding that he has been promoting the idea âoein discussions with the White House and others.â Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, also thought it likely that the necessary funds would be allocated, calling the project "compelling." "As we begin to contemplate a successful end to the Covid-19 pandemic, we must not shift back into complacency," Dr. Collins said. Much of the financial support would come from Dr. Fauci's institute, but a project of this scope would require additional funds that would have to be allocated by Congress. This year's budget for the infectious diseases institute is a little over $6 billion. Dr. Fauci did not specify how much additional money would be needed. If surveillance networks detected a new virus spilling over from animals into people, the logic goes, scientists could stop it by immunizing people in the outbreak by quickly manufacturing the prototype vaccine. And if the virus spread before the world realized what was happening, the prototype vaccines could be deployed more widely.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Fauci Wants To Make Vaccines for the Next Pandemic Before It Hits

Comments Filter:
  • by Baconsmoke ( 6186954 ) on Monday July 26, 2021 @05:59PM (#61623247)
    The first comment to not be mired in conspiracy or sarcasm. Fighting viruses can in a sense be viewed similarly to fighting a war. Far better to be prepared for eventualities rather than relying on blind luck. Plus often when research like this is done we learn a lot more than we thought possible and end up finding numerous benefits from the effort expended. It's outside of my wheel well, but the logic seems reasonable.
    • by Luthair ( 847766 )

      Yea, to me this is the blatantly obvious outcome of the pandemic. The economic costs have been so massive spending a bit of money preventively is a no-brainer.

      For the conspiratorial idiots, governments with covert biological weapons programs have been looking at these since WW2 - we should really get some good guys on this too.

    • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      Finally, a sensible comment. This forum seems to be infested with idiot trolls.

      Fauci's idea is great. One thing I'd like to know is why do some vaccines last a decade or more but the Covid vaccines are rapidly losing effectiveness after only months. The British govt is already talking about booster shots. An Israeli study showed vaccine effectiveness was dropping at roughly 10% per month.

      • The vaccines target a part of the virus that mutates -- the spikes.

        Not sure if other vaccines target more stable proteins or the viruses don't mutate much.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        It's really simple: You have to have a certain level of circulating neutralizing antibodies to neutralize *a* virus strain when exposed; This is 'sterilizing immunity.' The existing vaccines - including especially the pfizer and moderna ones - are based on the ancestral Wuhan strain, the original sequence publicly posted in January 2020. And the antibodies they provoke are *overwhelmingly* potent against that strain - it's likely that we would've seen something like 98-99% protection against it rather than
        • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

          And a booster that includes new variants closes a huge amount of the gap in serum protection.

          How long does it take to update the vaccine for a new variant? Can they target several variants with a booster?

          In Israel they had a good early vaccination drive with the pfizer vaccine but now the effectiveness is reducing fast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] (paper and articles linked by Dr John Campbell there)

          He mentions the study is about the pfizer vaccine, it'd be interesting to know at what speed other vacc

  • Vaccines are tailored for a specific virus. While there are basic techniques that work better or worse of particular types of viruses, the vaccine is always tailored to the virus that is the current problem. This proposal sounds like he is attempting to use the pandemic fear and desperation as a lever to fund an eternal virus laboratory that would be spending its time waiting for a virus to attack. The Pharma companies can do this for us. They are making enough on the pandemic already to fund their rese

    • there was work on a general purpose COVID vaccine after the 1st SARs and Avian Flu hit. But because they mostly hurt poor folk in China nobody cared enough to keep funding the research. Had they done so we probably would have had a vaccine shortly after the outbreak. Fauci is trying to start that research back up (and more importantly trying to get it funded).

      So yeah, this is something you want. At least if you're not a billionaire who's a) gonna have to pay for it and b) got bailed out with trillions i
    • Re:Boondoggle (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sjames ( 1099 ) on Monday July 26, 2021 @06:26PM (#61623339) Homepage Journal

      The mRNA vaccines change the game a little. Previously, a vaccine was necessarily either the actual target virus killed, or a live weakened virus where if was put through many generations in culture to produce a weak bot otherwise similar version.

      The mRNA vaccine requires identifying a particular feature to the virus that is dissimilar to anything in the human body and a good target for antibodies, then synthesizing mRNA to order to produce that particular protein. In that sense, the vaccine is programmable.

      • Not only that, but the equipment that's used to make a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine can be reused to make a Flu vaccine, cancer vaccine, or any other mRNA vaccine that they come up with. Just wash the equipment, load the new mRNA sequence in, and pump out vaccines. I've even heard reports that they're trying to make portable vaccine generation equipment. So a hospital could have an mRNA vaccine generator or you could load it on a truck in a third world country and generate vaccines right in the village that needs

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      I do not think we got lucky. When there is strong and broad basic research there is going to be a storehouse of knowledge to work novel problems. This is the key. Funded agencies like the CDC, NSF, NIH so they can be part of a world community that is developing basic and applied science. The money gets shifted around. At the turn of this century money got shifted to the CDC to research things like anthrax, and my friends got job. In the 1980â(TM)s the spigot was turned off and we lost the lead on solar
    • Re:Boondoggle (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SoftwareArtist ( 1472499 ) on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @12:16AM (#61624055)

      Your understanding is incorrect. Viruses come in families that share most of their basic biology. The details vary, but once you figure out how to make an effective vaccine against one member of a family, it's usually easy to adapt it to other members. That's why we can easily make a new flu vaccine every year. We long ago figured out a recipe for making vaccines against influenza. Now that we have that recipe, we can take whatever new strains are circulating each year and adapt it to them.

      There are about 20 main families of viruses that affect humans. The proposal is to create a vaccine for one member of each family. Once we have an effective vaccine against one member of a family, we'll have a huge head start at developing one for any other member.

      We saw the value of this last year. After COVID emerged, it only took a couple of months before the first vaccine entered human trials. That's because scientists had spent years studying coronaviruses. They were able to take the work they'd done on SARS and adapt it directly. It's not the same virus, but it's the same family. Without those years of work, it would have taken far longer to get a vaccine.

    • The Pharma companies can do this for us.

      Why would Pharma companies proactively develop something without monetary incentive?

  • by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Monday July 26, 2021 @06:06PM (#61623275) Journal

    I can see the argument forming against developing a vaccine that is plausibly necessary because we were studying it in the first place. Sure... Viral threats to humankind can jump species or be borne in a laboratory... doesn't really matter.

    Addressing problems that threaten us as a species shouldn't be compartmentalized as natural or anthropogenic... mankind is of nature, and not separate from it. We are the greatest threat to us and the rest of the planet's life forms.

    Better to develop the vaccines and not need them, than to need them and not have them. Stopping nations from doing this type of research has a statistical likelihood on the order of asking my dog not to kill squirrels.

    • How do you develop vaccines for future super bugs? Well, you first create the super bugs. Then study them.

      But it is not so helpful when the bug gets out of the test tube.

    • Given how much we spend on so many other things, throwing $500 million at future vaccine research seems kind of trivial and probably produces a lot of payoff.

  • by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 ) on Monday July 26, 2021 @06:16PM (#61623303)
    I expect we will indeed see some sort of concerted global effort in this regard going forward. I don't expect it will be led by the US though. Half the country does not even have a good grasp of reality. I think the days of the US leading anything on the world stage are waning.
  • by hey! ( 33014 ) on Monday July 26, 2021 @06:20PM (#61623323) Homepage Journal

    Arguably WHO's most important function is to do global influenza surveillance. Every year it picks the four strains -- one H1N1, one H3N2, and two Type Bs -- each thought to be most likely to go pandemic *next year*. It ships to manufacturers who then culture the virus and make a new vaccine which is ready for large scale manufacture shortly thereafter.

    The idea that it always takes years to develop a new vaccine is mistaken; flu vaccines are annually reformulated, although it's a variation on a theme. This year's H1N1 vaccine is much like last year's and made on the same production lines. It'll have the same trade name, but it's a new vaccine.

    It is quite possible we may find ourselves doing something similar for new COVID variants, although thus far it hasn't been necessary.

    • It is quite possible we may find ourselves doing something similar for new COVID variants, although thus far it hasn't been necessary.

      This assumes that the next pandemic will be a COVID variant. What if it's another virus altogether? The case for the WHO to be involved seems to be strong. So far, international cooperation on COVID-19 has meant compressing what would've taken 10 years of research, development & testing into 1 year, more or less. It's also meant that we've proven experimental vaccine technologies that promise to revolutionise vaccine design & manufacturing. The suggestion is to identify the most likely epidemic/pand

      • by hey! ( 33014 )

        I actually *didn't* assume it would be another COVID variant, although I *did* assume another COVID variant is possible and one important scenario.

        WIV's draft genome for SARS-COV-2 was published on January 11, 2020, and Moderna's draft design was ready two days later. The first samples of the vaccine were shipped on Feburary 24. So basically it takes 42 days to go from genome to a vaccine candidate. Since the EUA for the vaccine was issued on December 18, it took 300 days to go from being able to produce

  • keep monoclonal antibody treatments in the discussion. Instead of artificially training the body to create the antibodies in hope that it (the body) can get ahead of replication in case of infection, add helper antibodies after infection and let the body develop viral resistance naturally (and safe from death or debilitation).

    We *may* have been lucky with these vaccines as they don't seem to cause long-term health complications (at least what we've seen so far), but that's not been the case with all vac
    • As I understand it, monoclonal antibodies are much more expensive to produce than mRNA vaccines. That's the underlying point of this proposal, I think: We've never before had a technology that's cheap enough to use to make All The Vaccines before we need them. Now we do; should we take advantage of it?
      • Yes, monoclonal antibodies are much more expensive for the currently approved products. Not really in the substance you ingest, but by the procedure to administer it - it's an infusion treatment, and it takes hours. One major issue as I understand is health centers' reluctance to offer monoclonal antibody treatments to reserve their facility for cancer patients (chemo).

        There are emerging (phase I/II) major improvements in the therapy in both the delivery efficiency and medical efficacy. One company in
    • "Naturally" is to die or get crippled when we get sick. "Naturally" is to suffer and weaken from disease. "Naturally" is to suffer lots of side effects from both vaccination and infection.

      Screw "naturally". I want the best unnatural protection I can get.

      • I don't agree. Our bodies are attacked by pathogens from moment one. We fight off almost all of them by ourselves. Left unchecked (no vaccination), most of us would fight COVID off by ourselves. Some of us would get long-haul, a small number of us would need professional medical attention, and a small portion of those would die. I want all of these people to heal completely without long-term complications.

        I believe that if we had an effective test-treat available protocol it would work. It works lik
        • Exactly. We are under constant attack. And then we die.

          I want the best unnatural protection I can get. Screw natural, it is killing me.

          You want to die, you do that, but don't advocate that others should die "naturally" just because of your religious conviction. I want life, not "natural".

    • Monoclonals can be thought of like antibiotics (despite operating on different principles), they will help you while critically ill, but do not confer lasting protection like a vaccine will. They're a treatment rather than a cure.
    • Once you've been infected, you're not "safe from death or debilitation." In fact, that's when your danger is the highest. Letting people get infected and then treating them with Monoclonal Antibodies is a horrible idea. First of all, the supply of Monoclonal Antibodies would quickly be exhausted. Not everyone would be able to be treated with them. Also, Monoclonal Antibodies aren't a cure-all. They can help in some circumstances, but they don't guarantee complete recovery. You can still die or wind up with

  • Wasn't it Fauci and the wizards at the CDC that hobbled our early response to Covid 19 by implementing a poorly-designed test that delayed our testing protocols for precious weeks at the start of the Pandemic?

    Yes, it was:

    https://www.technologyreview.c... [technologyreview.com]

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0... [nytimes.com]

    • How dare you not blame Trump?

      Also isn't Fauci the one who was funding the gain of function research in the first place? And then used his position as director of the NIAID to career-suicide anyone who dared suggest the virus came from his Chinese lab in Wuhan? And then sent one of his cronies (Daszak) to China to say "nope, it really wasn't the Wuhan lab"?

      • You mean that thing he keeps lying to Congress about, even when presented with peer-reviewed articles that describes GoF research being performed at Wuhan and lists the NIH grants that funded it?

        I don't know what kind of bureaucratic or linguistic gymnastics he pulled to have his agency describe what is prima fascie gain-of-function research as something else, but that doesn't make it any less a lie. Hell, I tracked down one paper by the North Carolina/Wuhan team that actually included a section on how

  • But what will happen if the next pandemic comes from a virus that causes Lassa fever, or from the Sudan strain of Ebola, or from a Nipah virus?

    It won't, because none of those spread through the air. They all require physical contact, which is easily avoided in a developed country if you are worried about disease spread. Researchers did not focus on coronaviruses "by sheer chance" but rather because they were known to have pandemic potential, due to their easy spread and relatively high mortality.

    Don't get me wrong, mRNA technology is flexible enough that it should make creating vaccines for all sorts of diseases vastly easier than in the past, and

    • It won't, because none of those spread through the air.

      Pathogens mutate. In the case of bubonic plague, it was originally transmitted by contact with infected rats. Later, a variant evolved that was spread through the air. Then all hell broke loose.

  • How would this help when half the population of your country won't take a vaccine specifically because the government is asking them to do it?
  • In the UK, and I believe in most developed countries, epidemiologists have been warning for years that we should be prepared for an epidemic respiratory disease. Reasonable precautions would include stockpiles of personal protective equipment for medical staff, and extra backup supplies of ventilators and the like. This was proposed well before Covid 19 was even heard of.

    When the Covid 19 epidemic emerged in China, and it looked like it was spreading to Europe, UK ministers insisted that our health service

The unfacts, did we have them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude.

Working...