[ExI] Vaccines

[The Avantguardian]

On Wednesday, May 13, 2020, 09:36:36 AM PDT, John Clark via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: 

> The average vaccine takes 10.7 years to go from an idea to something the average person can get, the fastest one was the Ebola vaccine and it took 5 years. That's way too slow. It takes such a long time because before clinical trials start an experimental vaccine only has a 6% chance of ever reaching the market; even if it gets to the clinical trials stage there is only a 33% chance of success. But a COVID-19 vaccine is so important we can't proceed with doing business the usual way, we need a massive Manhattan Project style effort. About 100 different vaccines are some stage of development and at least half of them should be aggressively pursued in parallel. And we should definitely use human challenge trials, some will say that's immoral but I think the moral path is the one that produces the least sickness and death.
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While I applaud all the investment in vaccine R&D, it is a risky one because there is a chance the pandemic will be over with by the time any vaccine enters production. While the four endemic human coronaviruses that cause colds seem to generate antibody responses that only last 2-3 years, antibody responses to SARS and MERS, which are more closely related to SARS-CoV-2 generate long-lasting antibody responses.

So there is a good chance that long lasting herd immunity kicks in before vaccine manufacturers would be able to recoup their investment. Of course any new technology developed would hopefully be useful against the NEXT emergent coronavirus. Which seems like a likely proposition.

https://judithcurry.com/2020/05/10/why-herd-immunity-to-covid-19-is-reached-much-earlier-than-thought/?fbclid=IwAR23hi4LXgeVUmq9v1na4_FwCYegxAboBCUiZV6eTroGgPK64XeakNG2Qfs
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> There is also the problem of scaling up, even after a good Vaccine is found we need to make enough for 7.6 billion people. Bill Gates has picked 7 vaccines that he thinks are most promising and is spending several billion dollars to make 7 factories to mass produce them with the full knowledge that most of the factories will be unused and most of the money will end up being wasted because he is willing to trade money for time because every day you save in finding a vaccine you save thousands of lives.  But it's not enough, we need at least 50 factories, if 49 are never used that's OK, it would be money well spent as far as I'm concerned.

Is anybody else a little creeped out by the fact that Bill Gates and Johns Hopkins hosted what amounts to a rehearsal of the pandemic called Event 201 just over a year earlier?

https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/

On their website they issued a statement that the pandemic was not quite as deadly as the one they practiced for. So yeah I hope the naming of COVID-19 was not an homage to Windows-98.

Stuart LaForge