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by djsumdog 2129 days ago
It takes 5 to 10 years to create a safe and effective vaccine. Look to the 1970s and Swing Flu to see an example of a failed vaccine. It is absolutely insane that anyone is seriously considering we can make a safe vaccine for this in less than a year.

Pharmaceutical companies have never made a successful vaccines for coronaviruses before. I've heard the argument, "Well we have more people working on it." If you hire nine women, you can't make a baby in a month. There is no way, no matter how much money you throw at it, to safely do 5~10 years worth of testing in less than a year.
4 comments
HPsquared 2129 days ago
Indeed, you'd think in HN of all places, everyone should be familiar with the concept of the "mythical man month".
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rootusrootus 2129 days ago
You just replied to a strawman argument made by someone you seem to agree with. Why?
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rootusrootus 2129 days ago
> I've heard the argument

That was a beautiful strawman, and even one of the replies your comment walked right into it.

There aren't many human coronaviruses circulating to begin with. And they're not dangerous, aside from SARS-CoV-2. Of course there aren't any vaccines for them. Got pretty close on SARS & MERS before they fizzled on their own.

> It takes 5 to 10 years to create a safe and effective vaccine

How long do you think the leading SARS-CoV-2 vaccines have been in development? Years. It's not like they were dreamed up since February.

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achenatx 2129 days ago
The SARS vaccine was likely successful. SARS died out and so the vaccine was never fully challenged in a pandemic. But as far as I know antibodies lasted a long time.
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djsumdog 2129 days ago
No they didn't. SARS1 and MERS vaccines had a ton of problems, such as Imuenopathic responses and Immune Enhancement syndrome.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/

https://www.pnas.org/content/117/15/8218

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mandeepj 2129 days ago
> If you hire nine women, you can't make a baby in a month

Absurd argument. You can't parallelize the birth of a baby but you can do that for testing a vaccine.

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WD-42 2129 days ago
How? The whole point of phase 3 clinical trials is long term observation. Have you figured out how to parallelize the passing of time so that it goes by quicker?
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refurb 2129 days ago
What? You'd just run your phase 1 (safety) in parallel with phase 2/3 (efficacy)?

So basically dose tens of thousands of people before you even know it's safe?

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