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A comment on Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest. Parent comment

Re:Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new... by whatshisface on Wednesday September 01, 2021 @12:57PM (#28382436)
The claims that rare side effects have been well-characterized and can be predicted from the mechanism alone are simply not true - the FDA itself required further postmarketing studies (to be finished around 2023) as a requirement in their approval letter. The foundation of convincing people that taking the vaccine is safer than not taking it cannot be the false claim that the probabilities of each side effect are known, because they are not. Instead we should focus on the true claim that the virus is much more dangerous and also not completely characterized.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new... by lolwut987 on Wednesday September 01, 2021 @02:28PM (#28383788)
That’s absurd.

Yes, I still test my code.

But when I write it, I do it with the lessons I’ve learned over decades, and it’s usually close to working before the first test comes into the picture.

That’s where we are with vaccine production: we’ve been cranking them out for decades, and the process is so robust that failures at in the six plus nines range of outliers.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new... by whatshisface on Wednesday September 01, 2021 @03:56PM (#28384827)
I think you might be overestimating the success rate of drug discovery and underestimating the complexity of the situation. Starting from 10,000 compounds chosen on the basis of reasonable mechanistic or chemical arguments, one or two working drugs are typically discovered.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Drug-discovery-and-devel...

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Re:Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new... by lolwut987 on Wednesday September 01, 2021 @04:01PM (#28384889)
Like the rest of engineering, you very rarely start with a novel target.

You’re building things from a library of tested techniques.

Vaccines aren’t drugs.

They’re a method of delivering material to the immune system for it to do its thing.

We do that by finding the thing we want to present, finding a pipeline to extract that, and finding a delivery mechanism that is tested and compatible.

We don’t “discover” a new flu vaccine ever my season, we put together this seasons release.

That’s why it didn’t take years to design and release a new vaccine for covid: we have the technology already, we just needed to pick the payload and select the rocket best suited for the job.

[ Parent | on HN ]