[ExI] The Japanese mystery: why so few COVID cases?

[John Clark]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 12:14 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*> Vaccines are made by isolating a bunch of some pathogen, weakening it
> somehow so it can’t reproduce, inject the weakened and slain pathogen, the
> immune system reacts by producing antibodies, even if the pathogen is too
> weak to spawn. OK, suppose this UV wrecks covid but the treatment doesn’t
> actually remove the destroyed viruses, it only damages them beyond their
> ability to spawn.  Then the damaged viruses are still in the bloodstream,
> alerting the immune system but not replicating. My best guess on why this
> isn’t being done more is that we don’t have enough machines yet. *


You're talking about a live virus vaccine and that's the oldest type of
vaccine technology, and it's the riskiest because there's always the chance
that you have not weakened the virus enough and will end up actually giving
the disease to somebody instead of preventing it. With a good live vaccine
this chance can be made to be quite small but it takes a long time to test
it to make sure. A safer approach is to use a killed virus, but it's hard
and slow to grow and kill and purify the virus so it would take a long time
to make billions of doses and it's very expensive. A even safer approach
would be to not use the entire dead virus but just the protein spikes
sticking out of it because that's with the immune system uses for
recognition, but that sort of virus vaccine takes even longer to purify.

The newest approach, that is so new it has never been used for a human
vaccine before, is to use genetic engineering and not inject any part of
the virus at all into the person but Instead inject DNA or RNA that codes,
not for the entire virus but, just for the virus protein spikes into the
person. The vantage is there's no way it could cause a person to get the
disease and very little genetic material is needed and it's easy to mass
produce, so if it works it would be cheap and quick to make huge numbers of
doses. One vaccine that uses this method entered phase 3 clinical trials
about a month ago and another one is going to start in about a week. Let's
hope for the best.

John K Clark
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