waitwaitwaitwait so

you’re saying now we’re learning how to make HIV, malaria and maybe even cancer vaccines?????

WHY DID IT TAKE A WORLD PANDEMIC TO APPLY ALREADY EXISTING TECHNIQUES TO THE WORLD’S BIGGEST HEALTH ISSUES

https://twitter.com/AugustusRotter/status/1378432530408439809

@xerz regulation that makes it too expensive to bring this stuff to market

@lain it’s easy to say that the regulation is to blame, but that regulation arises from everyone’s expectations and standards

most people are fine with things being strict and taking their time to ensure safety overall, and both governments and pharma seem to like the periods too

and R&D is not affected by such, it’s always gonna be quite expensive due to the complexity of the issues and, once again, the expected rigorousness

@xerz well, you answered your own exasperated question then

@lain not really, I still think it could have happened much earlier if the incentives were right or if people didn’t care as much about them

@xerz @lain I think the issue here was that mRNA wasn't a viable option until very recently, the research was only being kept alive by two companies, they had a breakthrough, and now we get amazing new drugs and they get a pile of money for taking that risk when no one else would. If anything it sounds like the system is working.

@Moon @lain well, it has worked good enough to barely get in time for COVID19, so that’s great

but I try to look for the best system possible here, and I’m wondering if there was such a need to take risks at all, or if we should have taken a lot more risks assuming losses for a greater good, or something alike

@xerz @lain I am actually in favor of governments funding some drug development and then allowing them to be put in the public domain immediately. But I think you can have a ton of people and a ton of money and still have a limit the number of leads you can explore.

In that other thread someone mentioned other diseases that kill more people than COVID. If there was a public panic about those diseases we'd probably unlock resources just as fast as we did with COVID. If it's really true that we got a safe and tested vaccine in ten months because all roadblocks were removed, that gives us a great meter stick to measure against for other health problems. So yeah I think that we could do a lot better.

@Moon @xerz @lain >If it's really true that we got a safe and tested vaccine in ten month
we didn't
emergency use is not approval

@hakui @Moon @lain @xerz it's really an experimental gene therapy, not a vaccine. certainly no reliable evidence yet that it does anything to prevent the spread or reduce mortality of covid

the mortality stats themselves are so fraudulent and confounded between medicare fraud and overly sensitive rtPCR tests, the whole thing is a joke

i'm all set with no vaccine but if other people want to test it out we'll see what happens to them

@meowski @hakui @lain @xerz it doesn't interact with the cell nucleus at all, how is it gene therapy

@Moon @hakui @lain @xerz
even though it's not supposed to recombine into the dna, it's still possible. and as far as being a gene therapy- even though it's not supposed to be recombined into the dna, it still produces RNA which is functionally the same end point

mRNA is a complement molecule of DNA- dna by itself isn't generally functional other than as a template to produce RNA and proteins.

so idk you can argue about the semantics of what is a gene- but many viruses contain only RNA. RNA is widely viewed to be a precursor to DNA in evolution.