Well deserved. I've been following mRNA vaccines since long before the pandemic because of an interest in cancer therapeutic vaccines, and the technology is amazing and it took sooooo much fight to bring it forward to production. The speed and flexibility of the tech really is a huge advancement.
Are COVID-19 vaccines the first successful mRNA-based vaccines? Seems to me there should be some other successful application of mRNA when it comes to vaccines/medications even before COVID-19. In that case, how much more complex was it to create a vaccine for COVID-19 specifically?
It's about incentives: vaccines are one of the only products where manufacturers are completely immune from liability, and given big pharma's historical willingness to priotise profit over lives, it's hard to just trust them. Especially when the reason big pharma lobbied for that liability immunity was because they claimed they'd be sued into bankruptcy without it.
Every single company in the world tries to minimise their legal liability, for every single product.
That's even more crucial when you're trying to vaccinate literally billions of people. Even for extremely safe vaccines (like these are), very low percentage bad outcomes can mean a lot of people willing to sue.
Billions of people also means a lot of cranks willing to call conspiracy theories in a lot of jurisdictions.
Yes, in order to save tens of millions of lives globally - which is exactly what happened. You really don't want to discourage that.
But leaving aside pragmatics, you're assuming that the manufacturers wouldn't be liable. If they'd e.g. hid bad results from some study, they'd presumably still be criminally liable.
Liability adds a strong bias towards inaction and it's in society's interests to avoid that.
Like, pretty much everything has some side-effects, and if (for example) you have the choice between doing nothing and having a million people die and doing something for which everyone is certain that that will save that million people but on average might kill ten other people, then asserting liability effectively means saying that you shouldn't do that thing, because you won't be liable for the former million deaths but will be liable for the latter ten ones. So if the society wants people to choose the former option, they shouldn't be liable for such consequences.
Willful negligence resulting from economic incentives are endemic and I agree a major problem in every industry. It could be the long-term side effects of these vaccines prove more harmful than the side effects of multiple COVID infections... time will tell.
But it's a big leap to go from "Pharma is driven by profits, therefore they should be put under more scrutiny" and "Pharma is driven by profits, therefore they are injecting us with 5G-enabled nanobots to enable mind control by the Council of Rome"
> But it's a big leap to go from "Pharma is driven by profits, therefore they should be put under more scrutiny" and "Pharma is driven by profits, therefore they are injecting us with 5G-enabled nanobots to enable mind control by the Council of Rome"
They are put under way more scrutiny than other industries. Or where is the FDA equivalent demanding phase I, II, and III trials for so-called self-driving? Or imagine a pharma company embracing the slogan "Move fast and break things."
Vaccines, however, are usually not that profitable. If anything, I'd expect more conspiracy theories about pharma companies suppressing vaccines on the grounds that, while prevention may be better than cure, it's generally less profitable.
GenX "big whatever" / "evil corporations" leftism is completely dead at this point. People should drop it since it only ever brings them to incorrect conclusions.
If you want an evil corporation, it's the small ones that are usually the worst.
Other mRNA vaccines for human diseases had been under development for years before the pandemic, but none had yet reached approval. Vaccine development is normally slow, partly because nobody wants to put up the money for large human trials until they're relatively confident the vaccine will work.
During the pandemic, however, governments gave financial guarantees that allowed vaccine trials to go forward right away, so SARS-CoV-2 is the first human virus with an approved mRNA vaccine.
> how much more complex was it to create a vaccine for COVID-19 specifically?
It's not necessarily more complex. A number of different approaches ultimately worked, including one of the oldest technologies: growing virus in eggs and then chemically inactivating it. However, mRNA vaccines worked the best, and had less side-effects than most other approaches.
Yes, the production capacities do exist now. mRNA vaccines have proven relatively safe and effective. That should motivate pharma companies to invest in them.
Not exactly the same, but Onpattro, an siRNA medication encapsulated in a similar formulation of lipid nanoparticles, for the treatment of ATTR was approved in 2018.
In the times when so many people are up in arms against covid vaccines, we keep forgetting how things were and how these vaccines allowed to open up en-mass. Yes, there were problems but number of lives saved is just awe inspiring.
If they didn't reduce transmission, but we were told they did, then we suffered the problem of moral hazard. We thought we were protected so we went out and caused more risk to us and others. Possibly increasing the number of deaths.
So I don't think they saved lives at all, they might have increased people's risk thinking they were protected and they weren't, also spreading it more.
> Unvaccinated, infected inmates had an estimated 36% risk of spreading the virus, compared with 28% among infected vaccinees. After adjustment, any vaccination, previous infection alone, and both vaccination and previous infection cut the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission by 22%, 23%, and 40%, respectively.
> Booster doses and more recent vaccination further lowered infectiousness among vaccinated inmates, with each dose conferring an 11% risk reduction; the risk of transmission rose 6% for every 5 weeks that had elapsed since the last shot.
I don't know about you, 8% sounds a rounding error and probably within the error margins. It certainly wasn't enough to open the country en-mass like the OP believes.
And now we have the opposite situation with those who have had the most boosters and now more likely to catch the new variant that is out.
> 8% sounds a rounding error and probably within the error margins.
It is not.
Erm yes it is ... from the study:
> In adjusted analyses, we estimated that any vaccination ... reduced an index case’s risk of transmitting infection by 22% (6–36%)
CI is much wider than 8pp and the estimated absolute transmission risk CIs actually overlap at 31%. So the study results are consistent with there being no actual difference, also.
If this is the best evidence of a difference in transmission it's not very good.
Also this is Omicron which hardly matters. The justification was the earlier variants.
This is a classic example of the way conspiracy theorists shift goal posts and demand more and more evidence, while waving away any evidence provided. It's _boring_ to engage with people like you. You have no idea what you're talking about, and demand that people who _do_ know what they're talking about give you an education that you don't actually want. You're just _performing_, you aren't having a genuine conversation with people.
Out of 111,000 inmates, 31 were hospitalized and none died. Is there a small city with equivalent population where approximately the same numbers held?
I very much doubt there's a small city with total gender segregation, people living in large buildings they're not permitted to leave, and single-source universal healthcare.
(That's what makes it such a good observational study population; a whole bunch of variables are controlled away by default.)
I'm one of those people "on the fence". I can tell you now that honestly a good study won't convince me to trust the prevailing narrative.
Hear me out. In my mind, there are so many reasonable and logical ways in which those studies can be manipulated and interpreted in a manner that goes a certain direction (that I'm distrustful of). The reason I'm there is that a lot of trust was lost over a long period of time and multiple instances. So a whole host of related side-issues need to be resolved and "proven" false with studies before I can get back to a high-trust zone with modern medicine when it comes to covid and other such "hot" topics.
Do you know any vaccinated people who got infected with Delta? The vaccine breakthrough variants cause upper respiratory symptoms rather lung symptoms. I believe this is the win in the end, though Omicron still kills some people.
You may want to avoid casting all questions through this lens. Some people seek to leverage this sense of loss of trust to promote other arguments, in politics and the economy.
I appreciate that loss of trust is real, happens fast, and takes longer to recover. Recovery itself demands some acceptance that not all evidence is unequivocal, or comprehensible.
Respectfully, I believe you are in the wrong here.
Covid and climate science denial can be strengthened by having a 'discussion'.
This is because conspiracy thinking is actually immune to evidence. The denialist will subvert your evidence in a way that it proves the conspiracy. In here they will probably complain that 'correlation is not causation' or some other methodology 101 trope, whereas the audience will think "oh, yeah, this is complicated, smart people are debating it, I guess the jury is still out and we don't know for certain if climate change is real or not, and the vaccines are not a silver bullet either, lets just wait until the debate is over'.
But, in fact, the debate is over.
So no, in this case the onus is one the person attacking a vast body of scientific literature proving beyond reasonable doubt that vaccines are effective to come up with something supporting those wild claims. It is not up to me to provide a literature list that nobody will ever read anyway, and anyone who is even remotely interested in finding the truth can google such a list in 5 min.
Thank you for your post. And I mean it. I've fallen into this trap so often myself, because nothing grinds my gears as conspiracy theorists do. I think next time I'll stop before I answer, think of your post and maybe copypaste it.
At this point, anyone still "asking for information" knows full well where to find it. It's not March 2020 any more.
"Actual data from US prisons" took me about 20 seconds to find a reputable source for (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37736396), likely less time than your comment asking for it took to type.
>Using an event study approach and data from 43 countries and all U.S. states, we measure changes in excess deaths following the implementation of COVID-19 shelter-in-place (SIP) policies. We do not find that countries or U.S. states that implemented SIP policies earlier had lower excess deaths. We do not observe differences in excess deaths before and after the implementation of SIP policies, even when accounting for pre-SIP COVID-19 death rates.
The vaccines massively reduced mortality and severe disease in the vulnerable populations. That is a big win.
They also could have stopped the spread for the early variants, but the later ones were simply too contagious. There simply was no chance to keep transmission fully down at that point.
> The vaccines massively reduced mortality and severe disease in the vulnerable populations. That is a big win.
That’s changing the goalposts. The vaccines were not necessary for the vast majority of the population or society as a whole to “open up”.
That’s assuming you analyze only physical harm from the spreading virus. After months of brainwashing, they were definitely required for large swathes of the population to given them a mental protection to come out of their shells.
> They also could have stopped the spread for the early variants, but the later ones were simply too contagious. There simply was no chance to keep transmission fully down at that point.
There was never a chance to keep transmission fully down. It was like trying to prevent a cold or the flu from spreading.
The criteria for the original license were the reduction in deaths and disease. Transmission wasn't even tested in the original phase III trials. The vaccines achieved their primary purpose, they prevented death and severe disease.
COVID was a major threat to a significant part of the population. The vaccines were effective and reduced the threat to those people enormously.
It would have been very nice and useful to stop transmission and achieve herd immunity. But even without that the vaccines were a huge win and saved a lot of lives.
Moderna seems to have moved, or removed, their initial testing results but you can still find an archive here. [1] The pharmaceutical industry was initially claiming that vaccination would completely prevent infection, as it typically does, let alone spread:
"There were 11 COVID-19 cases in the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine group and 185 cases in the placebo group, with a vaccine efficacy of 94.1% (95% confidence interval of 89.3% to 96.8%)."
It's easy to create false memories because the politicians and pharma industry simultaneously swapped the narrative to stopping hospitalization and death once it became completely clear the vaccines were not stopping infection, but that is not what their initial purpose was.
The efficacy rate was not being measured based on death/sickness, but on any infection at all. It was supposed to be 94.1% effective in terms of completely preventing infection.
Again, I think you're having trouble reading. From your link:
> The median length of follow up for efficacy for participants in the study was 9 weeks post Dose 2. There were 11 COVID-19 cases in the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine group and 185 cases in the placebo group, with a vaccine efficacy of 94.1% (95% confidence interval of 89.3% to 96.8%).
> Cases of COVID-19, starting 14 days after Dose 2, were defined as symptomatic COVID-19 requiring positive RT-PCR result and at least two systemic symptoms or one respiratory symptom.
A SARS-CoV-2 infection and a COVID-19 case aren't the same thing, for the same reason a HIV infection is not the same as having AIDS. The 94.1% number comes from counts of actual sickness, despite your assertions to the contrary.
Feel free to change the above to claim they stated it would create a negative PCR test or a PCR test with less than 1 one respiratory symptom or 2 systemic symptoms. It does not meaningfully change the issue whatsoever. The asterisk by infection went, without skipping a beat, from a 'PCR test and symptoms' to 'hospitalization/death.' These are very different things.
The virus the vaccine was first tested is quite different than the version we faced later. The virus is not a static target, but a quickly evolving one. And the later variants were far, far more contagious than the initial one.
You complain about that, but proceed to doing it yourself, and you don't even address the point unlike the person you responded to.
> It was like trying to prevent a cold or the flu from spreading.
Which is funny, because even the very mild measures we had here in the Netherlands totally succeeded in preventing the flu from spreading. Haven't had a cold or flu in 1.5 years whereas normally would be sick at least 2-3 times. One strain of the flu was completely eradicated.
It sounds hyperbolic but look at any poll on how deadly people thought COVID was compared to how deadly it actually was. This study [1] found people believing that, on average, about 16% of people infected (diagnosed or not) with COVID died. In reality, there were a measured total of around 700 million cases and 7 million deaths. And vast numbers of cases went undiagnosed and so would never have ended up being tracked. In any case, the real IFR was well less than 1%. Brain washing is an unnecessarily loaded and divisive term, but it is safe to say that the media (and politicians) actively went out of their way to make people believe things that were not true, and they succeeded.
Public perception and reality are often at odds, but it doesn't mean the difference in perception is because of brainwashing, it's because humans are bad at measuring risk.
If the ones who are supposed to be informing the masses are deliberately feeding them information that leads them to inaccurately measure said risk, then that’s brainwashing.
I'd argue you're creating a bit of a false dichotomy there. I completely agree that the public is bad at measuring risk. But do you disagree that the media/politicians were actively working to exaggerate the impact of the disease? And really this even applied to organizations like the CDC. Read this [1] page and tell me how long you think it'd take the average person to realize they're talking about child hospitalizations with COVID and not child hospitalizations from COVID?
The "summary" of the article is that "COVID-19 can cause severe illness in children and adolescents" followed by numbers talking about a shocking increase in rates. The fact it's talking about people hospitalized with COVID is hidden in a wall of text written in language that most people wouldn't be able to decipher. That more people tested positive for a more contagious variant, in any setting, is the most unremarkable news imaginable - spun into a terrifying headline, by the CDC no less.
I see no way to imagine that article was written in good faith. And it's been the absolute norm for the past 3 years now.
The higher the vaccination rate in a state, the lower the deaths after the vaccine was introduced. This is unaffected by the age of the state.
The fact that this shift only emerges after the introduction of the vaccine means we can pretty much rule out any demographics-based causes. The "low vax" and "high vax" states were pretty much even before the vaccine. The only reasonable conclusion is that high vax rates directly caused lower death rates.
Any sources or data to back that up? Or is this just your own hypothesis you came up with yourself?
There is an enormous body of knowledge proving vaccines did reduce transmissions, you can easily find them online. So a claim that goes counter to the outcome of hundreds of studies should have some backup, otherwise it no better than saying 'here is a snowball that proves 100% of climate scientists are wrong'
What would have been the alternative? Go endemic Bergamo-style? Remain in soft lockdown for a decade or two in order to go endemic at a very slow pace? At the time vaccines were widely available, chances of making the virus die out had already been at exactly zero for quite a while (well, zero, plus wherever the chances are for a sudden all life ending meteor strike). It was vaccines that allowed us come to where we are now with the amount of inconvenience we had on the way. Any path without vaccines would have been worse, one way or the other.
Oh there's certainly moral hazard for all of the muppets that fell in line with the interlocking "reopen" astroturf campaigns that cropped up during the lockdown, but it isn't due to false or misleading claims about vaccine efficacy. It was made clear from jump that 1. the vaccines did not confer perfect immunity and 2. continuous mutation meant the goalposts for protection were moving. Individuals that chose to accept either the narrative that we were all perfectly safe once vaccinated or that there was nothing to worry about in the first place because it was all a giant conspiracy are collectively responsible for Covid making the transition from pandemic to endemic.
It's impossible that covid could ever have not become endemic. It can transmit through animals, we're not going to vaccinate or kill all the animals, and we haven't found the source it actually came from.
No you don't, covid is infectious before it's symptomatic. Australia and China tried the closest working thing to that (incoming quarantine) and it was extremely expensive and eventually failed.
China also claims they've found it in fomites (inanimate objects) like frozen food shipments. Though, I dunno if I believe that one.
Ultimately, none of the societal restrictions really helped reduce the portion of the population that caught covid -- given enough time, it ended up rounding up to 100%, almost worldwide. Restrictions and masking really just bought us some time and slowed the process of getting to "everyone got infected". Even China, New Zealand, Australia, etc failed at zero-covid given enough time, and covid raged once it got out. Different states in the US with vastly different policies ended up with the same final outcome. According to the NY Times, Florida and New York both have 35k cases cases per 100k population -- obviously there are substantial differences in data quality, but we are clearly not looking at an order-of-magnitude difference between these two massively different responses.
Given that lens, the ultimate outcome of the pandemic is "almost everyone eventually gets covid." As a result, the vaccines -- in reducing mortality -- saved an absolutely immense amount of lives.
I think it’s worth mentioning that COVID wasn’t what caused the world to shut down, and vaccines weren’t what caused the world to open up. These were both incredibly authoritarian policy choices by governments.
Sweden has twice the death rate as its closest neighbors (both geographically and culturally), Norway and Denmark. Note that the differences in policy between Sweden and other European countries were largest early on in the pandemic, and the differences in Sweden's death rate then were even more extreme.
In a broader international comparison, Sweden (and Europe generally) did not fare well. Countries that took a zero-CoVID approach, such as China, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam and Singapore ended up with much lower death rates, because most of them vaccinated their populations before allowing the virus to spread.
I highly recommend everyone who wonders why people do this to read the 'Conspiracy Theory Handbook'. Unlike what the title suggests, it is a very brief primer into the psychological research done by Cook and others on conspiracy thinking, mostly from the perspective of climate science denial: https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/handbook/the-cons...
One of the key traits of conspiracy thinking is immunity-to-evidence:
"Conspiracy theories are inherently self-healing, evidence that counters a theory is
re-interpreted as originating from the conspiracy. This reflects the belief that the
stronger the evidence against a conspiracy (e.g., the FBI exonerating a politician from
allegations of misusing a personal email server), the more the conspirators must want
people to believe their version of events (e.g., the FBI was part of the conspiracy to
protect that politician)"
I suppose so, if you look at the exacerbation of economic inequality, starvation (+15 million worldwide), and deaths of despair caused by the lockdowns and associated interventions. Seemingly no one minds that.
Most discussions around depopulation get bogged down in emotional or ethical arguments. To clarify, ethical considerations aren't distractions; they drive the pragmatic actions of all parties involved. It's even feasible to consider the most ethical—perhaps fully democratic—means of implementing such plans. However, it's worth noting there's a historical tolerance limit beyond which future generations may not be kind to the architects of such initiatives.
The real crux isn't whether some advocate for lower populations—clearly, many do—but the operational aspect: who executes, under what authority, and how? For instance, if a group of biologists and engineers aim to reduce Earth's population to 4 billion by 2400, the implications—like fewer children and potential space colonization—are vastly different than a group of anthropological philosophers striving for the same population count by 2033, which could necessitate more drastic measures.
These logistical issues, whether it's stealth tactics versus open methods or the necessity of opportunistic partnerships, remain conspicuously underexplored.
Governments could have avoided shutting down if they had been willing to accept much larger numbers of deaths. In the US, that would have meant somewhere around a million more deaths.
>Using an event study approach and data from 43 countries and all U.S. states, we measure changes in excess deaths following the implementation of COVID-19 shelter-in-place (SIP) policies. We do not find that countries or U.S. states that implemented SIP policies earlier had lower excess deaths. We do not observe differences in excess deaths before and after the implementation of SIP policies, even when accounting for pre-SIP COVID-19 death rates.
Italian and New York hospitals were overwhelmed because a) both places put sick elderly into old age homes. (42% of US COVID19 deaths in 2020 occurred in old age homes!) b) Like elsewhere early on, doctors put everyone serious onto ventilators in a mistaken belief that they should treat patients like they do ARDS cases based on blood oxygen levels. This damaged healthy lung sacs and caused long-term dependence on mechanical respiration that doctors found almost impossible to wean patients from, and other side effects like deep vein thrombosis; Nick Cordero is an example. (This article from April 2020 <https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...> was completely vindicated in retrospect.) Neither happened after the first few months.
And no, none of those field hospitals built in parking lots and stadiums everywhere were used, either. In Wales, for example, Millennium Stadium was converted into a temporary field hospital with 300 beds and capacity to expand to 2000 beds. It was such a big deal that a public contest was held to name it Dragon's Heart Hospital <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Heart_Hospital>. However, said hospital never had more than 46 patients at one time, and was closed in six weeks for lack of use!
Even in NYC, which really did see overloaded hospitals briefly in March-April 2020, USNS Comfort treated a total of 179 patients. USNS Mercy treated a total of 77 patients in LA.
You left out (c) cases were rising exponentially, so even if doctors could have handled X number of patients, they would become overwhelmed a few days later when that turned into 2X. Virtually no one in the population had immunity to SARS-CoV-2, so the only way to stop the exponential rise was a dramatic reduction in face-to-face contact between people. That could occur through spontaneous change in public behavior (e.g., everyone avoiding public places as much as possible, or everyone wearing then-unavailable N95 masks in public), from public policy ("lockdowns"), or from both. But continuing on as normal would have led to hospitals being overwhelmed, no matter how efficiently they were run and how skillfully they treated the patients.
To your point (a), old-age homes should have been much better protected, but it's virtually impossible to shield them off when the virus is raging outside. The most effective way to protect the elderly would be to reduce transmission of the virus in society as a whole.
To your point (b), that's what happens in a pandemic. There's a completely new disease, and doctors don't know how to treat it effectively. Everyone is trying to do what they can, based on experience with treating other diseases. You can't base public health policy around a belief that doctors will instantly know the correct way of treating a pandemic disease. You have to take dramatic measures to reduce transmission in a situation like New York faced in early 2020.
This is a garbage-in, garbage-out analysis, akin to saying, "We analyzed 100 cities, and found that those with levies were more prone to flooding. Thus, we conclude that levies offer no protection against flooding." We know mechanistically why levies work: they block water. We know mechanistically why lockdowns work: they reduce transmission. Less transmission means fewer infections means fewer deaths.
You can see this most clearly in the zero-CoVID countries, which had dramatically lower death rates during the pandemic. Taiwan and China had virtually zero deaths for much of the pandemic, because they traced literally every infection chain and capped it off. They reopened after vaccinating most of their populations, which means that most people in those countries had a primed immune system when they first got infected. As we know from numerous studies, that dramatically reduces mortality.
If governments cared about dead people they would regulate the fast food and processed food industry. McDonald’s kills more people than covid ever could.
Some places never locked down, like Sweden and South Dakota, and their death rate wasn't significantly higher. Overall there's no evidence that lockdowns actually reduced mortality: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737 .
>Using an event study approach and data from 43 countries and all U.S. states, we measure changes in excess deaths following the implementation of COVID-19 shelter-in-place (SIP) policies. We do not find that countries or U.S. states that implemented SIP policies earlier had lower excess deaths. We do not observe differences in excess deaths before and after the implementation of SIP policies, even when accounting for pre-SIP COVID-19 death rates.
What we call "lock down" was hardly anything. And usually in reaction to surging cases. So the data probably couldn't show it working, even if it did. And it probably didn't.
You believe quarantines have no effect on the spread of contagions? With data on zero-covid countries (Australia, New Zealand, China, S Korea, Vietnam,...) so readily available for comparison...
I would actually fire you if you worked for me as an engineer. And for the fact that you were obviously not following quarantine procedures, for which you're now overcompensating by spreading medical disinformation. It's not hard spotting the people that caused all the deaths during covid. It's pretty easy actually.
> Some places never locked down, like Sweden and South Dakota, and their death rate wasn't significantly higher.
In 2020 it clearly was higher. Denmark, Finland and Norway avoided the spring 2020 death wave, whereas in Sweden mortality was 20% to 50% (well, 48%) higher during the weeks of April and May 2020.
After the first two devastating waves during the Spring and Autumn of 2020, Sweden in fact 'locked-down' in some ways more restrictively than our nordic neighbors - all of which made timely interventions that meant their restrictions on meeting en-masse in public were for shorter periods and less intrusive on people's everyday lives.
The narrative that it was a 'free-for-all' in Sweden has been fostered retrospectively by neo-liberal groups that placed economics above human lives. In their eagerness to be 'proved right' after the fact, most Swedes now embrace this historical revisionism.
The statistics that show that Swedish "excess deaths" were low or even lower than other countries were cooked-up by a journalist from a right-wing newspaper in Sweden (SvD), who noticed that if one discounts the downward trend in excess death for the last 25 years in Sweden, together with dispensing with demographic weighting, and then averaging the 3 years from 2019 onwards (which includes the period after vaccination), then miraculously you can squeeze the numbers you want from the raw figures.
take away the default countries, and instead add Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.
Then make sure you also click "Align axis scales" you will see that Sweden only had fewer restrictions than its neighbors during a very short period at the beginning of the pandemic (during the first wave).
After that, Sweden had both more stringent restrictions than all its neighbors, and had those restrictions in place for a longer period of time.
The narrative - the historical revisionism, the myth that a very large number of people want to promote, and which has even become some sort of amnesiac 'reality' for many Swedes - should not be mistaken for what really happened.
Thanks for the source! And I'm not saying I'm 100% right but I do remember reading articles from the economist and other solid publications about them not having any restrictions. I won't be able to find the article but I will look...and also look at this one.
But Tegnell is the architect and main proponent of the historical revisionism that I'm talking about. He is the man at the center of the controversial policies.
Even while they were being enacted, Sweden was fed a narrative of exceptionalism by Tegnell and the mainstream media, who never mentioned the comparative liberality of the other Nordic states' policies, and maintained the fiction that we were still following the most liberal strategy (even to this day).
Tegnell is massively popular in Sweden. In fact, as deaths accumulated and it looked more and more like he was following a disastrous path, his popularity increased exponentially.
Criticism or even mildly questioning Tegnell was (and for a large part, still is) totally off-limits: there is absolutely no way I'd mention my doubts about him or his policies to my fellow Swedish colleagues or friends.
edit: Incidentally, for those who can read Swedish (or use Google Translate), this series of contemporary articles is a really great overview of the events in Sweden seen from a skeptical perspective:
As a foreigner living in Sweden during covid was just bizarre. I certainly appreciated that school were kept open and that the country never went into complete lock down. However the making fun of masks at the highest level, because there hadn't been any definite studies that showed they work (and after the turnaround later they wondered why so few people put them on), or the policies for medical personal who were not allowed protective gear (because it scares patients) even for ones working directly in the covid wards.
And yes there is definitely a weird "Swedish exceptionalism", which interestingly Swedes from all sort of political persuasion exhibit.
From the analysis I saw in Sweden, the conclusions was that the wast majority of deaths were caused by failures in the elderly care. The pandemic spread like wildfire by the overworked personal who did not get protective gear or time to keep health standards. Some did not even have time to wash their hands between patients. The wast majority of housing for elderly is also located near the capital, similar to Copenhagen in Denmark, resulting in major hot spots for the virus. The government body responsible for supervision and control over healthcare also came to the conclusion that care for the elderly had critical flaws during the pandemic, with only half of patients meeting a doctor in person and as high as 1/5 of patients never even got to talk to a doctor.
None of the international discussions about restrictions has been about restrictions around elderly care. Sweden did actually issue some, which some described as prison-like for those impacted, but that was about a year into the pandemic. It was also seen as too late, with vaccine and proper staff/gear/protocols being more effective tools.
The Oxford Stringency Index doesn't correlate in any way with COVID deaths so it's unclear what point you're getting at here. None of the NPIs had any effect on COVID.
At the very least not practically, a lot of companies went WFH, for example. There might have been less official forcing but behavior for sure changed.
> the first two devastating waves during the Spring and Autumn of 2020
Sweden had negative excess mortality from Jan 2020 to Spring 2021, so fewer people died than expected in this period. These COVID waves just weren't devastating in any way, and yielded virtually no deaths "of" and not "with" COVID. It's strange that you are so convinced that Sweden's data doesn't disprove the effectiveness of lockdowns...
> neo-liberal groups that placed economics above human lives
> Sweden had negative excess mortality from Jan 2020 to Spring 2021
According to this, Sweden had quite bad excess mortality in 2020 in April and May, and some in June. And then again from mid-November 2020 to mid-January 2021.
There are many different ways different sources have tried to estimate cumulative excess mortality. Depending on the calculation methods, different sources have ended up with quite different results.
What is your source, and what method did they use?
It can be debated what model should be used and governments don't always have consistent methods of baselining. With different models you can compute some excess mortality in Sweden but those have their own flaws.
But it's worth calling out here that the reason you have to dive into the details of what precise baseline model you use is because the number of deaths was so very tiny on the scale of a country. A simple graph showing the absolute numbers puts it in perspective:
It looks initially dramatic but that's only due to the massive drop in 2019. In reality 2020 had the same number of deaths per pop as in 2015! Nothing special happened in 2015.
Given that 2019 was an abnormally low year, 2020 would have been a bit higher than normal anyway even with no pandemic. But we're still looking at numbers pretty much within the realm of normal variance. If somehow you'd never heard of COVID, then someone had shown you that graph and asked "did something catastrophic happen in this decade" you'd probably have said no. Although 2020 is a bit higher, it's on the order of a few thousands of people, not something you could have noticed in a country of millions short of saturation-level media coverage.
That's why it's hard to say but important to hear: these levels of death simply do not matter. How do we know? Because some countries have had high and persistent levels of excess death since the end of the pandemic, but as COVID isn't the explanation hardly anyone cares. There's just no link between levels of death and severity of reaction, in our society.
Many European countries have an ageing population, and thus the number of yearly deaths increase year to year. For example Finland in 2010–2019 had about 0.8% increase in yearly deaths every year. If the deaths followed this model and thus there was absolutely no excess mortality (and no random variation), the simple method you cite would compare 2020, 2021 and 2022 to the average of 2015–2019, and would estimate 2.4%, 3.2% and 4.0% excess mortality for years 2020, 2021, 2022 for Finland.
Whereas Sweden doesn't have an ageing population structure, due to lots of immigration in the past 20 years. And Sweden didn't have an increasing trend in yearly deaths in 2010–2019.
This simple method overestimates the excess mortality for many countries, if they have an ageing population structure. Then you end up comparing overestimated values to Sweden's value that it not overestimated.
You can project a baseline like that and get a higher number for 2020, but 2019 is still abnormally low and those people who survived 2019 had to die at some point.
I'm happy to grant a different baseline though. It goes from being a really small number to a really small number. Remember that everything that happened was justified by claiming a 3.something% IFR and 100% infection rate in a single giant wave. That never came close to happening and the places that used very light touch approaches had no different outcomes to places that went full totalitarian. That's the important thing here.
> Some places never locked down, like Sweden and South Dakota, and their death rate wasn't significantly higher
Many factors: different demographics, population density, culture, what does "locked down" mean in different countries / areas, what does "significantly higher" mean...
One important point though is this probably confuses correlation and causation. Areas that were hit harder tended to lock down harder.
> Overall there's no evidence that lockdowns actually reduced mortality
People post this occasionally, and I'm going to keep calling bullshit. What happens is someone posts a fringe paper that supports their view whilst conveniently ignoring the large body of established scientific orthodoxy that supports the obvious conclusion: that restricting human interaction slows down transmission of a respiratory disease that transmits through human interaction.
I agree that the mechanism for lockdowns helping is sound (less interaction -> less infection) but I still believe lockdowns were harmful overall (eg including aspects like additional deaths of despair - suicide and overdose, less healthy activities - exercise and socializing etc).
I must admit this belief mostly comes from the claim Sweden did better, and the fact that where I live had almost no lockdowns and did better than the rest of my country.
Do you know of any good evidence that lockdowns were effective, or are you calling bullshit based on intuition?
> I still believe lockdowns were harmful overall (eg including aspects like additional deaths of despair - suicide and overdose, less healthy activities - exercise and socializing etc).
Lockdowns were absolutely harmful - I don't think anyone is claiming otherwise. They were effective in stopping health systems collapsing, which is why pretty much everywhere implemented them when it looked like their health systems were about to be overwhelmed. (cf Italy in early 2020). That would have been catastrophic compared to the harms of lockdown.
In terms of suicides specifically, the evidence is not clear. I've seen studies that indicate suicide rates did not increase or actually fell during the pandemic, e.g. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... . There were also fewer deaths from road traffic accidents etc. However, there were lots of other harmful effects such as secondary effects from the economic impact.
> Do you know of any good evidence that lockdowns were effective, or are you calling bullshit based on intuition?
There have been a number of studies concluding that lockdowns were effective. I doubt digging them up will convince any of the sceptics in this thread.
I’m skeptical but open to changing my mind. The suicide paper was interesting, I think it makes sense that early in the pandemic suicides would decrease. I would be interested to see a similar analysis for 2022 and 2023 since I would expect there to be many second-order suicides (not a suicide during the lockdown but a later suicide as a result of lost social interactions, additional addictions and economic impacts).
Are there any particular papers in the report that you think are evidence that lockdowns prevented health system collapse and were beneficial overall?
I had a preliminary skim of it and decided to check the first relevant citation for lockdown effectiveness. It has the same problems as most of the studies I have seen: it does not include any of the second order effects. Of course virus transmission is reduced by limiting interactions but this is only one part of the story. This may be answered in some of the other references but I need to put it aside for now.
We do not need to look further than excess mortality during the period.
It's three years later now and the numbers are in. There is plenty of high quality data from all Western countries.
However data driven policy decisions should be much more fine grained than that. We should instead identify specific situations where different type of lockdowns would make sense.
But the data is clear. Prolonged periods looks bad, at closing schools were clearly the wrong decision on every time scale.
I know you're spreading misinformation to cover the fact you were breaking all kinds of quarantine procedures because a coward called you a coward one time. Now you're faced with an overwhelming mountain of evidence that your behaviour lead to many deaths and the cowardice resurfaced. You're now a conspiracy theorist and limit yourself to circles that share your mistake. You must be spending a lot of time on Facebook and Reddit.
I could cite the most objective sources and statistics, but if you haven't figured it out by now, you don't want to. You're on the level of flat-earthers. The only difference being there's way more of you than of those idiots. And if you think the number of people believing in something somehow gives it credibility, then you should start preparing yourself to meet Allah in the afterlife.
> COMIRNATY is a vaccine indicated for active immunization to prevent
coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory
syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in individuals 12 years of age and
older. (1)
A single indication, "not getting it". This is what the clinical trials tested and this is what the FDA approved.
> The trials were never powered to even test for infetion or transmission.
You called that very statement a "bizarre claim" upthread.
Try this: "Seatbelts prevent injury and death in car accidents."
They don't prevent every single one of them, but no one calls the above statement a lie. Your standard - requiring a vaccine be perfect at its purpose - is an invented one in bad faith to win an argument.
That alone demonstrates the vaccine can help you not get it.
We have loads of evidence of it lessening symptoms; for a non-zero amount of people, that'll mean going from symptomatic to asymptomatic, i.e. SARS-CoV-2 infection but not COVID-19.
Vaccines have never been expected to be perfect in this regard; some polio vaccines can give people polio, for example.
(The idea that "turns out it only prevents hospitalization and/or death, not mild symptoms" is a bad result is also lunacy from the start.)
>>>> Vaccination was never about "not getting it".
Of course it was about whether the vaccine prevents you from "getting it" (it being Covid). The original claim was that it was 95% effective in preventing you getting it.
> We have loads of evidence of it lessening symptoms; for a non-zero amount of people, that'll mean going from symptomatic to asymptomatic, i.e. SARS-CoV-2 infection but not COVID-19.
We have loads of crappy evidence showing that (see below). Crappy means highly confounded observational data.
> Vaccines have never been expected to be perfect in this regard; some polio vaccines can give people polio, for example.
No one expects them to be perfect, but the original claims were they were supposed to be 95% effective in preventing Covid. Real world efficacy is no where near that. If there's any efficacy at all it is in the low teens.
[BTW, there's a huge debate about the oral Polio vaccine. The US stopped vaccinating with it two decades ago because of that risk]
> (The idea that "turns out it only prevents hospitalization and/or death, not mild symptoms" is a bad result is also lunacy from the start.)
It would be luncay if anyone actually claimed that.
The problem is that claiming that it prevents hospitalizations or deaths requires evidence. Reliable evidence.
A recent NEJM correspondence demonstrates quite vividly how terrible much of the evidence for that claim was:
I caught covid after getting vaccinated and I would not have even known I had it had a coworker not tested positive and I had to test to come back to the office. Symptoms were incredibly mild. A lot of people my age who weren't vaccinated ended up the in the ER. I never thought the vaccine would prevent disease, it was never claimed that the vaccine prevented catching covid, it always just reduced severity and mortality.
The vaccine was never approved for reduction of symptoms because there was no good evidence to make this claim. And there's no good evidence to make it now.
It was approved for the prevention of Covid (the 'D' stands for disease). It was supposed to prevent you from getting Covid, regardless of severity, and it didn't.
And if we're citing anecdotal evidence. I know of no one who got anything more than flu symptoms, and for most it was mild, regardless of vaccination.
That includes obese diabetic 80s year olds. I know of no one personally who went to the ER except for a vaccinated friend who panicked.
I’m not saying it didn’t reduce your symptoms - it probably did. But there were plenty of people that caught COVID unvaccinated and had the same experience as you.
On the other hand, I had the wonderful experience of catching the first virus and the delta variant. I should have been more protected than with the vaccine by itself as the data clearly showed at the time but it still hit me, a 34 year old decently fit person, almost equally as hard. I had 2-3 weeks of incredibly high fever along with a bunch of other nasty symptoms.
We’re all different. My retirement age mom has never been vaccinated (even though I wish she would have) and she’s either never caught it, which I doubt, or it was so mild she didn’t realize it.
i cant imagine how it must feel to have her own vaccine injected in her, and know she saved so many lives through her persistence and the rare few that believed in her through her lowest moments.
Is this the first practical, mass deployable remote code execution in a human? Or was there something earlier?
I particularly enjoyed the unreasonably effective antivirus bypass achieved by slight modification of the payload by introducing pseudouridine (?), which the antivirus had never seen before and therefore ignored. Such a bypass definitely deserves a Nobel Prize!
Attenuated/weakened viruses still infect cells and go through normal protein-making machinery. Inactivated viruses and subunit/recombinant vaccines, however, just directly expose our immune system to the antigen(s) of the pathogen.
mRNA/viral vector/attenuated all involve some degree of "code execution."
> I don't think weakened viruses go through our protein-making machinery (aka code execution)
Yes they do. They are live viruses, and they attack cells and hijack their protein-making machinery for making more viruses. But the attenuated vaccine viruses are not capable of causing a severe disease, so in time the body's immune system cleans them out.
The viral vector vaccines are a very similar development as the mRNA vaccines, and I'm curious as to why they've received less attention as a technological wonder.
Brief summary:
Goal of vaccine is to get antigens in body in order to stimulate immune response to antigen, ideally at a lower risk than via infection from associated pathogen.
- "Traditional" vaccines inject a dead or weakened pathogen. Protein subunit vaccines inject just the antigen(s). Antigen directly put in body
Both mRNA and viral vector vaccines, however, are genetic vaccines. Rather than injecting your body with the antigen directly, they inject your body with code (mRNA and DNA, respectively), with the goal of having your own body produce the antigen(s).
- mRNA vaccines deliver a snippet of mMRNA via lipid nanoparticles to your cells' cytoplasm, where your ribosomes pick it up and produce and express the antigen themselves
- viral vector vaccines deliver a snippet of code via living virus (in the case of COVID vaccines, a living adenovirus delivering a DNA payload) to your cells' nucleus, where your cells reads the DNA, produces mRNA in your cytoplasm, after which it behaves the same as the mRNA vaccines
Basically, both the mRNA vaccines and viral vector vaccines are genetic in nature and rely on delivering code to your body rather than antigens. The analogy I've used before is that traditional vaccines are SSR, and the genetic platforms are SPA. I'm just curious as to why mRNA as a platform has been so much more hyped than the viral vectors; they're novel in fundamentally the same exact way.
Likely due to the limitations and challenges with the viral vaccines. Perhaps the biggest limitation is that the virus used as the vector must be one to which you don't already have immunity. For instance the adenovirus used by the Chinese and Russian vaccines is pretty common in the west, with something nearly half of all Americans have some immunity to it.
Yes, the delivery system definitely has that drawback. However, the lipid nanoparticles as a delivery system have problems of their own, which I laid out in a sibling comment to your own.
But my question is more related to the pop-science perception of mRNA vs viral vector. mRNA were presented as new technology, but on media publication after media publication, the viral vectors were presented as the "old"/"traditional" way of doing things. 9/10 people have that understanding of the mRNA vs vv vaccines. The truth is that both are radical departures from existing technologies and they're both genetic platforms very similar in nature, and both completely novel being deployed at this scale.
One is that the mRNA vaccines were brand new, while VV was old enough that most people have already taken a few shots using it. The media has a very non-linear response to novelty.
Another one is that the most profit-seeking laboratories were working with it. And they are the ones with closest relation to the media.
Finally, it may be some reflection of the experts hype. People were very rationally hyped due to the lack of restrictions, easiness to ramp-up new vaccines, and the bare beauty of the idea. It's possible that journalists perceived that, even if they couldn't understand or explain the reasons.
Neither mRNA nor viral vector vaccines were new. mRNA had a vastly better safety and efficacy profile. AstraZeneca had the clots, the Russians had the issue with replication (and use Ad5), and the Chinese exclusively used a virus that nearly half of all Americans are immune to. And IIRC the mRNA vaccines were still more effective against the variants.
> "Besides injection site [muscle] and lymph nodes [proximal and distal], increased mRNA concentrations (compared to plasma levels) were found in the spleen and eye. Both tissues were examined in the frame of the toxicological studies conducted with mRNA-1273 final vaccine formulation. Low levels of mRNA could be detected in all examined tissues except the kidney. This included heart, lung, testis and also brain tissues, indicating that the
mRNA/LNP platform crossed the blood/brain barrier
A similar 2017 study was conducted using mRNA coded for luciferase as a tracking mechanism:
And it, likewise, found the protein was produced in the muscles, lymph nodes, spleen, liver, heart, bone marrow, kidney, lung, stomach, rectum, intestines, testes, and brain.
One of the main draws of using the lipid nanoparticle as a delivery mechanism for other payloads in the past has specifically been that the lipid nanoparticle can readily cross the brain-blood barrier (BBB). And the EMA paper/quotation referenced above seems to verify that this is, in fact, the case.
A question that both platforms have to contend with is: "what, if any, risks are associated with having your cells producing and expressing a pathogenic antigen that your immune system is to identify and attack?" But one that the lipid nanoparticle delivery system has to contend with is the same question, but in the context that it has very little differentiation WRT where it is going to be deployed and expressed.
With the viral vector vaccines, the delivery mechanism is a living virus, and has much more predictable infection pathways. For one, our bodies have millions of years of evolution for dealing with viral infection, and particularly safeguarding the parts of our body least desirable for infection. Viruses have a very hard time crossing the blood brain barrier, whereas lipid nanoparticles do not.
There are, meanwhile, concerns associated with the viral vector vaccines which are not associated with the mRNA vaccines, but I've yet to see this sufficiently addressed as a major shortcoming of the mRNA platform. Targeted delivery is a very important topic in the world of gene therapies, and seems to have been completely neglected in the available platforms.
> As another note, the mRNA platform has a few concerns that the viral vector vaccines do not.
E.g. the target patient might already have a good immune response to the vector hull. I.e. the patient's immune systems would destroy the vaccine before it can do its work. One of the vector vaccines against covid did use two different vectors because of that. But repeated usage of the same vector might decrease its effectiveness.
The 4th paragraph in the Nobel Prize press release suggests that it's because mRNA based vaccines are easier to scale up and mass produce in response to a pandemic:
"Producing whole virus-, protein- and vector-based vaccines requires large-scale cell culture. This resource-intensive process limits the possibilities for rapid vaccine production in response to outbreaks and pandemics."
"But for many years her career at the University of Pennsylvania was fragile. She migrated from lab to lab, relying on one senior scientist after another to take her in. She never made more than $60,000 a year"
The perspective from the inside is pretty different from the outside. High-functioning families see their achievements as “normal” while the rest of the community looks around in awe.
Yes. That's because "high-functioning families" compare themselves with those who are better, not those who are worse. They go "sure I got 2 olympic medals, but bob and suse also got 2 each. It's not a big deal". They never dwell in thoughts like "I got 2 olympic medals, and look at the billions of people who got zero."
Absolutely. Becoming world class at anything, especially anything competitive, also involves failing about a million times on the way up. In coaching chess one of the first things one tends to ask is what the student wants to achieve. And the typical response has something to do with winning. But they don't need you for that. If they just want to win, then they but need to never play anybody better than themselves!
Improving involves blood, sweat, tears, and defeat. Only to come back ever stronger.
You can fail or have success on many dimensions. There is probably some skill you are good innately, or better than a large chunk of population. On that dimension you will have probably have built a pretty good self-esteem over the years, but you know that you can still improve (hence comparing yourself with who got 4 medals if you have 2) but fear of failing will not completely block you, only stress you more to raise the bar.
On the other hand, in domains where you are not so good by default, if you are a perfectionist you can totally risk being paralyzed until you think you are "good enough for it".
I don't think there is a "good by default" dimension. Maybe a "learning easier" dimension. I'd argue that in such advanced spheres comparison becomes secondary. First an foremost it's about the activity. Like friends competing in a game of cards. It's about having fun with friends. Winning is for having a purpose to play.
It's just what happens whenever you rise in the ranks of any domain.
People in the 99th percentile aren't super happy and satisfied that they've outcompeted 99% of the participating population who look at them with awe and envy. They're comparing themselves to the 99.9th percentile who leave them in awe and envy.
I think it's important for any high performer to occasionally step out of their narrow perception of the world and really grok how far ahead they are compared to everyone else. This is definitely something a lot of my high income tech friends could learn to appreciate when they get caught up feeling like a loser for only making $250k total comp.
> I think it's important for any high performer to occasionally step out of their narrow perception of the world and really grok how far ahead they are compared to everyone else.
A (pre-Putin) Russian proverb goes it’s better to be first in the village, than it is to be last in the city.
I know a family of a nobel prize winner, and everyone in it is just insanely talented -- like, if you were to caricature the experience of a super genius family you'd actually probably get pretty close to them. And, your point is spot on. For them, the sheer creativity and output (in writing, science, and music) of the whole family was kind of seen as table stakes and something rather unremarkable. Whenever I was over for dinner I felt like a kid in class who hadn't done the reading haha (just in terms of how hard it was to keep up... they were all super gracious and I have many many cherished memories from the time we hung out)
To be honest and in this context. Nobel prize committees doesn't do any better and have history of failing in recognizing great scientific achievements until long time passes [1] (and sometimes scientists die before that which disqualify them from the prize)
They only give one per year and there's probably more than one nobel prize worthy achievement every year on average, so they end up with a backlog. Unless something huge happens in a given year like the Higgs, they're probably going to reach back as far as they can for a worthy award to make sure people get the awards before they die.
Also Higgs probably falls in that category too. His original research was almost 50 years old... Only receiving award after it was confirmed with testing.
The class of people who seem to do well in academia these days are those focused on grinding out masses of papers on incremental advances. Professors good at writing grant applications do well too, because with those grants they can afford to hire lots of graduate students to help with those incremental advances and masses of papers.
Individuals focused on real discovery and not publishing much until they really have something significant to say don't fit into this well.
Well at the moment the UK could really benefit from tax revenue from a certain prosperous former colony so that sounds good to me. Not sure about the benefit for the colony.
There aren't a lot of places where going into academia has significant opportunity cost (like for example, losing out on the prospect of a yacht paid for by reactjs work).
Musk and Bezos have their science/engineering experiments... and Gates through his investments. Hell, if we look at this broadly, many investments are being made in science - just through through (and to) institutions.
There's no need to "bring it back" because we never "got rid of it". It's just a natural part of some people being wealthy - they have more time/resources to spend on various pursuits, including art and science.
This is still true, although to a lesser degree, because everyone is much better off. 500 years ago, you could only pursue some things if you were born rich. Today, the field has greatly expanded, to everyone's benefit.
There are several SROs ("Scientific Research Organizations") funded by extremely wealthy folks (typically made their billions in tech). They can offer scientists a number of nice things that universities can't- for example, Arc Institute, created by Patrick Collison among others, has plenty of lab space and computing for its members, compared to the space and computing available on campuses like UCSF and Stanford.
That never went away. We just have multiple avenues:
1. Government funded research
2. Private industrial research
3. Private personal research
Usually, those involved in #3 are made fun of constantly by the lumpenproles. Before someone in category #3 makes it they look like Bryan Johnson doing Blueprint. That's the defining characteristic, actually. If you were to look at Ms. Kariko before she was successful, the majority of HN users would have made fun of her.
I wonder if there's a way to measure the proportions of impactful science coming from private companies versus universities. Perhaps measure by field, too, since the proprotions may differ in genomics vs electrical engineering, for example.
I don't have any idea how to calculate those proportions, but it's an awesome puzzle.
Private companies are interested in profitable science, not impactful science. In fact it can have negative impact: Discovering a way to extend intellectual property rights for an expiring patent, or a formulation that they can charge more for. Discovering a cheap cure for cancer wouldn't help profits.
And have their own internal politics - they want science that does not disrupt the VP/CEO's plans, or make the chief scientist look bad.
Many companies, unfortunately, go out of their way to not produce meaningful science in the sense of publicly available (trade secrets) or publicly usable (patents) knowledge. Biotech especially.
How is that different from any profit seeking endeavor? You could write the same company about software companies that don't open source all of their code..
Fundamentally, it isn‘t. Practically, some industries are more open about their work than others—computer graphics (both game and cinematic) come to mind as an example on the opposite end of the spectrum from the secretive worlds of biotech or (say) semiconductor manufacturing.
My point was only that (by the definition I think makes the most sense here) they are doing science to the exact extent they give up the intellectual-property monopoly, whatever that extent happens to be.
I mean, there’s definitely a date in the past before which this definition is not useful. On the other hand, if a human learns something new, but nobody else does as a consequence of that, has human knowledge advanced? There are always edge cases—occasionally the mere awareness that something is possible has allowed others to rediscover the method—but generally I’d say no.
That does not mean that dissemination of new information has to work like it does now. The Republic of Letters was very different but quite successful. But if you have taken no effort to make your discovery available to others, I’d say you’re not advancing the cause of human learning; if you have taken effort to ensure it is not available, like what many patents aim for nowadays, I’d say you’re working against it.
I am in academia and I see the same thing among my colleagues. In physics and chemistry. I also see a lot of data manipulation, lies in methodology, omission of any flaws in the studies, just to get published. Because that is the only measure of your value ti the institution.
Fuck, even the head of the institution publicly announced that only quantity matters, not quality. Because the government funding for research also depends only on quantity.
Graduate school, MS at Harvard & MIT, PhD at UIUC.
Both my MS and PhD supervisors were brilliant and strongly believed in publishing only when they had something real to talk about, which I respected a lot. But it was clear this wasn't what the top professors were doing. They were running paper mills.
>> What fields in academia?
Elec engineering & CS.
>> Do you work there or have friends there
I don't work there, although I was offered several positions. This culture is pretty much why I chose industry. In the real world, most customers care about real achievements.
This is especially true in U.S. health sciences, where to get money from the NIH, you must plan and describe the outcome of the next 3-5 yrs of research. It's not acceptable to say, "We're going to explore this area for 5 years and see what we find and hope for a surprise."
Obviously, you then only get very incremental, low-risk, low-reward research, but high-profile scientists who mainly serve on the committees at the NIH and dole out funding get to keep their small business (err, I mean lab) going with minimal disruption in funding.
yeh unfortunately most of the best professors spend the majority of their time applying for grants for their students, going to conference, doing admin etc rather than work in a lab
They are more likely to be able to recognize talented grad students and build an army of them to pump out good (great?) papers and hit up the conference circuit.
Survivor bias. This is what often mentioned in any thread about business success, yet nobody has mentioned it here.
Institutions also often don't recognize researches that end up going nowhere. What we can say is that finding a gem is hard because of abundance of noise.
I know it's a dumb cultural cite, but I keep thinking of the "12th man" scene from the movie (book too?) "World War Z". The Israeli is explaining that his job is to disagree with the consensus. Just in case. Who is then given charter and resources to plan accordingly. Just in case.
I hope there's many buckets of research funds. With a modest bucket for long shots. And perhaps a smaller bucket for loonie tunes. Where by formalizing that model would preempt all the reactionary "omgherd golden fleece!?" outbursts.
As a taxpayer, I'd be thrilled if researchers, artists, journalists, musicians, and misc crazies got some kind of UBI, to do their work without starving. Considering the scale of all the usual waste and pork, genius grants wouldn't be more than a round-off error.
With a payout of 1:1000, it'd be a bargain for society. Smartest investments ever.
Kariko had a PhD from Hungary, was a post-doc at Temple U. - not an elite pedigree. At Penn, an elite school:
"It was a low-level position, research assistant professor, and never meant to lead to a permanent tenured position."
and after that boss left,
"Dr. Kariko was left without a lab or financial support. She could stay at Penn only if she found another lab to take her on. “They expected I would quit,” she said.
Universities only support low-level Ph.D.s for a limited amount of time, Dr. Langer said: “If they don’t get a grant, they will let them go.” Dr. Kariko “was not a great grant writer,” ...
Kariko was slotted into the non-tenure / adjunct role, and it didn't matter what they did. It happens in private industry too. The problem is elitism overlooking talent and production. It's a brazen, obvious flaw.
The US long had the culture - imperfect, of course - of an active rejection of elitism, class, etc. 'All men are created equal', 'every man a king', meritocracy, hard work, you can accomplish anything if you work hard enough, the land of opportuity, the American Dream, etc. That equality, the respect for others, is the foundation of voting - you respect everyone's right to have input and its value.
The dominant fashion, a sort of neo-reactionaryism, is to reject that, deride it, rather than aggressively moving it forward. Many people look for ways to justify prejudice, to exclude, to embrace personal ego and greed and to mock public good. I think that's because if you embrace universal rights, opportunity, equality, etc., you can't avoid 'liberal' ideals too, and those are the target of reactionaryism.
"active rejection of elitism". Not really. In US 'elite' means money wealth, whereas in historical Europe 'elite' means martial nobility. Anecdata: the very concept of 'legacy admission' is overtly classist, and simply does not exist in continental Europe. US is very much elitist, it's just that its manifestation of elitism is less obvious to the unsuspecting eye.
Is there any non-elitist country out there? Humans tend to socially stratify even in relatively modest conditions (such as tribal life).
What really matters is if the elite is closed or relatively permeable, and how it treats the non-elite.
What the founding generation of America rejected, was inheritance of elite status, but I don't think they were completely egalitarian either. After all, people like Jefferson and Washington were highly regarded by their peers.
Again, it's not at all perfect, but it has certainly been a widely held value and objective. Think of the overt humility of Washington, Lincoln, and most American leaders until around seven years ago.
I wonder if she would have survived today’s even more competitive academic environment. If not then we must wonder how many future Karikos have been silenced by our current academic system.
I often wonder if, as a lay person, I would be capable of understanding the significance of really technical papers like this if I were to randomly start reading. Probably not without the right foundation.
I read this as an undergrad and had a blast (inside joke lol). I am considering starting a YouTube channel explaining such breakthroughs while going through the original research. If you’re interested I’ll ping you as focus group when I have some!
Insufferable Orban incoming, “another victory for Hungary, we are the best yada yada”
Even though her tenure was/is in the US and she couldn’t have done any of the research in Hungary. Which is pretty much true for all the previous hungarians (Albert Szent-Györgyi being the only exception) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hungarian_Nobel_laurea...
It's you who brought Orban here first, quoting something he didn't say, then refute it. Are you from some kind of propaganda school? Orbán posted this in fact: "My congratulations to the first Hungarian woman winning the Nobel prize. We are proud!"
Good. I have so much hope in mRNA technology.
Also love the story of Kariko who was almost labelled a pseudoscientist with her research.
Goes to tell how you should take nonsense or genial exclamations with a grain of salt.
Just wish so many of us had not been coerced into taking them under the threat of having our freedom severely limited. I got severely sick from the second moderna shot. And there is reallo no data that shows that my age group benefitted from it especially since it did almost nothing in terms of reduce transmission.
So it kinda feels like we were just forced lab rats.
"Previous studies have shown that vaccinating low-risk groups resulted in more sick days due to adverse events following immunization than the days gained by preventing infection."
What took us out of lockdown in the end was not the vaccines or the billions spent on them.
Not even the dumb masks and the draconian asinine distancing rules.
It was Omicron. Plain and simple.
So the borderline forceful injections of billions did very little in terms of spread, saved only a handful of frail souls in the west since the poor countries never even got vaccines to cover their medical staff.
This mess possibly damaged the trust bond between the public and "medical experts" for a very long time.
Does not take away from the fact that I still believe we will see great things with mRNA vaccines in the future. I am not to thrilled about how we were forcefully introduced to it though.
> What took us out of lockdown in the end was not the vaccines or ht billions spent on them. Not even or the dumb masks and the draconian asinine distancing rules. It was Omicron. Plain and simple.
But on the other hand, how much did the vaccination campaign accelerate the emergence of Omicron? I don't think there's any way to tell.
Please don't use praise to smuggle in vaccine misinformation.
The vaccines were a (successful) strategy for the population as a whole; their use on low-risk groups was a part of that strategy.
While the usefulness of some of the tactics and groups targeted can be debated, isolating them out of that context to push your anti-vax message is extremely misleading.
What misinformation? I don't see anything misleading whatsoever about OP's comment. The vaccines certainly didn't prevent transmission, and according to his data they didn't help prevent sickness in lower age groups either.
> What took us out of lockdown in the end was not the vaccines or the billions spent on them. Not even the dumb masks and the draconian asinine distancing rules. It was Omicron. Plain and simple.
The Nobel Prize in vaccine disinformation goes to:
It's not hard spotting people that broke quarantine rules for a tiny ego boost. A lot of people died strictly because of it. With all the censorship on other topics on HN, I truly wonder why such medical disinformation is being tolerated and even upvoted. HN is becoming more like Reddit by the day now.
Being cowards and downvoting me on a dead post without having the guts to state your opinion in trembling fear of outing yourself as corona-deniers in a sick society where this is actually acceptable, none the less, one can tell that this kind of opinion is really only held by the worst our species has to offer and their boot lickers.
> Many people around the world may have wondered how it is possible that billions of "vaccine doses" can be made available at the push of a button, and all governments worldwide have agreed to torture their populations until everyone is dosed with a vaccine at least three times or even more - from babies to hospice residents. [...]
> Many people around the world may have wondered how it is possible that billions of "vaccine doses" can be made available at the push of a button, and all governments worldwide have agreed to torture their populations until everyone is dosed with a vaccine at least three times or even more - from babies to hospice residents. [...]
I think we need to recognize that sometimes (often?) innovators are "kinda kooky" sometimes. In a different field, folks are surprised that a guy trying to send rockets to Mars is kinda kooky sometimes.
Before you get downvoted to oblivion. I think it is a fair question.
Yes, Robert Malone could be seen as initiating the journey in 1987 [0] but there are a lot of landmark contributors who refined it to the mass-produced mRNA platform of today.
As with other Nobel Prizes, it is a far outdated award of the late 19th/early 20th century in which honoring single individuals made some sense.
In today's scientific enterprise the high-frequent collaborative effort of different teams all over the world is the norm, so over time it becomes pretty hard to single out individual scientists.
The prize winners of today are just widely recognized representatives (and therefore mostly older folks) of a particular successful scientific endeavor so that the public can still relate to the achievements via a personal story what would be otherwise a history lesson involving a lot of important people - and in this case I think Karikó's extraordinary perseverance throughout her science career fits this bill very well without ruffling up some too many feathers.
The first few minutes of this video goes over what he contributed to the mRNA vaccine technology. The rest of the video debunks some claims he made on Joe Rogan.
"While Malone promotes himself as an inventor of mRNA vaccines,[1][7] credit for the distinction is more often given to the lead authors on the major papers he contributed to (such as Felgner and Wolff), later advances by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman,[3][19] or Moderna co-founder Derrick Rossi.[13] Ultimately, mRNA vaccines were the decades-long result of the contributions of hundreds of researchers, including Malone.[3][20][21] In April 2022, Davey Alba, writing for The New York Times, said that "[w]hile he was involved in some early research into the technology, his role in its creation was minimal at best", citing "half a dozen Covid experts and researchers, including three who worked closely with Dr. Malone."[7] "[0]
Interesting -- I just got my fourth covid vaccine, along with a flu shot, yesterday. I got two shots in 2021, one in 2022, and my fourth yesterday.
Vaccines are a godsend. Also, I have never had covid.
I'm not convinced that the vaccines are 100% bad but they were a novel technology and I'm not sure we're far enough along to judge them objectively yet.
Regardless of how good they are, they were definitely over-sold.
IMO (but I'm barely more than a layman), mRNA already offers a safer delivery mechanism than previous vaccination methods, and the massive COVID campaigns have revealed much about the virus, but nothing about the vaccination method.
The number of deaths due to COVID has been estimated at over 5 million. The fact that it didn't get much higher, and we can stroll about like nothing happened, is already a miracle.
Edit: didn't finish...
So what is your worry? Sure, there is the possibility of abusing the tech, like any tech. But healthwise?
I misunderstood. I thought the award was for the vaccination, rather than the underlying technology. The technology is definitely worth an award.
I think that there is enough "noise" over COVID vaccine side-effects that we don't yet know whether long term it is safe. I also think that given the politicisation of COVID (for instance even discussion of the lab leak theory was gas-lit), I don't think politicians would admit to an issue even if there was one.
My understanding is that almost all side-effects of mRNA covid vaccines originate in the fact that the body produces a part of the virus. If that part of the virus can damage the body, so can the vaccine. This is the mechanism for the myocarditis after vaccination. But it also means that the probability to get myocarditis from an actual infection is much higher because of the exponential growth of the real virus.
If that understanding holds up against scrutiny in the future, mRNA vaccines are an extremely safe and capable platform to deliver vaccines.
To think of it in programming terms: the original vaccines had code with a length of 4000-4300 nucleotides. Yes, that protein might trigger reactions after injection. But, then, what would you expect from the virus, which has almost 30,000 nucleotides, encoding an additional 28 proteins, including those involved in replication and camouflaging?
The only scenario in which you have better chances not taking the vaccine is by making sure you never get exposed to the virus, for years.
I figured there'd be a Nobel Prize for the mRNA vaccines. This is deserved and the further impacts of this are going to be felt for decades.
Some background: for many years, the flu vaccine has had what's called the "egg problem". The vaccine is cultivated in chicken eggs in a sterile environment. The US government pays billions every year to maintain these production lines. It takes about 4-5 months to go from choosing what flu strainsa are likely to be prevalent to there being a vaccine. The production line can't scale up quickly either.
Also, people who are allergic eggs can't generally take the flu vaccine. That's why they ask you.
For decades the US government has funded research to get away from this system and that resulted in the mRNA vaccine. It doesn't require chicken eggs to produce and the lead time for producing a vaccine goes to almost immediate. we saw this with Covid where the candidate vaccines were produced in days. This fed into conspiracy theories about it being unsafe because it was rushed but it was nothing more than the culmination of decades of research where fast vaccine turnaround was the entire point.
In future years we'll see mRNA vaccines turned to diseases that have thus far we've been unable to produce vaccines for.
I'm hopeful that you're right about the future of the technology.
> This fed into conspiracy theories about it being unsafe because it was rushed but it was nothing more than the culmination of decades of research where fast vaccine turnaround was the entire point.
That's one interpretation. I wonder if you'd apply that same interpretation to the first few viable aircraft. Surely flight was studied for millennia at the point that the wright brothers got their plane flying. Would you hop in and try to cross the Atlantic on one? Or would you fall prey to conspiracy theories that maybe they hadn't worked out all the kinks yet?
edit: I suppose I'm being downvoted for spreading Big Wheel's antiwinger talking points.
I still think about this when flying, ultimately it’s a choice and you have to trust a whole chain of humans ( pilots, techs, controllers, engineers, suppliers ) doing things the right way - makes you realize flight is really a miracle
I dont mind getting in a plane these days (aside from all the bullshit you have to deal with on either end of the trip). I would be a little hesitant to be strapped into Flyer I or even Flyer II. I wonder if there was stigma for that position back then? Maybe if it had the right marketing budget.
I'm responding to the argument that decades of research is enough to feel safe using a technology. Maybe there is a better argument, but OP didn't make it.
How long have we studied the fountain of youth? The cure for baldness? Penis enlargement pills? Would you trust any of today's solutions to those problems?
Research time is necessary but not sufficient. What I and many others care about is time in production usage.
The comparison you made was not accurate. We have a pretty good handle on the science of how the body builds up immunity to pathogens (most lay folks can tell you something about white blood cells). I think a more apt analogy would be prop planes are to dead virus vaccines as jet planes are to mRNA vaccines. And I do think we were jumping into jet planes fairly quickly after inventing them, because at that point we already understood the principles of flight well, jet turbine engines were just another mechanism of delivery.
What does pretty good handle mean to you? We obviously know some things - we have various models that are predictive. We seem decent at figuring out if I do X, then Y will happen with some frequency. And thats the sort of thing that will sell a drug like hot cakes.
We don't seem good at knowing that it doesn't also cause Z, A, B, C, etc, and by the time you figure any of that out, the checks have already been cashed and spent.
I don't think lay folks being able to regurgitate some terminology says much. Lay folks could tell you that birds flap their wings long before we had controlled manned flight.
Maybe I'm not tracking the argument. Are you saying that because we can't completely model the body's response to a drug or immunization through to the body's eventual death, we shouldn't trust it or use it?
My argument was just that this is weak, nothing more:
> This fed into conspiracy theories about it being unsafe because it was rushed but it was nothing more than the culmination of decades of research where fast vaccine turnaround was the entire point.
Some people want to count all of the research time that went into mRNA tech as part of its "age" as a technology, like when it was being first tested on mice, or still failing small scale human trials. Others (like me) start the clock at the point when it started being rolled out in people en mass.
That has nothing to do with conspiracy theories (everyone's favorite mental shortcut). It has everything to do with not wanting others foisting their risk calculus on my medical decisions. It was somewhat understandable when everyone was being blasted with the propaganda about killing grandma, but we should be clear now that it was never actually appropriate to be trying to force this thing on anyone, and that was one of the bullshit arguments used to do so.
Ah I see you must have lived (or live) in a country where it or was (or is) legally required to get the vaccine? I would agree then - there's a clear moral hazard with forcing people to get a medical treatment against their will.
As an example, fear of flying is more prevalent in the population than fear of driving. This is despite flying being demonstrably safer by any metrics you choose. It, like pretty much any fear, is irrational. That's fine.
This only becomes a problem try to rationalize their fears and make them seem logical. Again, if that's purely an internal struggle that's fine. But if your fear of flight led you to push policy and legislation to outlaw planes and airports using junk science about noise, pollution or safety then your fear of flyijng has become a problem that needs to be addressed. And you need to be ignored.
Which brings us to mRNA vaccines and the "evidence" of them being unsafe. Trust me when I tell you that what motivates you here is your feelings, not anything rational. I would strongly encourage you to figure out why that is.
No, right thread. Your original comment immediately pegged you as an anti-vaxxer. You might try the slightly better label of "vaccine skeptic" but it's the same thing. This was entirely obvious.
Perusing your comments confirms this pretty quickly eg [1][2][3][4][5][6].
I want to engage, but there doesn't seem to be any point. You seem to be confidently handling my side of the conversation for me.
Though I guess for the record since you're throwing labels at me, I am no such thing by any reasonable definition of the word. Keep fighting the good fight though.
> As an example, fear of flying is more prevalent in the population than fear of driving
And yet despite flying being generally safe, hundreds of people died because Boeing rushed out and undertested the 737 Max; which is the exact same concern people have with the vaccines. And given that that's exactly what happened with the Johnson and Johnson vaccine (recalled last May due to causing fatal blood clots), they are right to be worried.
Just a reminder: Obama got a Nobel prize for peace, while he went nuts on surveillance, did not deliver on the promise to close gitmo, and bombed 6 "sovereign nations". Also his admin got Assange on a banana trial.
Since then I see Nobel prizes as a propaganda tool.
To me it is obvious that mRNA tech was pushed through with emergency clearances, not with rigorous scientific research. But here is another reminder to the public that mRNA tech is very thoroughly "scientific" (what ever that means nowadays).
a desk rejection is when the editor in chief (or managing editor, or whoever is the one first receiving the submitted paper) decides to reject the submission without sending it out for peer review
basically a judgment call by the person in charge of a journal that the paper is not interesting or impactful enough to warrant going through with the rest of the review/publishing process
ouch. but also, surely that has to happen to the majority of papers, meaning the snap judgment call of effectively one person greatly colors the quality of the whole process. as a conference organizer this is something i worry about. is there a better process proposed out there - that respects the constraint that high value people have limited time to review things?
sadly no, it is an unsolved problem of scholarly publishing imo. on the one hand you have the reputable journals following the traditional publishing process that take pride in their high rejection rates -- these require a large percentage of desk rejections to avoid flooding their reviewers with sub-par papers. thus they'll inevitably have some quality papers fall through the cracks + some flashy sub-par papers making the cut.
on the other hand you have the pay-to-publish journals that have a financial incentive to push as many papers through peer review -- these thrive on sub-par papers that are technically just barely 'good enough', but the upside is that the real good ones will also make it through. however, they inevitably face reviewer fatigue, and the most valuable ones will quit reviewing if they often send them low-quality papers. so basically once in a while they'll publish top notch research without being aware of it.
i'm not aware of any middle-ground solutions out there and it certainly feels like a tough problem to solve.
I think preprints provide a good way to solve this problem, but it requires some cultural shifts.
Imagine a world where all papers start their life as preprints. Researchers read these preprints (like arxiv) and comment on them (like PubPeer). Journal editors then search for the best papers (or hear via word of mouth within their field) and journals compete for the rights to publish the most interesting papers. When an agreement is reached, the journal organised reviewers and asks for any changes to the paper.
I may be missing something critical but I dream of a day when the actual people producing academic output have power over journals who produce nothing but fees.
Historically journal controlled peer review didn’t exist and science still progressed perfectly well.
It’s an appealing vision. Distributing the early review process across time and the whole community would solve a lot of problems with the current model.
I do suspect that this would strengthen the winner-takes-all dynamics in academic publishing. Like whoever has the biggest twitter following gets all the attention, then gets Nature and Science competing for their paper, which allows them to get funding to hire a publicist, who increases their profile.
I suspect the opposite since winner-take-all-dynamics are partly driven by gatekeeping. A famous scientist (like Francesca Gino) gains a following _because_ she is anointed by journals and institutions, which causes positive reinforcement via better jobs / grants / book opportunities etc. If top journals reject a researcher, they languish until they get lucky or the value of their work becomes unquestionable (like Katalin Karikó).
In my utopia, publication success would be driven by interest within a field which means lesser known researchers who haven't had breaks in high impact journals are more likely to break through, because the community acts as the gatekeepers, not a small group of journal editors.
I remember a story that the guys that developed PCR presented their results at a conference and no one was interested. The last day some guy walked up, looked at the title to their talk and asked, 'does it really work' and when they said yeah it works and he went 'holy shit'
For those that know more than I do, out of curiosity, why would this Nobel go to these two and not also Özlem Türeci and Ugur Sahin? The four of them shared earlier awards, and it was Özlem Türeci and Ugur Sahin's BioNTech that got the vaccine to market (after their decades of research).
The couple are billionaires, so I'm sure they're doing just fine, but that's gotta hurt to be overlooked for such a major prize when they did so much for that discovery and technology.
Well yes, clearly -- 2005 is before 2008. But it's interesting to see who gets selected when so many other researchers end up being involved with these major technologies before and after a single paper.
Sorry I just think this is actually one of the simpler Nobel prizes and I’m fairly certain they weren’t even in the picture when the discovery was made.
I worked in a lab with “Nobel winning lineage” and the ego fights always come up so I get kind of tired of it coming up lol. Sorry I responded so harshly.
Absolutely, and this is more along what I was asking. What about their discovery was deemed the most important part out of this long chain of work that led up to mRNA vaccination and this Nobel? Nature's news section had a history of discoveries a while back [1], and it seems like there is a lot of disagreement about who deserves what credit.
Personally, it seems like everyone's contribution is important, but we as humans irrationally want to point to a single thing/event/team and say "this was the cause" rather than stand back and notice how interdependent the whole thing is. In the end I think things like Nobels are pretty silly.
Humans are even more irrational! For CRISPR most people expecfted the prize to go to 3 people- Doudna, Charpentier, and Zhang. But Zhang was ommitted and many people think it was because the head of his institution wrote this: https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674%2815%2901705-5 (the establishment hates Eric Lander, and this was a particularly egregious example of his behavior).
But the original discoverer of CRISPR, Francis Mojica, was not awarded the prize. That's because, in my opinion (as well as the Nobel Committee), Doudna and Charpentier played the greatest individual roles in the process of turning the original discovery of CRISPR into a powerful tool (CRISPR/cas9), that is much more general than CRISPR the process that occurs in bacteria. I still think Mojica should have been given the prize, and if 4 recipients were possible, also Zhang.
As a Hungarian-American whose (Hungarian immigrant) father can no longer walk unaided after being administered the vaccine too soon after having contracted COViD (he lives in a place where you have to be 50 years old to own property and they have their own hospital system — you’d think they would have known better), I’m having the most Hungarian response to today’s news possible.
Notwithstanding my own best friend who is a medical doctor and who is unvaxxed (we don’t really talk anymore).
Does not the presence of mRNA artifacts in breast milk, hearts, brains, and every other organ in the body when we were told that absolutely wouldn't happen concerning to anyone else? Isn't it concerning that menstrual cycles were altered in a majority of females after the vax? Does it not concern anyone that the vax causes myocarditis and nobody is quite sure how? GBS? Or that it was literally forced on people on threat of losing your job? Or how institutions have become completely captured and corrupted by this process?! Is it not concerning to anyone that we have changed the definition of vax to accommodate this vax that doesn't actually stop transmission like other vaxes, but that's what we were told at first, which turned out to be one of many dozens of lies surrounding this vax, some of which are still repeated today. But no, a Nobel prize. Awesome.
Like the Oscars and Grammy's, the Nobel Prize is based as much on cultural significance as it is on the quality of the product.
Lobotomies also won the Nobel Prize because they were a cultural phenomenon of the day. JFKs sister got a lobotomy.
So even if these one and a half year old treatments prove to have significant long-term side effects there's still the recognition of the cultural and historical significance.
Dr. Kariko’s experience makes me wonder how many other potentially groundbreaking research nodes are being ignored and whether organizations like YC actually have adequate mechanisms to identify such potential bio-science startups.
"Dr. Kariko’s struggles to stay afloat in academia have a familiar ring to scientists. She needed grants to pursue ideas that seemed wild and fanciful. She did not get them, even as more mundane research was rewarded. “When your idea is against the conventional wisdom that makes sense to the star chamber, it is very hard to break out,” said Dr. David Langer ... Leading scientific journals rejected their work. When the research finally was published, in Immunity, it got little attention. ... “We talked to pharmaceutical companies and venture capitalists. No one cared,” Dr. Weissman said. “We were screaming a lot, but no one would listen.[1]”
Are you saying this is a fact of life, or that it is true by definition? Like, "any idea, to be truly groundbreaking, can not be easily distinguished from noise / crackpot theories".
It's surprisingly difficult to look at an idea and figure out from first principles if its any good. Most of the scientists (and people really) rely on comparing it with what they have already seen and using their experiences from things they know to judge the new idea.
So, its really difficult to judge a revolutionary theory. Crackpot theories are easier to judge however. They often have very provable falsehoods.
"any idea, to be truly groundbreaking, can not be easily distinguished from noise / crackpot theories"
This is an interesting insight. Yeah, I think you are onto something here.
Groundbreaking ideas, as opposed to new technologies, tend not to have obvious real world applications/results for years. As such, they aren't easily distinguishable from random crackpottery.
We tend to validate ideas by their later applications, or, at the very least, a heap of corroborating evidence. Both takes a lot of time to aggregate.
It's practically a tautology, if the idea was easily distinguishable from 'random crackpottery' then it wouldn't be so groundbreaking, because it necessitates that the other party in a 30 to 60 minute meeting could confidently distinguish it.
> It mostly shows that gov. funded research grants are broken and just fund echo chambers.
No, it shows there are weaknesses in the government-funded research grants. But it is far from clear which other system would be better overall not just in this case.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it" -- Max Planck
Makes me think of that Feynman commencement speech - hopefully we can get better:
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.
While it's a nice story, I seem to remember that it isn't true.
There was some article a while back that talked about the fact that measurements from the oil drop experiment pretty much moved as the input data got better.
Citations already exist in sibling comments. The linked StackOverflow questions also have further sources where people are trying to track down time-limited original sources.
You clearly couldn't be bothered to put in even a minimal amount of effort to follow the citations that have existed for 12 hours prior to your useless post.
I will give your post as much consideration as you gave mine.
> She needed grants to pursue ideas that seemed wild and fanciful.
You cannot even realize how many people in academia are running for wild and fanciful ideas. Don't blame the scientists, they are probably the most open-minded to the new ideas. But filtering out bad ideas is a part of their job, and they grew thick-skinned from constant bombardment of fancy ideas, we cannot pursue them all.
So I'd say this story is pretty traditional in the history of revolutionary ideas (e.g. a similar story of John Snow vs. cholera -- how many years and lives it took).
For good reason. YC has no business investing in biotech because that’s how we get shit like Theranos. The biotech VC industry is mature with as much or more deal flow in dollars than software VC every year, with tons of people with experience in science and entrepreneurship.
The pipeline for fundamental biology research is much longer and more complex compared to pure tech. This is the reason why there are so many fewer bio-tech start-ups. The same can be said about hardware vs software in pure tech. There must be 100x start-ups in software, compared to hardware. The greatest hope for more break-thrus that can be commercialised is an increase in gov't research funding (say: 10x) and/or the gov't offering bounties with guaranteed contracts for commercial products. Example: If you can create a malaria vaccine with 75% efficacy for children under 12, then US/EU/Japan/UN will guarantee an order for 25B USD or 1B doses. (Something enormous, to really move the needle.)
Wiki tells me that she started publishing about mRNA in 2005. The first mRNA vaccine was not approved until Dec 2022. That kind of timeline is impossible for private investment to fund. It needs to come from gov'ts and non-profits.
Very well deserved. The more we understand how RNA/DNA are able to build proteins, which then assemble into cell parts, into cells into rest of biology, the more we control our future.
I wish I’m alive to see the day when we have cheap DNA compilers and molecular assemblers. Design in CAD and a machine grows it out from a mixture of molecules in water.
yet another hungarian nobel prize winner who managed to get it while left hungary long ago. yet hungarians going to be proud of her. this country such a shame.
Nobel prize recognising effort and intent, not outcome. Didn't stop infection. Didn't stop transmission. Adverse effects overlooked and long term ones unknown.
There have been millions of lives saved, and the studies I’ve seen show far more adverse effects and worse long term outlooks for the unvaccinated. So no, this Nobel prize awards outcome as well.
i wouldn't say she was ignored. this was an important but incremental research.
people always assume that landmark discoveries are immediately obvious but really it only appears so after the accumulation of numerous research built on top of it.
thomas kuhn wrote that knowledge builds up to a tipping point where the collective intelligence begins a paradigm shift and realize that "oh yea... that was a major discovery"
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