Replies to post #365744 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Conspiracy theory bullshit, again.

Years of research laid groundwork for speedy COVID-19 vaccines
Health Dec 7, 2020 6:44 PM EST


https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/years-of-research-laid-groundwork-for-speedy-covid-19-vaccines


How could scientists race out COVID-19 vaccines so fast without cutting corners? A head start helped — over a decade of behind-the-scenes research that had new vaccine technology poised for a challenge just as the coronavirus erupted.

“The speed is a reflection of years of work that went before,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, told The Associated Press. “That’s what the public has to understand.”

Creating vaccines and having results from rigorous studies less than a year after the world discovered a never-before-seen disease is incredible, cutting years off normal development. But the two U.S. frontrunners are made in a way that promises speedier development may become the norm — especially if they prove to work long-term as well as early testing suggests.

“Abject giddiness,” is how Dr. C. Buddy Creech, a Vanderbilt University vaccine expert, described scientists’ reactions when separate studies showed the two candidates were about 95 percent effective.

“I think we enter into a golden age of vaccinology by having these types of new technologies,” Creech said at a briefing of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Both shots — one made by Pfizer and BioNTech, the other by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health — are so-called messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccines, a brand-new technology. U.S. regulators are set to decide this month whether to allow emergency use, paving the way for rationed shots that will start with health workers and nursing home residents.

Billions in company and government funding certainly sped up vaccine development — and the unfortunately huge number of infections meant scientists didn’t have to wait long to learn the shots appeared to be working.

But long before COVID-19 was on the radar, the groundwork was laid in large part by two different streams of research, one at the NIH and the other at the University of Pennsylvania — and because scientists had learned a bit about other coronaviruses from prior SARS and MERS outbreaks.

“When the pandemic started, we were on a strong footing both in terms of the science” and experience handling mRNA, said Dr. Tal Zaks, chief medical officer of Massachusetts-based Moderna.

Traditionally, making vaccines required growing viruses or pieces of viruses — often in giant vats of cells or, like most flu shots, in chicken eggs — and then purifying them before next steps in brewing shots.

The mRNA approach is radically different. It starts with a snippet of genetic code that carries instructions for making proteins. Pick the right virus protein to target, and the body turns into a mini vaccine factory.

“Instead of growing up a virus in a 50,000-liter drum and inactivating it, we could deliver RNA and our bodies make the protein, which starts the immune response,” said Penn’s Dr. Drew Weissman.

Fifteen years ago, Weissman’s lab was trying to harness mRNA to make a variety of drugs and vaccines. But researchers found simply injecting the genetic code into animals caused harmful inflammation.

Weissman and a Penn colleague now at BioNTech, Katalin Kariko, figured out a tiny modification to a building block of lab-grown RNA that let it slip undetected past inflammation-triggering sentinels.

“They could essentially make a stealth RNA,” said Pfizer chief scientific officer Dr. Philip Dormitzer.

Other researchers added a fat coating, called lipid nanoparticles, that helped stealth RNA easily get inside cells and start production of the target protein.

Meanwhile at the NIH, Dr. Barney Graham’s team figured out the right target — how to use the aptly named “spike” protein that coats the coronavirus to properly prime the immune system.

The right design is critical. It turns out the surface proteins that let a variety of viruses latch onto human cells are shape-shifters — rearranging their form before and after they’ve fused into place. Brew a vaccine using the wrong shape and it won’t block infection.

“You could put the same molecule in one way and the same molecule in another way and get an entirely different response,” Fauci explained.

That was a discovery in 2013, when Graham, deputy director of NIH’s Vaccine Research Center, and colleague Jason McLellan were investigating a decades-old failed vaccine against RSV, a childhood respiratory illness.

They homed in on the right structure for an RSV protein and learned genetic tweaks that stabilized the protein in the correct shape for vaccine development. They went on to apply that lesson to other viruses, including researching a vaccine for MERS, a COVID-19 cousin, although it hadn’t gotten far when the pandemic began.

“That’s what put us in a position to do this rapidly,” Graham told the AP in February before the NIH’s vaccine was first tested in people. “Once you have that atomic-level detail, you can engineer the protein to be stable.”

Likewise, Germany’s BioNTech in 2018 had partnered with New York-based Pfizer to develop a more modern mRNA-based flu vaccine, giving both companies some early knowledge about how to handle the technology.

“This was all brewing. This didn’t come out of nowhere,” said Pfizer’s Dormitzer.

Last January, shortly after the new coronavirus was reported in China, BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin switched gears and used the same method to create a COVID-19 vaccine.

Moderna also was using mRNA to develop vaccines against other germs including the mosquito-borne Zika virus — research showing promise but that wasn’t moving rapidly since the Zika outbreak had fizzled.

Then at the NIH, Graham woke up on Saturday Jan. 11 to see Chinese scientists had shared the genetic map of the new coronavirus. His team got to work on the right-shaped spike protein. Days later, they sent Moderna that recipe — and the vaccine race was on.

[fuagf]

dropdeadfred, We've had enough of outright lie and misinformation from that site. Setting aside for the moment your most probable blatant fearmongering around increased bio-terrorism danger around the vaccines, which thus far i'm not able to find a direct fact check of, this paragraph

"Never mind that the United States as a whole reached herd immunity, as a matter of documented fact, and which was true in most states and locales in the nation, prior to the first shot going in the first arm and cases have continued to collapse since. In short the epidemic was over before we delivered the very first jab and while there are people for whom despite these risks the shot probably makes sense on a risk:reward basis on the math and on the science this is not true for the vast majority of the population."

is blatantly and ludicrously false the site is under serious consideration to be placed on the banned list.

I'm leaving that post for now for others to pick holes in, but am not saying it will not be deleted before the time for that has expired.

[Zorax]

For one thing, herd immunity isn't 10%, which we are less than that this moment with 300+ million people in the US. Herd mentality is 70% of a population.

Obviously, you try to find whatever fits your diseased mind on the internet and that would take about 30 seconds as the internet is littered with such mind numbingley moronic stupid sites like you always find.

Seeya dumbshit.

[fuagf]

dropdeadfred. The 2nd here, i think, goes to your repeated unjustified fearmongering that messenger (mRNA) vaccines open us up to dramatic new biowarfare danger. First, putting aside your false claim that mRNAs actually change the human genome here is yet another on that misinformation you have are spreading.

May 19, 20201:54 AM Updated 9 months ago
False claim: A COVID-19 vaccine will genetically modify humans
By Reuters Staff
Update 1: Now includes quote from Dr McCray
[...]
Most claims refer to a version of a now-deleted, widely shared YouTube video of Dr Andrew Kaufman, a “natural healing consultant” ( here ) in an interview with Spiro Skouras, an online-personality and “independent researcher” with a popular YouTube channel.
P - In the video, Kaufman talks about how a future COVID-19 vaccine would provide a vessel to “inject genes” into humans, first by a procedure known as “electroporation”, in which an electric current “create[s] little holes in our cells that allow the DNA to go into our own cells” and then through the insertion of “foreign proteins that supposedly generate immunity”. Kaufman concludes that the vaccine, like the results of biotechnology in agriculture, will make humans “genetically modified organisms”.
P - There are multiple claims in the nearly one hour-long video, which are beyond the scope of this fact check. However, the main claim in these posts on social media that a COVID-19 vaccine will genetically modify humans (described in the headline of the video and by Kaufman) is false. While most headlines don’t mention DNA-based vaccines, Dr Kaufman talks about them in the video.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-covid-19-vaccine-modify-idUSKBN22U2BZ

There are probably a half dozen or more now on the board on that. And mention of it in any number of other articles, a number posted directly to you.

So though this one deals with increased dangers arising from genome modification which doesn't apply to the mRNA vaccines, the article still goes to your fearmongering.

Genome Editing and the Future of Biowarfare: A Conversation with Dr. Piers Millett

October 12, 2018/by Kirsten Gronlund

All links

In both 2016 and 2017, genome editing made it into the annual Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community. (Update: it was also listed in the 2019 Threat Assessment.) One of biotechnology’s most promising modern developments, it had now been deemed a danger to US national security – and then, after two years, it was dropped from the list again. All of which raises the question: what, exactly, is genome editing, and what can it do?

Most simply, the phrase “genome editing” represents tools and techniques that biotechnologists use to edit the genome—that is, the DNA or RNA of plants, animals, and bacteria. Though the earliest versions of genome editing technology have existed for decades, the introduction of CRISPR in 2013 “brought major improvements to the speed, cost, accuracy, and efficiency of genome editing .. https://www.genome.gov/27569223/how-does-genome-editing-work/ .”

CRISPR, or Clustered Regularly Interspersed Short Palindromic Repeats, is actually an ancient mechanism used by bacteria to remove viruses from their DNA. In the lab, researchers have discovered they can replicate this process by creating a synthetic RNA strand that matches a target DNA sequence in an organism’s genome. The RNA strand, known as a “guide RNA,” is attached to an enzyme that can cut DNA. After the guide RNA locates the targeted DNA sequence, the enzyme cuts the genome at this location. DNA can then be removed, and new DNA can be added. CRISPR has quickly become a powerful tool for editing genomes, with research taking place in a broad range of plants and animals, including humans .. http://time.com/4882855/crispr-gene-editing-human-embryo/ .

A significant percentage of genome editing research focuses on eliminating genetic diseases. However, with tools like CRISPR, it also becomes possible to alter a pathogen’s DNA to make it more virulent and more contagious. Other potential uses include the creation of “‘killer mosquitos,’ plagues that wipe out staple crops, or even a virus that snips at people’s DNA .. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600774/top-us-intelligence-official-calls-gene-editing-a-wmd-threat/ .”

But does genome editing really deserve a spot among the ranks of global threats like nuclear weapons and cyber hacking? To many members of the scientific community, its inclusion felt like an overreaction. Among them was Dr. Piers Millett, a science policy and international security expert whose work focuses on biotechnology and biowarfare.

Millett wasn’t surprised that biotechnology in general made it into these reports: what he didn’t expect was for one specific tool, genome editing, to be called out. In his words: “I would personally be much more comfortable if it had been a broader sentiment to say ‘Hey, there’s a whole bunch of emerging biotechnologies that could destabilize our traditional risk equation in this space, and we need to be careful with that.’ …But calling out specifically genome editing, I still don’t fully understand any rationale behind it.”

This doesn’t mean, however, that the misuse of genome editing is not cause for concern. Even proper use of the technology often involves the genetic engineering of biological pathogens, research that could very easily be weaponized. Says Millett, “If you’re deliberately trying to create a pathogen that is deadly, spreads easily, and that we don’t have appropriate public health measures to mitigate, then that thing you create is amongst the most dangerous things on the planet.”

Biowarfare Before Genome Editing


A medieval depiction of the Black Plague.

Developments such as CRISPR present new possibilities for biowarfare, but biological weapons caused concern long before the advent of gene editing. The first recorded use of biological pathogens in warfare dates back to 600 BC .. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200679/ , when Solon, an Athenian statesman, poisoned enemy water supplies during the siege of Krissa. Many centuries later, during the 1346 AD siege of Caffa, the Mongol army catapulted plague-infested corpses into the city, which is thought to have contributed to the 14th century Black Death pandemic that wiped out up to two thirds of Europe’s population.

Though biological weapons were internationally banned by the 1925 Geneva Convention, state biowarfare programs continued and in many cases expanded during World War II and the Cold War. In 1972, as evidence of these violations mounted, 103 nations signed a treaty known as the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). The treaty bans the creation of biological arsenals and outlaws offensive biological research, though defensive research is permissible. Each year, signatories are required to submit certain information about their biological research programs to the United Nations, and violations reported to the UN Security Council may result in an inspection.

But inspections can be vetoed by the permanent members of the Security Council, and there are no firm guidelines for enforcement. On top of this, the line that separates permissible defensive biological research from its offensive counterpart is murky and remains a subject of controversy. And though the actual numbers remain unknown, pathologist Dr. Riedel asserts that “the number of state-sponsored programs [that have engaged in offensive biological weapons research] has increased significantly during the last 30 years .. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200679/ .”

Dual Use Research

So biological warfare remains a threat, and it’s one that genome editing technology could hypothetically escalate. Genome editing falls into a category of research and technology that’s known as “dual-use” – that is, it has the potential both for beneficial advances and harmful misuses. “As an enabling technology, it enables you to do things, so it is the intent of the user that determines whether that’s a positive thing or a negative thing,” Millett explains.

And ultimately, what’s considered positive or negative is a matter of perspective. “The same activity can look positive to one group of people, and negative to another. How do we decide which one is right and who gets to make that decision?” Genome editing could be used, for example, to eradicate disease-carrying mosquitoes, an application that many would consider positive. But as Millet points out, some cultures view such blatant manipulation of the ecosystem as harmful or “sacrilegious.”

Millett believes that the most effective way to deal with dual-use research is to get the researchers engaged in the discussion. “We have traditionally treated the scientific community as part of the problem,” he says. “I think we need to move to a point where the scientific community is the key to the solution, where we’re empowering them to be the ones who identify the risks, the ones who initiate the discussion about what forms this research should take.” A good scientist, he adds, is one “who’s not only doing good research, but doing research in a good way.”

DIY Genome Editing

But there is a growing worry that dangerous research might be undertaken by those who are not scientists at all. There are already a number of do-it-yourself (DIY) genome editing kits on the market today, and these relatively inexpensive kits allow anyone, anywhere to edit DNA using CRISPR technology. Do these kits pose a real security threat? Millett explains that risk level can be assessed based on two distinct criteria: likelihood and potential impact. Where the “greatest” risks lie will depend on the criterion.

“If you take risk as a factor of likelihood of impact, the most likely attacks will come from low-powered actors, but have a minimal impact and be based on traditional approaches, existing pathogens, and well characterized risks and threats,” Millett explains. DIY genome editors, for example, may be great in number but are likely unable to produce a biological agent capable of causing widespread harm.

“If you switch it around and say where are the most high impact threats going to come from, then I strongly believe that that [type of threat] requires a level of sophistication and technical competency and resources that are not easy to acquire at this point in time,” says Millett. “If you’re looking for advanced stuff: who could misuse genome editing? States would be my bet in the foreseeable future.”



State Bioweapons Programs

Large-scale bioweapons programs, such as those run by states, pose a double threat: there is always the possibility of accidental release alongside the potential for malicious use. Millett believes that these threats are roughly equal, a conclusion backed by a thousand page report .. http://www.gryphonscientific.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Final-Gain-of-Function-Risk-Benefit-Analysis-Report-12.14.2015.pdf .. from Gryphon Scientific, a US defense contractor.

Historically, both accidental release and malicious use of biological agents have caused damage. In 1979, there was the accidental release of aerosolized anthrax from the Sverdlovsk [now Ekaterinburg] bioweapons production facility in the Soviet Union – a clogged air filter in the facility had been removed, but had not been replaced. Ninety-four people were affected by the incident and at least 64 died, along with a number of livestock .. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/plague/sverdlovsk/ . The Soviet secret police attempted a cover-up and it was not until years later that the administration admitted the cause of the outbreak.

More recently, Millett says, a US biodefense facility “failed to kill the anthrax that it sent out for various lab trials, and ended up sending out really nasty anthrax around the world.” Though no one was infected, a 2015 government investigation .. https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/features/2015/0615_lab-stats/Review-Committee-Report-Final.pdf .. revealed that “over the course of the last decade, 86 facilities in the United States and seven other countries have received low concentrations of live [anthrax] spore samples… thought to be completely inactivated.”

These incidents pale, however, in comparison with Japan’s intentional use of biological weapons during the 1930s and 40s. There is “a published history that suggests up to 30,000 people were killed in China by the Japanese biological weapons program during the lead up to World War II. And if that data is accurate, that is orders of magnitude bigger than anything else,” Millett says.

Given the near-impossibility of controlling the spread of disease, a deliberate attack may have accidental effects far beyond what was intended. The Japanese, for example, may have meant to target only a few Chinese villages, only to unwittingly trigger an epidemic. There are reports, in fact, that thousands of Japan’s own soldiers became infected during a biological attack in 1941 .. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200679/ .

Despite the 1972 ban on biological weapons programs, Millett believes that many countries still have the capacity to produce biological weapons. As an example, he explains that the Soviets developed “a set of research and development tools that would answer the key questions and give you all the key capabilities to make biological weapons.”

The BWC only bans offensive research, and “underneath the umbrella of a defensive program,” Millett says, “you can do a whole load of research and development to figure out what you would want to weaponize if you were going to make a weapon.” Then, all a country needs to start producing those weapons is “the capacity to scale up production very, very quickly.” The Soviets, for example, built “a set of state-based commercial infrastructure to make things like vaccines.” On a day-to-day basis, they were making things the Soviet Union needed. “But they could be very radically rebooted and repurposed into production facilities for their biological weapons program,” Millett explains. This is known as a “breakout program.”

Says Millett, “I believe there are many, many countries that are well within the scope of a breakout program … so it’s not that they necessarily at this second have a fully prepared and worked-out biological weapons program that they can unleash on the world tomorrow, but they might well have all of the building blocks they need to do that in place, and a plan for how to turn their existing infrastructure towards a weapons program if they ever needed to. These components would be permissible under current international law.”

Biological Weapons Convention

This unsettling reality raises questions about the efficacy of the BWC – namely, what does it do well, and what doesn’t it do well? Millett, who worked for the BWC for well over a decade, has a nuanced view.

“The very fact that we have a ban on these things is brilliant,” he says. “We’re well ahead on biological weapons than many other types of weapons systems. We only got the ban on nuclear weapons – and it was only joined by some tiny number of countries – last year. Chemical weapons, only in 1995. The ban on biological weapons is hugely important. Having a space at the international level to talk about those issues is very important.” But, he adds, “we’re rapidly reaching the end of the space that I can be positive about.”

The ban on biological weapons was motivated, at least in part, by the sense that – unlike chemical weapons – they weren’t particularly useful. Traditionally, chemical and biological weapons were dealt with together. The 1925 Geneva Protocol banned both, and the original proposal for the Biological Weapons Convention, submitted by the UK in 1969, would have dealt with both. But the chemical weapons ban was ultimately dropped from the BWC, Millett says, “because that was during Vietnam, and so there were a number of chemical agents that were being used in Vietnam that weren’t going to be banned.” Once the scope of the ban had been narrowed, however, both the US and the USSR signed on.

Millet describes the resulting document as “aspirational.” He explains,“The Biological Weapons Convention is four pages long, whereas the [1995] Chemical Weapons Convention is 200 pages long, give or take.” And the difference “is about the teeth in the treaty.”

“The BWC is…a short document that’s basically a commitment by states not to make these weapons. The Chemical Weapons Convention is an international regime with an organization, with an inspection regime intended to enforce that. Under the BWC, if you are worried about another state, you’re meant to try to resolve those concerns amicably. But if you can’t do that, we move onto Article Six of the Convention, where you report it to the Security Council. The Security Council is meant to investigate it, but of course if you’re a permanent member of the Security Council, you can veto that, so that doesn’t happen.”

De-escalation

One easy way that states can avoid raising suspicion is to be more transparent. As Millett puts it, “If you’re not doing naughty things, then it’s on you to demonstrate that you’re not.” This doesn’t mean revealing everything to everybody. It means finding ways to show other states that they don’t need to worry.

As an example, Millett cites the heightened security culture that developed in the US after 9/11. Following the 2001 anthrax letter attacks, as well as a large investment in US biodefense programs, an initiative was started to prevent foreigners from working in those biodefense facilities. “I’m very glad they didn’t go down that path,” says Millett, “because the greatest risk, I think, was not that a foreign national would sneak in.” Rather, “the advantage of having foreign nationals in those programs was at the international level, when country Y stands up and accuses the US of having an illicit bioweapons program hidden in its biodefense program, there are three other countries that can stand up and say, ‘Well, wait a minute. Our scientists are in those facilities. We work very closely with that program, and we see no evidence of what you’re saying.’”

Historically, secrecy surrounding bioweapons programs has led other countries to begin their own research. Before World War I, the British began exploring the use of bioweapons. The Germans were aware of this. By the onset of the war, the British had abandoned the idea, but the Germans, not knowing this, began their own bioweapons program in an attempt to keep up. By World War II, Germany no longer had a bioweapons program. But the Allies believed they still did, and the U.S. bioweapons program was born of such fears.

What now?

Asked if he believes genome editing is a bioweapons “game changer”, Millett says no. “I see it as an enabling technology in the short to medium term, then maybe with longer-term implications [for biowarfare], but then we’re out into the far distance of what we can reasonably talk about and predict,” he says. “Certainly for now, I think its big impact is it makes it easier, faster, cheaper, and more reliable to do things that you could do using traditional approaches.”

But as biotechnology continues to evolve, so too will biowarfare. For example, it will eventually be possible for governments to alter specific genes in their own populations. “Imagine aerosolizing a lovely genome editor that knocks out a specifically nasty gene in your population,” says Millett. “It’s a passive thing. You breathe it in [and it] retroactively alters the population[’s DNA].

A government could use such technology to knock out a gene linked to cancer or other diseases. But, Millett says, “what would happen if you came across a couple of genes that at an individual level were not going to have an impact, but at a population level were connected with something, say, like IQ?” With the help of a genome editor, a government could make their population smarter, on average, by a few IQ points.

“There’s good economic data that says that [average IQ] is … statistically important,” Millett says. “The GDP of the country will be noticeably affected if we could just get another two or three percent IQ points. There are direct national security implications of that. If, for example, Chinese citizens got smarter on average over the next couple of generations by a couple of IQ points per generation, that has national security implications for both the UK and the US.”

For now, such an endeavor remains in the realm of science fiction. But technology is evolving at a breakneck speed, and it’s more important than ever to consider the potential implications of our advancements. That said, Millett is optimistic about the future. “I think the key is the distribution of bad actors versus good actors,” he says. As long as the bad actors remain the minority, there is more reason to be excited for the future of biotechnology than there is to be afraid of it.

Dr. Piers Millett holds fellowships at the Future of Humanity Institute, the University of Oxford, and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Policy and works as a consultant for the World Health Organization. He also served at the United Nations as the Deputy Head of the Biological Weapons Convention.

https://futureoflife.org/2018/10/12/genome-editing-and-the-future-of-biowarfare-a-conversation-with-dr-piers-millett/