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by nate_meurer 2218 days ago
Nope. It sucks that China has a such a stranglehold on pharmaceuticals, but I guarantee you 100% that almost nobody will give a shit where a vaccine is made if it's perceived to be safe and effective. The vaxxers don't care where it's made, and the rest of us will only need to be convinced that it's safe enough given our individual conditions.

I think it's a safe bet that there will be multiple different vaccines. What you get will be determined by availability firstly, and safety profile if necessary. It's really no different from any of the medicines we already use. For example, the vast majority of antibiotics are manufactured in China; have you ever heard of someone turning down antibiotics because they were made in the wrong country?

1 comments

> if it's perceived to be safe and effective

Safe vaccines take years or decades. I personally get all my shots, but I'm not about to take a vaccine developed in two years! Especially if I'm not in the high risk group. I don't think it would be unreasonable for people to wait 5~10 years and see the effects of early adopters first.

Vaccines for seasonal influenza are prepared each year, about six months ahead of flu season to leave time for manufacturing. Do you avoid those when you get all your shots? We've been making these for decades and they seem as safe when they hit the general population all at once as any other vaccine.

I'm sure a SARS vaccine is a completely different animal, and I don't know enough about viruses to know how hard it is to make a safe coronavirus vaccine, but your objection seems to be entirely about the timeline.

I should have gone into more detail, but it's because of many of the things you mentioned. Flu vaccines are not "new" .. the procedure for making them is well known and many strains are made and kept ahead of them. (I believe they're all inactivated virus, typically bread in chicken eggs). They aren't made in six months; they took decades to develop the process where strains can be isolated, inactivated and combined in a shot.

SARS1 vaccines had some very troubling imunopathic responses and feline SARS1 vaccines made reinfections worse. This will be a totally new vaccine, for a virus family we've never developed vaccines for before, and some of the techniques they're using (the DNA/RNA technique pushed by Gavi/Gates) has never had a vaccine make it through a clinical trial before.

Those are the troubling things. I wrote more about it here:

https://battlepenguin.com/politics/this-is-not-a-time-of-hon...