Astral Codex Ten

Alex Hoekstra

4 min read

Alex Hoekstra

Article

Alex Hoekstra is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 28, 2021 and November 04, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Alex Hoekstra, $100,000, for the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (RaDVaC)”; “Alex Hoekstra, $100,000, for the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative”; “Alex Hoekstra of RaDVaC says that now that there are many COVID vaccines”. It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, ACX Grants, African Swine Fever.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: December 28, 2021
  • Last seen: November 04, 2022

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.

ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
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
ACX Grants: Project Updates
November 04, 2022 · Original source
27: Open Source Vaccines (6/10) Alex Hoekstra of RaDVaC says that now that there are many COVID vaccines available, they are focusing on making RNA/LNP vaccines more accessible, both by bringing relevant technologies into the public domain and bringing down the material and logistic costs. They have published several open-source intranasal vaccines for Omicron variants and been working on animal challenge trials.