We have more traditional vaccines en route as well.

I also know for a fact business entities related to various arms of the Chinese state have been buying up almost every startup with a patent in mRNA or any kind of antiviral “technique” and an owner with Chinese sounding last name.

I put “technique” in quotes because a lot of these startups are barely functioning companies with employees with nothing even resembling a drug. China doesn’t have a lot of mRNA candidates in pipeline and don’t have many in trials not because they think it’s unsafe, but because they just don’t have the tech.

Despite Chinese propaganda outlets claiming otherwise, Chinese biotech industry is many many years behind US.

So the world's peak experts are lying to us, according to you. But we should trust what experts say, also according to you. Do you see where I'm coming from?
A football game doesn't have unknowns? Most of life is setting a line amidst uncertainty, especially in gambling and investing and trading. Why can't you condense your knowledge down into a line?

It's obviously not 80% according to you of a vaccine approved in four months. You call that "crazy", which means you put the line way below 50% (or 80% wouldn't be "crazy"). Is it greater than 10%? Greater than 30%? Wildly different trading and investing decisions need to be made based on that difference. Being able to condense it a line actually matters.

Right, so what does that add to the odds? -0.0001%? -20%? -50%? How am I speaking to someone who claims to be a scientist but doesn't quantify? Words are close to meaningless and insightless without some kind of probabilities attached, especially when we're discussing tradable information.

Yeah, most of the drug industry is quackery and >80% of drugs would be better off in net terms not being made. I'm fully with you there, and I've spent years banging that drum. I just don't think it's terribly relevant to the analysis of how the vaccine will play out.

Not enough.

Even if everything goes well, a trial will take anywhere between 15 and maybe 35 million (ball park, there is actually virtually no upper limit.) Even with vaccines with high probability of success (think annual flu vaccine updates) less than 10% actually get to market, causing the average cost of development of a vaccine reaching market of a far better researched disease (flu) and with far more developed technique to cost 200-500 million, pretty much every year. This isn’t even counting the billions of dollars companies have spent recently on startups with promising anti-viral/vaccine development technologies, some of which were specifically being applied to the flu.

Moderna is basically getting 483 million to accelerate development. We have no reason to believe their probability of success is dramatically higher than typical vaccine candidates in the past.

I am not arguing they shouldn’t have gotten the money. I said very early on that new technologies have enabled rapid development of vaccine candidates and it is possible to get vaccines out to the masses by the end of the year. Moderna is part of that.

I am saying we need to fund more candidates. If we want reasonable probability of success at getting a vaccine ready this year, we are talking billions, maybe tens of billions, of dollars to tens of promising candidates from established pharmaceutical companies, not half a billion to a single firm that has never gotten a product to market.

That’s still not enough. In addition to the billions of dollars we need to spend on failed candidates’ R&D trials, we will need to “waste” billions more ramping up mass production of candidates that end up failing.

These are trivially small costs relative to what Covid-19 is doing but we apparently don’t have the necessary leadership to make it happen. What we are doing isn’t that much different than betting on hard 12 on a craps table thinking it’s the cheapest and fastest way to get rich.

Forget this chick (she is kind of cute tho), throughout this whole thing the best practical advice has been coming from Dr. Paul Saladino, he correctly advocates a mostly carnivorous diet (optimal for health and fixing metabolic syndrome, and for your immune system). Plus, he's is one of the only dr's out there talking about the actual problem when it comes to younger people dying from the virus, which is obesity . Obesity really screws you up, bigly. If there's anything you should be doing during the quarantine it should be trying to reduce your gut by eating 99% animal products.

A 100% meat/animal products diet is far from optimal. The best diet includes lots of vegetables. In terms of morbidity and mortality, there's very good data on it and the science is robust.

Fish and vegetables diet > vegetarian diet (including wholegrains) > some red meat diet (3-4 times week) with plenty of vegetables or wholegrains >>>>>> high meat diet

This isn't true. There are plenty of fit young people who ended up in hospital or even on ventilators. There was a 39 year old marathon runner in SF for example. They tend not to be fatties.

running marathons consistently is terrible for you, most elite marathon runners die fairly early afiak. Puts way too much constant stress on your organs.

Re: vegetables - the oxalates bro...and indigestible for a lot of people, causing gas/bloating. But w/e it's kind of dumb to argue since eating meat and veg is still 100x better than jamming yourself with highly processed foods and carbs.

Paid for by the big food conglomerates that are trying to sell you their plants, grains and sugars they mix up in labs.

I don't agree. There's ample data on how unhealthy processed foods are, which are against the wishes of the big food conglomerates. The science is really robust on fish + vegetables > vegetarian > low to moderate red meat + vegetables >>>>>>> high meat diets. There are definitely confounding variables (the toxicity of processed meat, the unhealthy diets of big meat eaters), but the data is so strong and we have population level samples from giant datasets.
Yep, marathons absolutely suck. High intensity is where the health benefits are.

Yeah I'm down with that. All meat with some vegetable sides >>>> the average American diet.

Whole foods mediterranean diet is clearly the best. I disagree a purely vegetarian diet is even sustainable, but it would certainly be better for you than an all processed food diet.

That's a common trap - people go from standard american diet (big macs and diet coke) to vegetarian, naturally they feel much better - however over time they will deteriorate because the nutrients we need are found in meat.

Biggest vegetarian population in the world is India, their health results speak for themselves (awful). On the other hand, the French eat loads of saturated fat and drink tons of wine, and they have tremendous life expectancy. I think TS mentioned it early but the fat= heart attack myth (that is STILL being perpetrated) is one of the most pernicious and harmful fallacies ever perpetrated by the "scientific" community.

Yeah if the saturated fat myth, and all the damage it did to public health and life enjoyment, didn't make you deeply question expertise and consensus science, you can't call yourself an intelligent person. Every scientific and government body came out against saturated fat at a global warming level consensus; the science was clear, broad and reliable on saturated fat by any standard we have and it was pure bullshit. The diets of hundreds of millions of people changed from saturated fats to sugar, more calories and trans fats. creating the current obesity and diabetes epidemic.

Perhaps the most disastrous public health action in history. If you trust experts, expert bodies, peer reviewed and consensus science after that clownshow (one of many), you're not very bright. Yet here we are again three months into an easily preventable global pandemic and two months into major economic damage because people trusted experts and expert institutions (the WHO, the idiot modellers in the UK) rather than their own common sense and first principles and data driven thinking.

i can't recall who but there's a pretty good podcast out there (this american life maybe) on the saturated fat thing was never based on real science and consumers then wanted to avoid fat and this led to sugar/fructose being substituted which is far, far worse for you and just made everything much worse

If anyone is interested, there is a decent video on YouTube of Eddie Hall (he previously won worlds strongest man) talking to someone about the coronavirus, ways to boost the immune system, what you can do and a little about why some people are worse effected than others. Most should probably know all this by now but it is worth going over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lbS_ii_RVs

Imagine being a leftist.

"HcL is BAD! It's BAD I SAY! Oh wait, my wife has the virus? Ok, get her a version of it ASAP!"

lol @ fredo. Dude is a roided out nutcase - perfect for CNN!

You're overstating the saturated fat argument. Fats are necessary but they are still to be taken only in moderation, saturated or otherwise.

People are fat and unhealthy because this, not because science.

Don’t recall this being posted:


https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.ed...ning-simulator

AstraZeneca Gets $1 Billion From U.S. to Make Oxford Vaccine
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...oxford-vaccine

What happens to the money if the vaccine fails?

.

you buy any of it before posting that? already beginning to rip, I got in at 55.16

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...al-coronavirus

I've literally never seen someone school Tooth like this. It's...impressive.

https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/sta...213749250?s=21

Sigh. Is there anything coming out from a respected university we can trust anymore? Truly disappointed.

lol? Parttimepro is the one who got schooled, he thought the grade 3 effects were hospitalization rather than mild flu symptoms completely self resolving in a day, as described by the lead doctor in the New York Times. Short of fraud by the lead doctor, his take is just wrong. If he wasn't comically misinformed he would have been correct. I know my facts before I post, parttimepro hadn't even read the case details. Why do you think he disappeared in shame?
Nope, universities are completely broken.