Astral Codex Ten

coronavirus vaccines

5 min read

coronavirus vaccines

Article

coronavirus vaccines is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 08, 2021 and December 28, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “if you believe coronavirus vaccines work”; “could have significantly shortened the wait for coronavirus vaccines”. It most often appears alongside FDA, 1DaySooner, 2013 NBC article: Drug Treatment Omegaven That Could Save Infant Lives Not Yet Approved By FDA.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: August 08, 2021
  • Last seen: December 28, 2021

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Contra Drum On The Fish Oil Story
August 08, 2021 · Original source
I worry that people are going to assume I got lucky, that maybe I’ve been spouting a bunch of crap about “the FDA needs to approve drug X! the FDA needs to approve drug Y!” for years, and most of those drugs were unsafe or ineffective, but just by coincidence I got this one right and now I’ll never shut up about it. One answer to this might be to look at my past work and see if this is true (I don’t think it is). But a better answer might be to remember that, if you believe coronavirus vaccines work, you’re in this same situation right now. That is, the media, general public, scientific community, etc all know that they work and are safe, but the FDA still has not fully approved them. This isn’t an unusual situation to be in! Most of the time, the FDA lags the general consensus of people paying attention, usually by quite a lot. I think people worry that I want the FDA to auto-approve insane drugs nobody knows anything about, whereas I’d honestly be pretty happy if they just showed the same level of common sense as an average member of the general public.
ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
1DaySooner and Rethink Priorities, $17,500, to research public attitudes around human challenge trials. Human challenge trials are studies where scientists deliberately try to infect volunteers with a disease to see if a treatment can prevent or cure it. They're much faster than waiting for people to get the disease naturally, and could have significantly shortened the wait for coronavirus vaccines. But they're controversial and nobody was able to get approval to do a challenge trial for COVID until 2021, which is why we had to wait so long for good treatment. Preliminary research suggests lots of people support these trials; I think building common knowledge of this is a first step towards making them available during future pandemics. Rethink Priorities is a respected effective altruist research organization. 1Day Sooner is a group lobbying for challenge trials. They’re currently seeking $10 million to use challenge studies to develop a universal coronavirus vaccine. Email josh@1daysooner.org if you can help
Inline links: 1DaySooner, Rethink Priorities, josh@1daysooner.org
Alex Hoekstra, $100,000, for the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (RaDVaC) to make open-source modular affordable vaccines. They've made a coronavirus vaccine which about fifty people (mostly scientists and biohackers) have self-administered, though there's no hard data on whether or not it works. They don't have regulatory agency approval for anything and probably won't get it, and they cannot sell their vaccine - the only way to get it is to manufacture it in your lab (or home lab) from the blueprints they make available. So what's the pitch for them being useful? First, global inaccessibility of vaccines has been a problem in past and present pandemics and will probably continue; RadVaC thinks their open source model might “drive up vaccine access, diversity, and security in the future”. Second, if there's ever a pandemic much worse than COVID - super-Ebola or whatever - I'm not waiting nine months for the FDA to have the right number of meetings, neither is anyone else, and I think we’ll all be grateful if we previously built the capacity to have a vaccine production group that moves fast and breaks things. Third, I think it's possible that their comparative freedom lets them come up with something genuinely better than Big Pharma, at which point hopefully it will encourage or embarrass Big Pharma into stealing it (did you know RaDVaC offers nasal spray coronavirus vaccines?) Fourth, I think it has positive...let's say "moral"...effects for people to know that ordinary people can do the same things big corporations do, and that it's possible (and sometimes even legal) to innovate without getting anyone's permission first. RaDVaC still needs more funding (go here to donate) and are looking for collaborators with experience in open-source development (RaDVaC wants to build infrastructure for decentralized vaccine R&D, including: construction of standards for sourcing, production, & testing; data-sharing platforms; and other online & accessible scientific tools). Reach out to them here. You can read more about RaDVaC's work here, here, here, here, and here, and find their YouTube channel here.
Inline links: Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative, home lab, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here