You're on the left side of the Dunning-Kruger curve on posting.

Explain why, if there is a genuine antibody response as claimed, of a magnitude equal to infection recovery, with no side effects among 40 so far, why this is more likely than not to end badly. This assumes no fraud of course.

Note that it also already works in mice, completely preventing infection. We have a previous proof of concept with MERS as well, from a different company - animal studies + humans with perfect results in prevention of infection. It's not like this is entirely new ground.

Just to illustrate how little you know:

They reported binding antibodies in 45 patients, but neutralizing antibodies in only 8. What's the difference?

What is an acceptable rate of serious side effects for a vaccine, and how many people would you have to test to determine what it is?

How do the antibody titers of people who have survived the disease compare to those of people who got the vaccine?

Does a vaccine generally work better in young people or old people?

You can probably look up the answers to some of these. But the fact is, you weren't even aware of any of them before you read this post, and yet you expressed tremendous certainty that this vaccine will be successful ("90% of the way there"). You know so little about the subject that you don't even realize how little you know.

Read their press release (I did before posting the first time), you're so Dunning-Kruger yourself that your objections/questions aren't even valid. Jesus man.

This difference is utterly irrelevant, because we'd expect to have binding antibodies, but not neutralizing antibodies yet. Their claim is that all the neutralizing results that are back show sufficient levels for protection.

Far higher than the rate of adverse reactions reported in this study, which is zero at lower doses, and 3/40 at large doses. I already covered this above. Those 3/40 aren't even severe reactions, it's mild flu symptoms for a day. And their mechanism of action (low-impact viral insertion for cell protein generation) has been previously tested, so we don't expect the kind of surprises there you'd see with other vaccine methods.

Moderna's results are equal or superior. They've provided no data/quantification for this claim, just the statement.

Another irrelevant question from a true Dunning-Kruger on analysis. As long as it works perfectly well in the younger (<55), that's good enough for a major solution to this problem and the reopening of society.

Instead of pretending you're Socrates and going after me with a hard on, why not actually post something useful, like your take on what it's more likely than not to fail? That would require you being other than a loser however, a big ask. There are actual valid objections to the Moderna study you could bring up, but not a single one of yours is cogent. That's quite a feat of incompetence for a guy holding himself out as knowing what he's talking about.

You also didn't address the result in mice virus challenges, which prevented replication and spread (unlike the disappointing Oxford studies). That adds a data point in favor of my take.

Covid Patients Testing Positive After Recovery Aren’t Infectious, Study Shows
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...n-t-infectious

Good news

no u

Sure, I'd put a lot of faith in a company that is basically Theranos and has never, ever published any data in a peer-reviewed journal from any of its 8 Phase 1 trials. I'm sure they chose those 8 patients to run randomly, and not based on which patients responded most strongly on other measures. Why not run everybody??

You're just factually wrong on a very basic point here. A Grade 3 reaction is a very severe reaction. It means you couldn't take basic care of yourself and had to be hospitalized. Grade 2 is "moderate," which means you were unable to perform some of your usual activities, in this case maybe sweating through your sheets for a week. Grade 4 is life-threatening.

Their mechanism of action has never made it past Phase 2. We should expect far more surprises than with the more conventional methods. Previous Phase 1 studies showed severe side effect rates of about 1%. And those were all done on the healthiest volunteers they could find. No one with autoimmune conditions or anything like that.

Do the math: if you give 300M people a drug with a Grade 3 side effect rate of 1%, you're hospitalizing 1M people. And maybe killing 100k? I mean, frankly, once the reports of how bad the side effects are, people would just refuse to get the vaccine.

I don't know if it's 1% at the 50 mcg dose. Neither do you. No one does, because you can't infer it from a sample of 45 people. And they wouldn't disclose how many less-severe adverse events there were. If it were zero, they'd obviously brag about it. So we can conclude it's some embarrassingly high number.

The point of the question was, if you knew the literature, you'd know that there's a huge variation in the antibody titers of CV19 survivors. For Moderna to just say the vaccination titers were similar to convalescent sera (and refusing to provide more information when asked about this directly on the conference call) is a huge tell that they're putting the best face on mediocre-to-bad results.

lol "perfectly well" -- maybe if you haven't been paying attention up to this point. Older folks are notoriously difficult to vaccinate as their immune systems are simply weaker. With this brand-new technology we have no idea whether they will respond at all.

The upper respiratory tract is very hard to protect with a vaccine. We've been working on flu vaccines for decades and the best we've gotten is something that generally lessens your symptoms, but doesn't make you non-contagious. If you want to reopen society after only vaccinating 55-year-olds and below, you have to show that getting the vaccine actually stops you from spreading the disease.

Wrong again. The Oxford vaccine was immunogenic in mice, and then disappointed in monkeys. Moderna hasn't even tested in monkeys yet.

Mouse studies have very, very little bearing on human efficacy. We've cured cancer and Alzheimers in mice thousands of times.


I think I've spelled it out well enough. If you're familiar with the industry, there are like 5 different obvious tells that their results were pretty bad but they wanted to pump the stock before the secondary.



Honestly, I just read these threads where you're posting every hour of every day with your combination of dickishness and factual errors, and wanted to point out for everyone just how certain you can be while being also completely uninformed and wrong.

Moderna aren't even running the trial. The company's claim is these are the early returned numbers. If you want to claim fraud on that, great. Let's have a number. What is the likelihood in your mind that these results are fraud/serious misrepresentation? Put a tradable number to it if you have an opinion. That's the one caveat I've given all along - IF the claims aren't fraud.

On the contrary, I don't think you've read what was claimed. Here is the New York Times:
So on the one hand we have blowhard dickhead on the internet who uses terms like "Dunning-Kruger" who's never posted or predicted anything of worth, saying these were serious hospitalizations, and on the other hand we have the New York Times with far more detail, saying they were mild and self resolving within a day. I'm going with the New York Times. Sorry.

Again, my reading of even skeptical experts disagrees with you on the bolded. Fewer surprises and side effects are expected from this compared to normal vaccines.

You're way over hyping because you don't know specifics and you think these people are needing hospital care based on their categorization. If the NYT is happy to say that the worst reactions were moderate flu symptoms which stopped after a day, then your analysis is just way off. If these events were not as characterized by the NYT - i.e. if Moderna is committing outright fraud here - then sure, I agree completely with you. But otherwise you're just way off with this analysis.

It's not a tell at all, again you're assuming and reading too much into this. This is from a guy who's hugely skeptical of early release from shady companies. I get all the potential issues here, better than you do.

It's not about whether this vaccine will work for the very old or not.

Again just silly assumptions. If these results aren't fraud then there are good responses across the board, so the cutoff at 55 is dumb.

Non-contagiousness isn't as hard as you think. The Oxford monkey results don't show contagion, merely viruses in their noses, which could be from the massive infectious doses they given them. This isn't entirely new (the odds would be a lot lower if it was) - MERS had incredible results, animal models showed the stopping of spread, so there have been actual working results. There was a group in Motana with good early results on Rhesus monkeys.

There's extra data for this view recently in humans out today, showing that humans that test positive after recovery aren't actually infectious. It's most likely that's what's going on here.

Cancer and alzheimers aren't replicating viruses. And if you'd read the Oxford you'd know it didnt' necessarily disappoint.

I'm very familiar with the industry - I've written all of your points before trying to convince Sklansky not to invest in Orex on similar early data releases. This is a different beast though. It's because I've spent years spotting and analyzing bio frauds (to find short spots) that I think this has a great chance.

There's zero evidence I'm uninformed. I have a >95% hit rate in this thread on being right. You seem less informed than me on this topic, and I know jack **** about the vaccine industry. I had the same thing out with the jsb who claimed to be an "expert" and attacked me, guessed the IFR comically wrong, then fell for a terrible Stanford antibody study.

If you have something to add to this thread then please do, but so far your contribution has been terrible, coming out swinging without a clue.

Unless this is straight up fraud (it could be, I'm not familiar with Moderna) the facts as stated are very good for this becoming a viable vaccine.

I spoke to someone who runs clinical trials, he said this is early stage and not close to 90%. In general phase 1 focuses on safety and pharmacokinetics data. The 2 x 4 members of the two dose groups is promising but far from conclusive.

I sincerely hope the vaccine works, but I shorted Moderna after the pump (won’t hold the position for long). If someone offered me 9 to 1 to bet against this gaining FDA approval and achieving mass production in 2020, it would be hard to say no. I’d be very happy to lose that bet though.

The IFR issue has not been decided anywhere but in your head. I also didn't fall for any study. I just reported it, as I have reported the results of a number of studies. I am well aware of the problems with early results from those kinds of surveys.

As far as Moderna, you picked a real interesting hill to die on here, but have at it. I have been following this company for years, well before it went public. I know a lot about RNA interference, and what problems it has to overcome to be a viable treatment option.

I also know people who, earlier this year, were trying to fix problems in Moderna's cancer treatment, and who gave me detailed explanations about problems with the design of its mRNA mimic. Obviously a cancer drug and a vaccine are two different creatures, and maybe it can get by with their design in a vaccine. But the problem with drugs like this is when the body rejects them, it tends to be pretty horrific. There's a company called Mirna Therapeutics that was working in this field and things were going great until people started dropping dead in its phase 2 trials.

I don't think anyone has enough information to form a concrete opinion one way or another about Moderna. And certainly the "the only way it can be wrong is if there is fraud" take is ridiculous. A million things can still go wrong once they expand their trials into phase 2. And the fact that this is being rushed at warp speed probably isn't helping matters at all.

The IFR issue is over. It's >1% and that number hasn't changed in months. There are so many diverse data points now.

As for a vaccine, how about talking numbers since this is ultimately about investment theses/outcomes?

The Moderna vaccine has a ______% chance of being approved and in mass production by November

Collectively, all the hundreds of vaccine attempts have a ______% chance of having an approved vaccine in mass production by November.

The Oxford professor that chezlaw cited said the odds were 80% within four months for her vaccine candidate. Is she lying, crazy or correct?
Bill Gates says 12-18 months and probably not earlier.

That's a massive range between people who should know what they're talking about.

I disagree the IFR issue is over, but arguing about it is pointless.

As far as numbers, I can't give you a percentage. But from an investment standpoint in Moderna in particular, you have to understand what they are up against.

Firstly, no one has ever designed a copy of an mRNA that hasn't triggered an immune response in patients when it is administered in levels needed to treat a disease or create a vaccine. The reason is because mRNAs are really unstable, so to create one that can go through the rigors of being transported through the body to the intended target. To make them more stable, Moderna and other companies create mimics, which are almost exact copies, but which have slight variations to make them more stable.

The problem, up until now, is that these slight variations aren't good enough, and trigger an immune response. One reason that these drugs do well in mice studies? Many of those studies involved mice that are genetically modified not to have immune systems. If you don't have an immune system, you can't trigger an immune response.

One important piece of missing data from Moderna is the mice safety assay. That is when you have a drug and you give it to normal mice in increasing amounts until they start dying. So if you expected dose is 50 micrograms, you run an assay with increasing amounts until the mice start dying. That info is a key indication of how likely a drug is to succeed.

The second problem Moderna is facing is the delivery system. Even if you have a good enough mimic, you still have to get it into the cell for it to work. This has never been done before. Its delivery system is too toxic to be used in any amounts needed to treat a disease.

It's why the company started out as a cancer company and is now a vaccine company. It is the literal definition of failing upward.

This doesn't mean that it doesn't have a chance to develop a working vaccine. Vaccines eliminate a lot of the problems it faced due to the fact that you need much smaller amounts (in theory, obviously it has never been tested in people on a large scale) and, unlike cancer, you don't have to deliver it to a specific part of the body.

So maybe it will produce a viable vaccine. But it hasn't up until this point, and based on its track record of success, I don't know if it will. I am pretty positive that someone will come up with a solution to the problems facing the field, since a ton of money is pouring into it right now. I truly believe RNA interference is the future of medicine.

But it's like the rocket industry in the 50s. There were a lot of things that went wrong before they finally got it right.

I think your biggest mistake is that you just discovered what RNA interference is, so it's like this shiny new thing to you. And you see a study that you want to solve this massive problem we are facing and you are excited, which is fine. But I have been watching rockets explode on the launch pad for years in this industry. So I am a little skeptical that all the problems in it have been magically solved just because we need them to be solved.

To me, the key is the company's phase 2 trial of the cmv vaccine. If that passes, we can all starting sucking each other's pee pees. If it doesn't, there's no way the corona virus vaccine is going to do any better.

mRNA tech isn’t unique to Moderna. Every major pharma has some version of it and they all have vaccine candidates ready for trials if they can be convinced there is money in producing the vaccines. Don’t forget they’ve been recently burned and it seems likely the end product will be considered a public good, limiting their upside.

In addition to the major pharmaceuticals, there are piles of biotech startups with patents on similar technologies.

Why does this matter? It matters because it shows we haven’t had much success with similar technologies and we really don’t know much about their safety profiles. I’d be much more comfortable with vaccines developed via more traditional methods bypassing safety protocols.

How much do they need?
Would 360mil suffice you think?
We can take our 400mil for the WHO, be nice and match China's $40mil contribution and give the rest to the company that comes up with a vaccine and then give it to the rest of the world.

Not in drug discovery and development. Not even close.
And specifically re mRNA, there are currently 0 mrna drugs in clinical use.
There aren't even any DNA vaccines for humans, and that tech is older.

TS, I get the feeling you have some $ riding on this vaccine and there's confirmation bias at work here.

I don't understand this. Why is it so hard for you to ballpark a figure? Is it less than 99%? Less than 70%? Less than 50%? Less than 20%? More than 5%? More than 20%? It's really weird to me that people that look at data can't condense their opinion into a broad quantitative estimate. "If you had to make a bet on this, where would you put the line?" is a question you should be asking yourself all the time if you trade or invest - and coming up with an answer.
Moderna are hugely overvalued. I always looked for shorts spots in bio, never long. Too much fraud and selection bias in bio.

I'm not making any mistakes. I think it's fantastic news that four months into this, we have:

- Great immune response in mice
- Great immune response in monkeys from multiple vaccine candidates in multiple locations
- Previous outstanding success with MERS, which is very closely related (complete protection in monkeys with no side effects)
- Early data from the first human trials showing great immune response and no serious side effects so far (assuming you believe the characterization in the NYT).

We're 90%of the way there imo. One of the world's leading vaccine experts, from the Oxford group, thinks her vaccine alone is 80% likely to work and go into mass production in four months. At this point you're disagreeing with the foremost experts. Is she lying, crazy or correct? I know nothing about vaccines so I have to rely on what experts tell me.

INO just popped on positive vaccine news, they must be using the MRNA play

It's a real general that people who have strong views are either full of it because they haven't put their money were their mouth is, or are biased because they have.

I read just this week that this is what China is doing- most of their vaccine/therapeutic candidates are using traditional methods vs. the RNA/bleeding edge route most of the rest of the world seems to be taking.

I cannot get over the irony that it's entirely possible the 'safest' vaccine will come from China.

I've made no vaccine bets at all (not a bio guy except short, too much fraud and positive bias), but i have market bets going (have some 3-7 month duration Tesla puts) which would be far better served by the vaccine not working.

These accusation of bias are hilarious. I just don't think like that, I only care about the data and people's/the market's reaction to that data. I can certainly be wrong about the data and my analysis of it, but not because of biases.

First, you have a basic misunderstanding of Moderna. They aren't four months into this, they are years into it. The easiest part of the equation is adapting its existing technology to create a vaccine for coronavirus. The preliminary results for coronavirus are likely not appreciably different than their results for the other dozen or so vaccines it is working on.

The issue is whether their basic technology, the mRNA mimic and the delivery system work. If it does, it is 90 percent there. If it doesn't, it is zero percent there.

Overall, I am 95 percent confident that the threat from coronavirus will be mitigated by this time next year. Whether that is through a vaccine, improvements in how we treat people infected with it or the virus mutating to a less dangerous form I don't know, but I think we will be back to normal in a year. It's why I haven't sold all my investments and put the money under my mattress.

I'm not misunderstanding anything. I know all the background here. And it's not just Moderna who has these results.

It's you who's misunderstanding - their preliminary results for corona are different from many of their previous results. Most didn't escape phase 1 trials because efficacy or safety couldn't be established. That we have a good result so soon - and not just from Moderna's mRNA method - is a great sign.

95% likely to be gone in a year is completely meaningless. The whole world agrees with this. The interesting bit is where the odds are on an earlier time frame, such as November or January (and avoiding a highly damaging winter second wave/lockdowns). It's bizarre that you hold forth on this but cannot put together any kind of number of where the line is for November. This is an investing/trading subforum on a gambling forum but you can't set a line? Just amazing.

Your lack of comment on what one of the world's peak experts says (80% chance of a vaccine working and under mass production in four months) is also hilarious. You'll call out Moderna but not her?

Too many walls of text to read through. But I will take the other side of it TS. I'll put up $1K vs your $8K that Moderna won't have a manufactured vaccine March 31, 2021.

I'd happily increase the stakes if you want.

^^
we should know in about 2 months (after Phase 2)

I think that the notion that there is an 80 percent chance of a vaccine being ready to mass production in four months is pretty crazy as well.

As far as setting a line, this isn't a football game. There's just so many unknowns at this point. Plus, the biotech industry isn't transparent, and Moderna is the leading culprit in refusing to share info.

The Oxford people are really confident, but you don't get VC money, Bill Gates funding or huge government grants by not expressing confidence your technology works. It's why the industry is so full of crap.

Right now the coronavirus is exposing the industry for what it is, something that is completely full of bs artists who are a lot better at raising money than they are at performing good science.

I'm not saying it's 90% that Moderna will get there. Here's a post from the 2p2 trading thread when the news broke that explains what I'm saying:
Showing that the human body can mount an effective immune response to this coronavirus from an injectable vaccine challenge, without obvious major side effects in the data so far, is a big part of the puzzle. It didn't have to be like that, especially for coronaviruses.

That's not to say that 10,000 things can't go wrong. That's why a vaccine from somewhere will likely be ready in 6 months and not tomorrow. But it moves the line.