Moderna Will Start Its First Human Trials of an mRNA Vaccine for HIV (cnet.com) 152
CNET reports:
Using the same mRNA technology that broke the mold with effective COVID-19 vaccines, Moderna has developed two vaccines for HIV. The first phase of testing for both could begin as early as Thursday, according to a post on the National Institutes of Health website for clinical trials. Phase 1 of the vaccine trial will test the vaccines' safety, as well as measure immunity and antibody responses. If the vaccines prove to be safe, they'll need to go through additional testing for researchers to determine how effective they are...
There were 37.7 million people living with HIV globally in 2020, according to United Nations data.
"There's a pressing need for new ways to prevent infection from viruses like HIV and influenza that conventional vaccines have struggled to address and to treat rare genetic diseases and cancers that kill millions each year," writes a reporter at Axios. "Vaccines and therapies based on messenger RNA hold promise as a solution."
There were 37.7 million people living with HIV globally in 2020, according to United Nations data.
"There's a pressing need for new ways to prevent infection from viruses like HIV and influenza that conventional vaccines have struggled to address and to treat rare genetic diseases and cancers that kill millions each year," writes a reporter at Axios. "Vaccines and therapies based on messenger RNA hold promise as a solution."
Finally (Score:3, Funny)
Vaxxed, waxed and ready to fuck [some HIV-infected people]?
Who's signing up for the trial?
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There are already medications that offer protection against HIV and trials of giving them to people who are deemed to be at-risk have been done.
These days most of the infections are due to either sex work or lack of access to education and healthcare. A vaccine would certainly help if it was cheap and widely distributed, but given that there is a lack of will to do more with what we already have I'm not sure that will happen.
Re:Finally (Score:4, Informative)
There are lots of vaccines on the market that already exist that you don't have to take. This idea that "Big Pharma" has defacto control over public health policy is tin foil hattery and does a lot of disservice to the actual bodies that determine health policy by identifying which viruses present enough of a danger to the public to warrant being party of typical vaccination schedules. (Which are not even mandatory in and of themselves, although if polio broke out in a big way, you could bet that would change.)
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That's like.. your opinion, man.
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Re: Finally (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Finally (Score:2)
LIkely safe (Score:4, Interesting)
The HIV vaccine is likely to be safe, but unlikely to be effective, based on past experience with HIV vaccines.
If an HIV vaccine were as easy to build as a coronavirus vaccine, then we'd have had one long ago.
Re:LIkely safe (Score:5, Insightful)
some medicines are not viable strictly from a business or logistical perspective.
lets take cancer for example. ive heard each individuals cancer is unique to the individual and maybe even changes while inside the person. so that treating with anything other than surgery or radiation is a moving target. you cannot stand up a general solution that can be turned into a viable business that can pay for its research, delivery, qa and lawsuits etc.. with solutions that are unique to every person.
but the covid vacinne for example they were able to sequence the virus and then produce the solution in a very quick turnaround.
it hints at a future where they diagnose you with some cancer on day 0 and then run your blood through the sequencer on day 1 then send plans for the tailored vacinne or medicine on day 2 and on day 3 you back in the office getting the first of your shots.
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ive heard each individuals cancer is unique to the individual and maybe even changes while inside the person. so that treating with anything other than surgery or radiation is a moving target.
It is unique, but they all share similar characteristics. For example, every cancer has a modification to disable the p53 gene in some way. Or many breast cancers are heavily dependent on estrogen. Medicines target those common characteristics.
When we talk about having a tailored treatment for cancer, we mean diagnosing the common characteristics of your particular cancer, and giving you a treatment based on your cancer's particular characteristics. It doesn't mean you will get a vaccine no one has ever had
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There are known common oncogene mutations that occur a lot in some cancers. Part of personalised medicines aim is to actually characterise the mutations in a cancer, and then chose drugs that can most effectively target those mutations. What happens though is the drugs are effective but often the cancer can mutate around it.
One I've been looking into is BCR-ABL1, which is a fusion of 2 genes that creates a unregulated kinase found in some leukemias. This has an effective drugs against it, but selective pres
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My (non-expert) opinion is that there will be multiple answers, depending on the cancer. Some will be combinations of small-molecule drugs, Others will activate the immune system...you could call those vaccines, but I don't expect them all to work in the same way. And sometimes you'll need a combination of both. And sometimes nothing will work, even in the far distant future. Well, I suppose you could go for cryo-suspension or uploading in the far *enough* future, but nothing short of that.
Re:LIkely safe (Score:5, Informative)
Past experience with HIV vaccines is likely to be inapplicable to predicting success here. mRNA vaccines utilize an entirely different mechanism than conventional vaccines, so you are comparing apples and oranges here.
And really, what makes you think that building the coronavirus vaccine was easy? The mRNA covid vaccines were built off of years of research into mRNA vaccine development. The fact that they are holding up to what might be their first really large scale rollout is a strong indicator that there is good reason to be optimistic.
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The mRNA is a method of delivering the proteins to the body. How does that make an HIV vaccine easier?
The Coronavirus vaccine was easy because within two years of it emerging, we already have several different vaccines, both traditional style and innovative types. We even have a DNA vaccine now.
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The Coronavirus vaccine was easy because within two years of it emerging, we already have several different vaccines
The mRNA vaccines for COVID were actually result of research into the original SARS virus. This work began in 2002 or so. So if you want to call 20 years of Coronavirus/mRNA research "easy", well, then go ahead.
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But TFA is discussing mRNA.
Re:LIkely safe (Score:5, Informative)
The mRNA is a method of delivering the proteins to the body. How does that make an HIV vaccine easier?
It does, by a lot. When you introduce proteins directly into the blood .. and they are floating around in the bloodstream, guess what happens? Your APCs grab them ... and present it via the MHC II pathway to who? CD4 T-cells. Gee, I'm sure HIV will quiver in its boots about that. Oh wait, let's see .. who are HIV's favorite cells? Yup .. ye olde CD4 T-cells. The only way your CD8 cells get invited to the party is via the cross-presentation pathway, which let's admit it sucks.
When proteins are introduced by the mRNA vaccine it is processed such that both MHC I and MHC II systems present the proteins. That means, both CD8 and CD4 cells are educated. CD8 T-cells can kick HIV's ass (Reference: https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com] )
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Nice post, thanks.
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The Coronavirus vaccine wasn't easy, not traditional ones, nor emerging ones. Traditional ones have the benefit of close to 20 years of study on how to make vaccines specifically for coronaviruses on the backs of the SARS outbreak in 2002 and MERS outbreak in ... guessing I think it was around 2010. We've been studying the spike proteins and how they work for half a century now.
Same with mRNA and DNA based treatments. They are being done on the backs of 30 years worth of research. People often talk about Pf
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Just imagine you dedicating your life to research which no one knows about, and then right before you come up with your results there's a dire need to have those results as quickly as possible. How lucky for humanity, so you release your results and all that happens is some Slashdot users claim that your life's work was "easy" because of how quickly they got their answer.
That's exactly what happened to me except no one ever needed my results.
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Yes, they are very different:
Apples, you eat their clothes, but oranges you don't?
-- Jason Mendoza [youtube.com] (The Good Place)
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That was a poor researcher (researchtress?) in the USA.
Actually two germans got a Nobel Prize for that around 1975.
Typical "not invented here" - and - "we do not need it, as we earn money otherwise" syndrome.
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This one is sufficiently different that it is worth a try. Results are unpredictable, but given the magnitude of the problem...
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Yeah, it's really easy for me to say I hope it works, especially since I don't have to pay for the research. Go team go!
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I certainly help pay for both research (via my tax dollars) and treatment (via both my tax and insurance dollars), and I think that if these vaccines have done well in non-human trials, then it will be an excellent use of my money to go to human trials. Even if it doesn't work, we'll learn a lot.
I don't (as far as I know) know anyone with HIV, but it's a nasty and expensive illness that really needs a vaccine, both from an economic and from a moral PoV.
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but unlikely to be effective As it is an mRNA bases vaccine it is rather safe. ... kind of redundant)) in your blood stream, much higher than a HIV infection would give you. And the main effect is: your body is building antibodies against that anti-gene.
Effectiveness of previous vaccines and therapies is hampered by the fact that the virus mostly infects T-cells.
The mRNA vaccine will reproduce in EVERY cell. So you have a high load of anti-genes (the spike proteins of the HIV-virus (yes, I know V + virus
Pro
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When I first read about how mRNA vaccines work I thought it sounded like they could try the same approach with AIDS.
What about mRNA seemed to you like it would be good for AIDS?
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Nice paper, thanks.
Rare? (Score:2)
"There's a pressing need for new ways to prevent infection from viruses like HIV and influenza that conventional vaccines have struggled to address and to treat rare genetic diseases and cancers that kill millions each year."
If something is killing millions of people a year, it's not very rare, is it?
The WHO has a neat page [who.int] about causes of death overall, and broken out by low-income, lower-middle-income, upper-middle-income and high-income countries. HIV has been pushed out of the top 10 everywhere but low
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If something is killing millions of people a year, it's not very rare, is it?
Genetic diseases in general are common. But each specific genetic disease is rare. There are hundreds of different unique genetic diseases. I mean, there are tens of thousands of genes that can go wonky individually or in combination. If there are say 10,000 genetic diseases .. if only 1000 people in the world have any specific one .. that's 10 million people with a genetic disease. And btw that's an underestimate .. there are a lot more than 10,000 genetic diseases depending on how you count (specific alle
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rare genetic diseases and cancers that kill millions each year."
If something is killing millions of people a year, it's not very rare, is it?
They are. Each one does not kill a lot of people, but there are a lot of them so in sum, they are killing millions of people.
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If something is killing millions of people a year, it's not very rare, is it?
0.05% is pretty rare, right?
What's 0.05% of 7 billion?
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Nobody said there was gonna be math.
Occasionally I read posts around here (Score:3)
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Don't expect this to enable folks to put HIV and AIDs behind us. All vaccines have a rate of bad side effects, and those who don't consider themselves at risk will refuse to take them. And this is actually a somewhat reasonable approach as HIV is usually containable by behavioral rules, and if you are already following those rules you are almost always safe. It will be like the vaccine against cervical cancer (caused by a virus) that needs to be taken before you are exposed to the virus...so parents refu
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All vaccines have a rate of bad side effects,
If they are properly produced and quality checked: nope.
We had side effects as in: catching the real disease in Africa in the 1950s - because the supposed weakened/half dead polio viruses used for the vaccine: were not dead.
The so called "side effects" in Corona vaccines are not side effects. That is a stupid misnomer of the industry or the health authorities: they are the expected effect.
If you have no fever after getting a vaccine: chances are, it did not work.
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Give me even one example of a vaccine that doesn't have side-effects in some people. You won't find one. Every vaccine is a risk. It's just that not taking the vaccine is also a risk, and it's usually a much higher risk.
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Give me even one example of a vaccine that doesn't have side-effects in some people. You won't find one.
Sorry, you are mistaken.
Fever, chills, head aches: are not side effects.
They are the effect.
Grasp it or don't grasp it, up to you.
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An allergic reaction is a side effect. Heart palpitations is a side effect. There are others. Every vaccine has some that affects some group of the population. If you disagree, give me even one counter-example.
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I gave you the counter examples already:
fever
chills
head ache
tiredness
etc.
A difficult problem (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with HIV is that the wily thing keeps mutating -- I mean coronavirus hardly mutates .. whereas HIV is so susceptible to APOBEC3 base editing and carries with itself such a shitty polymerase such that most copies of itself are flawed. Unfortunately, that also means it can occasionally get lucky and win the immunity evasion lottery. But I suppose if they could keep providing booster shots that might help. Ultimately though, the cure will have to use a combined immune + gene-therapy approach .. in my opinion. 1. Train the immune system using a vaccine, but then also 2. delete the provirus (meganucleases show promise) and 3. gene-edit the HIV entry receptors. I believe all three methods will have to be used simultaneously for a cure, because each one alone may be insufficient to get to a 99.9% cure rate.
References:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
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Fortunately HIV isn't very contagious, and is already mostly under control with our existing treatments. Adding a vaccine on top of them might be enough to completely get rid of the disease (hopefully).
Re: A difficult problem (Score:2)
Ok, then why do people engage in anal sex? Obviously, some people get pleasure from it. Did you design the rectum? How do you know the purpose of it in other people? Just because you personally do not use it for pleasure does not mean others do not want to.
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You're funny, rectal tears and transmission of disease by anal sex is well known.
Any biologist will tell you purpose of rectum, don't be an anti-science moron.
Some people have fetish of smelling and eating rotten fish, some die from it.
You're being silly, of course sex with with an organ that has thin wall that tears easily, that exists only to expel stool which is half bacteria plus shed viruses if host ill, will lead to transmission of diseases.
Let's say something generally true, anal sex is the main mod
Re: A difficult problem (Score:2)
While it is true that a larger percent of gay men have it in the US, worldwide it is predominantly transmitted via heterosexual sex nowadays. Also, just because rectal sex is a higher risk activity doesnâ(TM)t mean that you cannot get it from vaginal sex. While the risk is lower, you are still playing Russian roulette either way. In fact, the virus can be adept at lining the vagina. Reference: https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
Key quote from the article: HIV invasion through the mucosa of the female lo
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False that it is predominately spread by heterosexual intercourse now globally.
Are you counting "transgendered women" as males? Let's stick with biology, they're biological males and many many times more likely to get AIDS than biological female.
https://www.reuters.com/articl... [reuters.com]
Re: A difficult problem (Score:2)
Wow, it seems you are bad at statistics AND reading comprehension. The article you linked to stated that gay men, in the west, are 28 times more likely to get it. However, that does NOT mean it is being predominantly spread via homosexual contact. For one thing, gay sex or homosexuality occurs a lot more rarely than heterosexual sex. There are a lot fewer gay men than heterosexual worldwide. Second, as a percentage, more gay people in the west have it because the pandemic started with a high number of gay m
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Nope.
67% globally by male to male sex:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
Re: A difficult problem (Score:2)
No, that is NOT what YOUR linked source says! The 67% reference in that link is for specific to OLDER ADULTS in the UNITED STATES only.
Quote from your link: Recent surveillance data on older adults found that in 2016, among newly diagnosed older males, 67% were attributed to male-to-male sexual contact (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2018b).
CDC reference in your link: https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/group/... [cdc.gov]
Do you have reading comprehension issues? I am serious, cause that would explain a lot.
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Does not make any sense, as the percentages of the infected is basically 50 : 50 by gender.
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[...]that has thin wall that tears easily[...] Let's say something generally true, anal sex is the main mode of transmission of AIDS. Let's also say it's primarily gay man's disease, because it is.
The walls are not thinner than the vagina.
It is no longer a gay disease since 1990 - 30 years ago. It affects everyone. It is not a big topic in our times as medication "works".
Point is: a male giving oral sex to an infected woman, or receiving it, hardly can be infected.
OTOH: an infected male having sex of any ki
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While it is strictly speaking not a sexual organ, both men and woman can enjoy getting perpetrated.
E.g. in Woman it is easy to hit the A-point (similar to G-point but deeper inside and "on the other side of the vagina") and men get hit at the prostate. Usually a man comes instantly, if he is not used to it.
The clitoris is actually formed in a way that two of its 4 (or 5, depending how you count) fingers are surrounding the rectum.
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If current drugs push the virus to undetectable levels, then a vaccine primes the immune system to fight it coming back, perhaps it *might* work.
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Change in technology makes the incredible routine. In 1866, the transatlantic crossing record was 38 days. Today it routinely takes about seven hours.
I believe advances in molecular biology will produce that kind of transformation of expectations within our lifetimes. Patients may even receive genetically individualized vaccines for their cancers, something that would be inconceivable with vaccine technologies where it takes years to come up with a viable candidate.
Moderna had their candidate designed i
Re:A difficult problem (Score:4, Funny)
Change in technology makes the incredible routine. In 1866, the transatlantic crossing record was 38 days. Today it routinely takes about seven hours.
And in the 1980s it was being done in under 3 hours several times a day, but now it's back to 7.
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3.5 hours on average, but only for a tiny number of passengers.
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In 1866, the transatlantic crossing record was 38 days. Today it routinely takes about seven hours. ...
Yeah, but a viking long boat can do it in 10 to 14 days, depending where you define the "border/coasts of the Americas".
And that was nearly 1000 years before 1866
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The problem with HIV is that the wily thing keeps mutating
That's the big plus of mRNA over traditional vaccines. The mRNA vaccine can be far more specific to one protein. There's one protein on HIV that can't mutate much - the one it uses to enter human cells. When that one mutates enough, you get virus that can't infect anything.
So, an mRNA vaccine targeting that protein makes the mutation problem much less of a problem. It's extremely unlikely that the virus would be able to gain a mutation that avoids the vaccine while also remaining effective in matching o
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That's like saying "Just colonize Jupiter". It's not something you can just tweak, because those receptors have a job.
There are people born with mutant/broken CCR5 and CXCR4 receptors and they live normal lives. Those people are immune to HIV.
Reference: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/f... [harvard.edu]
3rd world gonna keep on 3rd worldin' (Score:2)
I'll pay money for a vaccine that'll keep me from being laid up with the man flu from my kid's daycare viruses.
When are we gonna see that?
Just wait (Score:3)
Re:Big Pharma (Score:5, Interesting)
What do we care? We don't like Big Pharma. Right? Right? Ooops, turns out all the Slashdot fake Marxist/Socialists love Big Capitalist Big Pharma when they feel personally threatened.
Someone can be very unhappy with how a given industry normally functions, and yet still be able to recognize that that industry does put out some very beneficial things. It is also worth noting that a lot of the more trenchant criticism of the pharmaceutical have a decidedly libertarian bent. See e.g https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescription/ [slatestarcodex.com].
Re:Big Pharma (Score:5, Insightful)
It's nice to read the occasional reasonable post on Slashdot. It makes me feel less alone in the world.
People seem to need things to be very simple and easily categorized. In reality, something like a large business is an incredibly complex beast that includes a group of leaders that disagree with each other on important issues, an army of employees who also disagree with each other and go on internal campaigns against each other when establishing company agendas, all of whom are beholden to a huge mass of stakeholders that also disagree with each other on every relevant issue. So, such businesses do good things, as well as evil things, as well as things that simultaneously cause harm while offering benefit, all while being "plugged in" to an incredibly interconnected economy that keeps people employed while providing valuable services and also while contributing to wealth inequality and pollution and so on.
So, trying to roll up the whole mess and say "it's good" or "it's bad" is to grossly oversummarize and commit to an oversimplified position. It is a more reasonable response to like the good things the company does while also disliking the bad things, and possibly to even get involved and support some of the company's efforts even while opposing others.
That's reality for you. It's not simple, and there is harm in pretending like it is.
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Indeed. Most people cannot handle even low levels of complexity. So they make up a drastically simplified fantasy "reality" that does not do the real thing justice and often is not even based on the real thing in major aspects. Then they use that as the basis of important decisions. The quality of the results is as expected, given this fundamentally defective process.
Re: Big Pharma (Score:2)
We need some way to compute âoepercent I disagreeâ with a corporation. I have no idea how we do that, but this tendency to see corps as singular entities is extremely problematic for many reasons: it tars good ones for small bad actions and it lets the bad ones off the hook for trivial redeeming acts. And it keeps the whole system from being accountable.
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are you under the impression this isn't something you could just look up? because how we test vaccines is a pretty old, well defined area of concern
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OTOH, sometimes challenge trials *are* used. I can't imagine using them in this case, but equivalently evil things have been done in the past, so suspecting them isn't totally bonkers...just nearly so.
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A real answer (Score:5, Interesting)
Others have given sarcastic or half answers. Here's the real answer.
First, you test if it "works" in a test tube. When you put someone some blood, does it do what you expect?
Then you test it for safety by giving it to some people and monitoring them closely.
Then if it's safe, you test for effectiveness (and more safety) by giving it to high-risk people. Gay men who are sexually active, in this case. You test those people for HIV, and watch for safety more.
You already know that without the vaccine, 0.25% of gay men get HIV each year (or whatever the number is).
Suppose you gave the vaccine to 2,000 people. If it's ineffective, you'd expect five cases of HIV in those 2,000 people. If you actually get significantly less, it looks like the vaccine is probably effective. That would be say 0-2 cases.
If the phase with 2,000 people indicates it's effective, you try 10,000 high-risk people. With 10,000 people tracked for a year, you'd expect 25 cases of HIV if the vaccine didn't work. If instead you only get one case, the vaccine has apparently reduced the risk by 96%.
Re:A real answer (Score:5, Interesting)
Others have given sarcastic or half answers. Here's the real answer.
First, you test if it "works" in a test tube. When you put someone some blood, does it do what you expect?
Then you test it for safety by giving it to some people and monitoring them closely.
Then if it's safe, you test for effectiveness (and more safety) by giving it to high-risk people. Gay men who are sexually active, in this case. You test those people for HIV, and watch for safety more.
You already know that without the vaccine, 0.25% of gay men get HIV each year (or whatever the number is).
Suppose you gave the vaccine to 2,000 people. If it's ineffective, you'd expect five cases of HIV in those 2,000 people. If you actually get significantly less, it looks like the vaccine is probably effective. That would be say 0-2 cases.
If the phase with 2,000 people indicates it's effective, you try 10,000 high-risk people. With 10,000 people tracked for a year, you'd expect 25 cases of HIV if the vaccine didn't work. If instead you only get one case, the vaccine has apparently reduced the risk by 96%.
There is one, absolutely crucial detail that you missed, namely that the trial is/should be blind (double-blind actually). They don't estimate rates of infection in at risk populace, and get a test group, vaccinate them and see if the rate is lower, because, unless the vaccine is close to 100% effective, they will see in *increase* in infection rates, because people will engage in more risky behaviour after being injected as part of the trial. See here [slashdot.org] for an example. What they will actually do is take a test group, split it randomly in two, inject one with placebo, other with vaccine, and check the difference in rates between those two groups, disregarding whatever happens in general population.
I wonder though: I know one person who participated in covid vac trials, and then immediately went a on party spree, saying she can do that because she's immune. When I pointed out she could have gotten placebo, she said she knows she got the real thing because she had severe side effects (fever, etc...) after the jab. I'm not sure if real blind trials are even *possible* when people know whether they got the vac from side effects.
Re: A real answer (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps. The placebo could be another vaccine with similar side effects, such as the flu vaccine.
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she said she knows she got the real thing because she had severe side effects (fever, etc...) after the jab
The vaccines include adjuvants (chemicals that strengthen an immune response). The adjuvants have been used for a very long time in many vaccines, so they were not being tested and would be in the placebo. Adjuvants can trigger those side effects.
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Phase 1 they inject it into a small number (10s) of healthy volunteers and see if it behaves as expected. Ie doesn't have obvious bad side effects, produces antibodies as expected.
Phase 2 gets a bit bigger with 100s to 1000s volunteers involved, at this stage they are fine-tuning the administration stategy. So dosage and how many doses. This will be done by looking at the immune response in the volunteers and ensuring it is as expected.
At phase 3 trial, they will innoculate ~ 40K or more people in high HIV
Re: Big Pharma (Score:2)
Skipping over explanations of the difference between phase I, II, III testing ..
They get a group of volunteers and vaccinate half of them without telling them who got the real thing and who got the saline .
They then tell all these people to try to avoid getting HIV by abstaining or practicing safe sex
You know that nothing will change in how they behave, they're humans. The people who catch HIV in the 2020's are pretty much idiots because HIV is one of the most difficult diseases to catch and easiest to av
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Actually things are more complicated. The phase I trials are to determine not whether the vaccine is effective, but whether it is safe. They're done with small groups. The phase II trials are to determine whether it's effective, and if you aren't in a desperate hurry you collect a reasonably large number of folks from a population where the disease is circulating, and calculate how many would be expected to get the disease. Then you vaccinate them and wait long enough to have an expectation of enough ca
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What do we care? We don't like Big Pharma. Right? Right? Ooops, turns out all the Slashdot fake Marxist/Socialists love Big Capitalist Big Pharma when they feel personally threatened.
Someone can be very unhappy with how a given industry normally functions, and yet still be able to recognize that that industry does put out some very beneficial things. It is also worth noting that a lot of the more trenchant criticism of the pharmaceutical have a decidedly libertarian bent. See e.g https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescription/ [slatestarcodex.com].
Did you actually read the link you gave? That is a scathing critique, but of FDA and government regulations which make it impossible to legally prescribe cheap cures, and not of pharmaceutical companies, which, like it or not, have to work within the system.
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He did say it was from a libertarian perspective. Perhaps he should have said Libertarian or anarchist.
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What has "doing the right thing" to do with insulting someone of being left or right or libertian?
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What do we care? We don't like Big Pharma. Right? Right? Ooops, turns out all the Slashdot fake Marxist/Socialists love Big Capitalist Big Pharma when they feel personally threatened.
You mean like how fake laissez-faire and pro-business republicans suddenly love big government and regulation when they get booted off Facebook and Twitter?
Re: Big Pharma (Score:5, Insightful)
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Flat out socialism is bad. Russia and China tried it, and hundreds of millions of people died from hunger.
Flat out capitalism is not much better... at least not so many people die, but too much power in the hands of a corporation/individual is not good either.
No, we need to have a mixture of socialism and capitalism with a good amount of regulation to stop abuses.
Germany and Norway and the countries around them seem to be doing it mostly right.
Re: Big Pharma (Score:2)
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Flat out socialism is bad. Russia and China tried it, and hundreds of millions of people died from hunger.
Well, just nitpicking.
But socialism certainly had nothing to do with that.
Hint: it is called a famine. Why did they have famines? Wow: you google that yourself. In China it would have been the same thing if Mao would have been a capitalist. Has nothing to do with socialism, communism, capitalism or anything related to any of those concepts (ideologies).
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Maybe once capitalist stop intentionally destroying every socialist country through sanctions, coups, wars, and other forms of subversion, this could be a valid criticism. But until capitalists allow socialism to exist in the world, we have to accept the meager positive things the capitalist class allow us.
Hmm, an interesting perspective (and I mean that).
But most socialist countries destroyed themselves. The Soviet Union did so right out of the end of WWII when they invested in more military industry than civilian. Tanks rather than tractors, so living quality declined over time until there were enough shortages to destabilise the entire system.
The real problem with this thinking, and yours admittedly is that socialism and capitalism are mutually exclusive. They aren't. You can have a socialist policy
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The main problem that undermines any of these systems is cronyism.
It destroys the free market, it destroys fair sharing, it destroys democracy. That's also when Socialism fails, when only one party exists any more, which may turn into a dynasty like in North Korea. Then it's not that different from a mona
Re: Big Pharma (Score:2)
How long and effective will democracy be when the state monopolizes everything. Without free media, democracy cannot exist in a useful manner. Do you think the government officials wonâ(TM)t act to protect themselves and hold their grip on power?
Re: Big Pharma (Score:3)
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We don't like Big Pharma. Right? Right?
No, we just don't like like people like you who think they're clever
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Well, we don't want you near us then. I only want vaccinated people near me or people who can provide real-time proof they aren't carrying Ebola. Go live in a cave. No wait, not a cave with bats. An empty cave, go live in an empty cave.
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Alarming Study Finds Cognitive Deficits in Those Who Had Even Mild COVID Cases| Amanpour and Company [youtu.be]
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So if you all don't want to end up stupid, get vaccinated.
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Unhhh .. I think you should have said "mRNA induced immunity is probably better and longer lasting than natural infection.". AFAIK the current evidence is strongly suggestive, but far from conclusive.
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So you don't know.
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HIV has a known viral cause. Cancers have a multitude of different causes. Some are viral, but they aren't all the same virus. And many aren't virus based at all.
Cancer is more of a syndrome than a disease. I.e. it's a multitude of different diseases that all look sufficiently alike that people give them the same generic name. This is true even if you get more specific and say something like "prostate cancer".