Coronavirus 2019-2020 thread (no unsubstantiated rumours!)
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plawolf
Lieutenant General
Let’s not sink to their level with baseless conspiracy theories.
Chinese FM strategy isn’t to manufacture fake news like the American state department, rather it’s merely holding a mirror and applying the exact same ‘logic’ and asking the same questions of Fort Detrick as the US government has about Wuhan to back up their wild conspiracy theory that Covid was leaked from the Wuhan lab.
Americans say their experts raised concerns about the possibility of a theoretical contamination breach at Wuhan; well there has been at least one actual breach at Fort Detrick.
Americans claim the Wuhan lab location being close to the wet market is ‘proof’ of a link, well China can point to US military personnel participating in the military games in Wuhan having visited the same wet market and also having some mystery mass illness.
And basically that’s the entirety of the American ‘evidence’ against China.
Anything America says to reject Chinese counter claims could simply be recorded and played back to reject American claims. Anything the western MSM says to ridicule Chinese comments about Fort Detrick can be record and played right back to reject their own claims about Wuhan.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Maybe members with medical knowledge can answer this, but I was just thinking, could man-made mRNA based vaccines almost be too precise, thereby offering very narrow immune responses, whereas more traditional deactivated virus based vaccines would naturally include a lot more genetic variation, thereby providing a broader and shallower protection?
This may explain why both mRNA based vaccines seem so effective at minimising any form of symptoms against the targeted strain, but is proving much less effective at dealing with mutated strains. Whereas Chinese vaccines using traditional methods are less effective at preventing all symptoms, but proving much better at dealing with natural mutations from the virus, as evidenced by sinovac’s 100% efficacy against serious illness or death in Brazil, home to the infamous Brazilian strain that is now potentially proving resistant to the mRNA vaccines?
Or it could just be that the American mRNA vaccines were never remotely as effective as claimed to start with, and the new strain is just a convenient scapegoat to pin the blame on.
This may explain why both mRNA based vaccines seem so effective at minimising any form of symptoms against the targeted strain, but is proving much less effective at dealing with mutated strains. Whereas Chinese vaccines using traditional methods are less effective at preventing all symptoms, but proving much better at dealing with natural mutations from the virus, as evidenced by sinovac’s 100% efficacy against serious illness or death in Brazil, home to the infamous Brazilian strain that is now potentially proving resistant to the mRNA vaccines?
Or it could just be that the American mRNA vaccines were never remotely as effective as claimed to start with, and the new strain is just a convenient scapegoat to pin the blame on.
Don’t know we need to see real life efficacy of other vaccines.
It really depends on which and how many parts of the virus the immune system responds to.
Obviously the inactivated virus has more variety of epitopes, but it doesn’t account for mutations either.
the mRNA vaccines are already a mix I believe, they can add more sequences to the existing cocktail to account for new mutations. But this would require new testing of dosage and efficacy. Each new mutation will cut down production and increase cost significantly.
This will be most expensive to do for adenovirus vaccines and subunit vaccines as they would need to optimize manufacturing process for each mutation.
For Inactivated viruses they also need to mix up the batches. Flu vaccine is like 2-4 different strains every season. They could be more comprehensive but it costs to ramp up.
New vaccines take like a decade to develop to sort all this out. What we’re doing right now is truly unprecedented.
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China has sold over 800 million doses so far? If so, that is a massive geopolitical victory. The exported doses will probably cross 1 billion shortly. Other news I read said Cansino had production of 300 million dose capacity, Sinovac 1 billion, and Sinopharm 1 billion. This is just the ones in Phase 3 that are finishing, and there are another 2 in Phase 3 (Anhui longcom and one from CAS) which aren't guaranteed to suceed so we shouldn't count them yet. This is to say nothing of the fact that China is also producing the Astrazeneca and BioNTech vaccines in the hundreds of millions this year. Its very likely China will produce at least 3 billion doses this year, and possibly 4 billion if the remaining vaccines are also a success.
I'd say it's both.
The mRNA vaccines target the spike S protein on the surface of the virus.
But there are other proteins on the surface of a whole virus, which an inactivated vaccine will also have.
Plus the mRNA vaccines were never as effective as claimed in the first place.
vesicles
Colonel
The purpose of all vaccines is to introduce a part or the whole of a virus to our body in an attempt to stimulate an immune response. Different technologies simply serve to achieve this goal via different routes. The traditional methods directly introduce parts of a virus, while mRNA vaccines introduce a code to our body so that our cells make the viral parts ourselves. The end viral structures, to which our immune system responds, are the same: some interesting parts of a virus. Whether one vaccine is more effective than the other is a case-by-case thing, based on which parts of the virus you decide to introduce to the human body. And that's a decision that has nothing to do with the technologies. In other words, someone, through experience and experimentation, decides to introduce certain part(s) of a virus into human body as a vaccine. Then they decide which technology to use to deliver it.
The effectiveness of a vaccine is decided by their initial decision to focus on which part(s) of a virus. The advantage of mRNA vaccines is flexibility and how quickly they can manufacture the vaccines. Let's say one day in the future, we suddenly find out that all existing vaccines are no longer effective against a new strain of the virus. For mRNA vaccines, they can tweak the coding sequences easily and change their protocol to make new vaccines against the new strain in a few days. All the production line stays intact and can be changed to the making of new vaccines easily. On the other hand, the traditional methods would require culturing of the new strain of the virus. Once the new strain of the virus is cultured, they will have to completely retest their protocols to de-acivate the viruses. they cannot risk the chance that the new strain somehow becomes resistant to their original way of de-activating the virus. You don't want to introduce live viruses to the general public. All this will take much longer to do.
Also, we have not seen the actual data on how effective Pfizer and Moderna vaccines improve serious cases. All the current data are on complete protection. So we cannot compare them with Sinovac's new data yet.
Another thing to keep in mind is that these technologies are not special symbols of certain countries. It's not like all the traditional methods belong to China and the mRNA tech is a western thing. Strictly speaking, the west came up with all these methods, didn't they? I am almost certain that all the leading countries are taking advantage of all the available methods at their disposal. It's just so happened that, in China, some vaccines using the traditional methods came out first, whereas mRNA vaccines in the west came out first. As far as I know, a French company Valneva is currently testing their VOVID-19 vaccine using inactivated viruses in phase 1/2 trials. A US company Novavax is testing their vaccine using partial viral particles in a phase 3 trial.
And Chinese companies are also working on their own mRNA vaccines as well. Take a look at what the Chinese experts say about the mRNA vaccines.
This is not a China vs. West thing. The ability to manufacture and distribute their vaccines effectively depends on how effective each government can be. The ability to convince your people to take the vaccines depends on the culture and government. That, you can pitch one nation against another. One individual vaccine can be better than others. You can say one nation has better ability to design/manufacture/distribute vaccines. But it has nothing to do with technologies. The vaccine technologies are independent of national borders. Everyone in the world is doing the same things and using the same technologies at their disposal. None of these technologies is any secret.
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Certainly you wouldn't have to rerun the entire test battery. You can verify that the virus is inactivated by introducing it to to cultured cells and observing if it's infectious. No one does years of tests on seasonal flu vaccines, the vaccine "inherits" the safety and reliability of previous iterations.