Excerpt: On the Promise of mRNA
There’s a lot of interest in a universal Coronavirus vaccine. I think if they make it work, it’ll mean one COVID shot and no more COVID for you, maybe forever, or at least for a year or three years or something like that. Which would take all these threats off the table including future ones because they’d be attacking something so basic about Coronavirus. So there’s that. And the theory is well, if we can do it for COVID, what else can we do it for? And they’re looking at a lot of diseases.
One question right now is why haven’t they come up with an mRNA vaccine for TB? It could be that it’s a bacteria. But it could probably be done. There was already some work on that. The flu is going to be the hardest one. Because it is one of the most mutation-oriented viruses, it’s much more mutable than Coronavirus. It’s got all these different loops of DNA or RNA in it. And there’s so many different ways it can mutate. And it does every year. It would be harder to attack. They’ve been trying to figure that one out for a while.
But again, the big advances are thanks to COVID. We give them a fresh shot at it. You know, we may well see vaccines for better vaccines for more infectious diseases, and especially the rare ones that aren’t worth anybody’s money to go after something that kills a few thousand people a year or a few 100 people a year and especially if they’re not in the first world. Why spend a billion dollars on that, but mRNA would be cheap. And companies like Moderna have actually said well, maybe we’ll just systematically take on a whole bunch of them and make a business out of it. They’ve picked on some diseases nobody’s ever heard of outside of say Malaysia or something and say we can do a vaccine for that.
Tom Corddry’s Post Alley stories on the Pandemic
Medical Revolution: The Tantalizing and Profound Promise of mRNA
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Everything You Need to Know About Schools, Students and COVID Right Now
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The Variants & The Vaccines: What We Know so Far
January 25, 2021If Moderna’s preliminary results are correct, their vaccine will still suppress it, but if it becomes widespread around the world, it becomes a new jumping-off point for further mutations, and one of those might complete the jailbreak.
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January 24, 2021Almost exactly a year after America’s first confirmed case of the “novel Coronavirus” was detected in Snohomish County, two cases of the extra-contagious variant from the UK, dubbed B.1.1.7 (poets, these virologists) have been found in that self-same county, a first for the State of Washington, though hardly for the nation. You Rock, Snohomish County!
Vaccinatin’ Rhythm
January 15, 2021West Virginia currently leads the nation in vaccination rate (7.1% of population with first dose, compared to a national average of 3.4% and Washington’s rate of 3.0%), and they’re doing it by a conscious policy choice.
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January 7, 2021I hope we got lucky, and that yesterday’s vile threat to our democracy doesn’t turn out to also be a literal killer of citizens and their elected representatives: Trump’s mob spreading Trump’s plague. A pox on his house.
The Mutating COVID: What it Means for You
January 2, 2021Taken together, the new variant means that accelerating our herky-jerky vaccine rollout becomes even more important, our use of non-pharmaceutical protections needs to increase for at least the first half of 2021, and we need, together, to accept vaccination as soon as it is offered, and reach out to everyone who is hesitating to be vaccinated and persuade them to join us in the jab queue.
Three Hurdles to Herd Immunity
December 23, 2020What does the path to vaccine-enabled herd immunity look like for the United States? It will look like a track set up for hurdlers. If we clear them all, we can win full normalcy. If we clear most, we might be able to manage a more rickety normalcy.
How Strong? How Long? – Two Essential Vaccine Questions
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New COVID Death Projections: First Comes the Fire
December 4, 2020These are staggering numbers: 90,000 deaths in January alone.
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November 10, 2020It appears that, of the 94 cases, about 8 were from vaccine recipients, and 86 were from placebo recipients. That’s a great ratio, but still very small numbers. The FDA wants to see the numbers after they’ve looked at 164 confirmed cases.
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September 21, 2020Despite this monumental effort, there’s a lot we don’t know yet about these potential vaccines, which means there’s a lot we don’t know about just how much benefit we’ll get from them. Our ignorance can be usefully organized into four categories: efficacy, durability, safety, and scalability.
COVID Update: Study Finds Longterm Health Effects; Many More Deaths and No Silver Bullet
August 6, 2020The results were unsettling, to say the least: “Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging revealed cardiac involvement in 78 patients (78%) and ongoing myocardial inflammation in 60 patients (60%), which was independent of preexisting conditions, severity and overall course of the acute illness, and the time from the original diagnosis.”
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July 21, 2020Weary people and businesses, who have been leaning forward in anticipation of the restored freedoms of the next phase, are sagging in their saddles, realizing that we’ve been set back.
Masks: Now more than Ever
June 18, 2020Given that lots of people are, at this very moment, eager to be mask-free, how can we persuade them to do an about face about their face and re-mask it?
The Vaccine Optimist
May 12, 2020There’s never been a human vaccine created in less than about 5 years, according to Bill Gates, yet he’s confident we’ll have one this time in less than two years, and as soon as 9 months! What’s that optimism based on?
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April 30, 2020With each new story, the SARS CoV-2 virus is revealed to be a more enigmatic and dangerous adversary.
Dialing Back the Apocalypse: The Scientific Debate
March 24, 2020The predictive model currently dominating public discourse is the one produced a little over a week ago by the UK’s Imperial College. As it happens, a critique has just been published by seriously qualified people. It argues that the virus can be much more fully contained after the first wave than the model predicts.
Dying… In Perspective…
March 16, 2020A lot of people will die of COVID-19. Hundreds of thousands at least in the US, many millions worldwide. Though it may sound callous to say it, remember that 2.8 million people die annually in the US, 56 million globally. Even in that context, this is will be a very substantial and disruptive tragedy.
What would a real pandemic change? Everything.
February 27, 2020Think of the damage a Trump rally could do to the life expectancy of a whole county.
I love this! I learned so much about how this all works. It does seem that mRNA will help us think about “fixing” the human body in a whole new way. I wonder if there are any timelines for some of this? The vaccine that could take out all coronaviruses, for example – is that like a moonshot project, or is it the case that having done it for COVID-19 the next step is relatively easy? In any case, thanks Tom for explaining this all so clearly. One of the reasons I love Post Alley.
Seems to me that the social problem is about as difficult to crack as the science. (and I can’t believe I actually just typed that sentence!) Not surprising that the scientists are depressed by the reaction to their amazing success. How is it that everything — even life-saving breakthroughs – are politicized and demonized? If we’d landed on the moon for the first time in 2021 instead of 1969, there’d no doubt be people protesting in the streets that it was an evil government plot! Thanks for this.
One thing you didn’t talk about but I’d like to know: are the mRNA booster shots the same shots as the originals? Or have they tweaked them so they handle variants?
Also – it sounds like from your desciption that the mRNA Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are a different approach than J&J and Astrazenica. Won’t they be able at some point to say whether one (or two) are more effective or last longer? Then what kind of politics does that open up?
This is just fantastic! Thanks, Tom and Doug. I hope to listen to more Post Alley podcasts in the future.