[ExI] vaccine was: RE: damn doctors!

[Brian Manning Delaney]

El 2020-12-17 a las 14:20, Dave Sill via extropy-chat escribió:
> On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 7:43 PM Brian Manning Delaney via extropy-chat 
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>> 
> wrote:
> 
>     I've taken, and am making, the RaDVaC vaccine –
> 
>     https://radvac.org/ <https://radvac.org/>
> 
> 
> Wow, cool! What a great idea.
> 
> My concerns, of course, would be about safety and effectiveness. The 
> side effects reported so far are mild. What's the worst-case scenario? I 
> know the numbers are low, but is there any indication that it works? Or 
> doesn't?


Yeah, I love RaDVaC. The power of the project can be generalized to far 
more than vaccines. A two-pager I wrote when I first found out about 
RaDVaC is here:

http://infinitefaculty.org/RaDVaC/

We're trying to raise funds to do confirmatory testing, but still have a 
ways to go. It's tricky because we need to measure 1) mucosal immunity 
(secretory IgA antibodies), and 2) T cell–mediated immunity, both of 
which are hard to measure.

For now, we've gotten several reports of people being at super-spreader 
events who did not get any symptoms, with one exception: an obese, type 
2 diabetic 70-year-old man, who'd taken the vaccine, and "had a cough 
for four or so days" after being at a such an event, where most of the 
others present got very sick. Maybe the vaccine saved his life. We don't 
know of course.

I've spent a lot of time in Sweden since July, where I followed "when in 
Sweden, do as the Swedes do" (reckless, I know, but after a while one 
loses resolve). Despite coughing blondes slobbering on me at bars, I've 
never had symptoms.

These anecdotes don't mean much of course. My belief in the efficacy of 
the vaccine is, rather, theoretical, sort of like never having heard of 
a parachute when a parachute is offered to me on a plane that's about to 
crash. I can “reason from mechanism” about the effects of being attached 
to a large, light-weight horizontal surface, and can quickly decide to 
accept the offer, even in the absence of clinical trials about the 
safety and efficacy of parachutes.

Same thing with safety: the design has many risk-mitigation strategies 
that make sense.

There are risks to any vaccine, but the risks of COVID-19 to someone, 
like me – well into his fifties, with sub-optimal immunity, seem far 
greater than the risks of RaDVaC.

But now that our design is mature, we're trying to get a clinical trial 
started.

Brian

P.S. It's a legal gray area, but it seems that it might not be illlegal 
for someone to come by my place in Boca Raton and make this with me.