[cickpass_broken]

the cost of these vaccines is largely hidden, no? Each country made deals behind closed doors AFAIK. I've seen some estimates of $12-$30 a shot, but have no idea the validity of this.

How much do the treatments cost? Is it vastly different?

> No long term side effects.

How do you know? I thought the only study/data from Pfizer covered 6 months. That's not very long term? https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v...

I don't think we need to replace vaccines, but large swathes of the population still don't have access. It seems very likely that a multi-modal approach would allow us to treat more people, faster.

Even Pfizer sees vaccination as well as treatment as the path forward: https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/antiviral-efforts

[smt88]

> How much do the treatments cost? Is it vastly different?

An average hospitalization costs $73,000 in the US, according to data collected from insurance claims[1].

That means that a single hospitalization costs the same as vaccinating 2,400 people (using your $30/shot estimate).

> How do you know? I thought the only study/data from Pfizer covered 6 months. That's not very long term?

Although I'm not an expert, a friend of mine is getting his PhD studying the immune system and explained it to me this way:

Any additional risk of mRNA vaccines would (with almost 100% certainty) occur shortly after vaccination[2], theorized to be as a result of a strong(er) immune response.

After the immune response has subsided, the vaccinated person's immune system would be hard to distinguish from someone who received a traditional vaccine because the goal of the vaccines is the same: to teach the immune system what the virus looks like[3][4] without actually requiring an active virus.

So to put that together, we can be fairly confident in an mRNA vaccine's long-term safety because its long-term effects are similar to other vaccines that we've studied for more than 100 years and because the mechanism of action subsides within a few months[5].

1. https://www.fairhealth.org/article/costs-for-a-hospital-stay...

2. https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19...

3. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-are-mrna-vaccines-so...

4. https://www.vumc.org/viiii/infographics/how-does-mrna-vaccin...

5. https://www.uab.edu/news/health/item/12143-three-things-to-k...

[Auracle]

Pandemrix was also similar to previous vaccines but caused an increase in narcolepsy, no? Immune systems are complicated.

[smt88]

Yes, and the reason it caused bad side effects was the strong immune response[1], which is a short term effect. That is exactly what has been extensively tested for the Covid vaccines.

1. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/07/why-pandemic-flu-sho...

[yz1ruhzh]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by short term effect, the first sentence in the article you linked mentions it's an incurable disease and it took them years to admit it was linked to Pandemrix.

English is not my native language so maybe I didn't understand what you meant by that.

[smt88]

I understand the confusion. I meant that the long-term narcolepsy was caused by something that happened in the short-term while the immune system was still reacting to the vaccine.

From that link:

> The flu vaccine is designed to trigger antibodies to influenza’s surface proteins, but if it elicits antibodies to the nucleoprotein as well, those might well latch on to the hypocretin receptor, and eventually lead to death of the cells, the researchers thought.

That couldn't just spontaneously happen a year after getting a vaccine.

[yz1ruhzh]

Thank you for the explanation.

[rsynnott]

The prices the EU, at least, is paying are public. IIRC they range from about 2 eur for AZ to about 30 for the MRNAs.

Today, there are no particularly effective treatments. Monoclonal antibodies might do something, and cost a few thousand quid, but you wouldn’t want to be relying on them as an alternative to a vaccine.