Looking at the RADVAC docs, I agree, this is dead simple. Required expertise is near-zero.
Regarding the cost: a few hundred dollars sounds like the right ballpark, and I’ll point out that making more doses costs next to nothing once it’s all set up. The protocol on the RADVAC site is for “10 to 15 doses”, and peptide cost is more about how many amino acids are in the sequence than how much of it you want to order. Should be quite cheap to make a lot.
On the FDA front, that sure sounds like they go after people who sell the stuff, but don’t care when it’s given away for free. So that’s pretty much ideal for a “make a thousand doses and vaccinate a whole community” scenario.
You forgot the most important question: how do you verify that it works? The answer is that you don’t.
I didn’t forget that, I guessed the answer. I could imagine the rationalist community scraping together a 200-person challenge trial, but that would be a big project. (At least the vaccine-making part wouldn’t be too hard or expensive, though.)
While I also find this an interesting idea I’m wondering if this exchange maybe suggest some additional complications.
When Estep reached out to him earlier this year, Siber also wanted to know if the team had considered a dangerous side effect, called enhancement, in which a vaccine can actually worsen the disease. “It’s not the best idea—especially in this case, you could make things worse,” Siber says of the effort. “You really need to know what you are doing here.”
He isn’t the only skeptic. Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Medical Center, who saw the white paper, pans Radvac as “off-the-charts loony.” In an email, Caplan says he sees “no leeway” for self-experimentation given the importance of quality control with vaccines. Instead, he thinks there is a high “potential for harm” and “ill-founded enthusiasm.”
Church disagrees, saying the vaccine’s simple formulation means it’s probably safe. “I think the bigger risk is that it is ineffective,” he says.
Given it is from the end of July I might wonder if any evidence of the potential or making the disease worse by taking the home brew has been seen.
I am also not a big fan of the “‘no leeway’ for self experimentation” view as I tend to think more “putting your money where your mouth is” would be a better world. The concerns should really only be about significant negative externalities, such as you test on yourself and reduce everyone else’s immunity type outcomes (not that I think that particular example would be possible).
Guess I’ll read up on that too. My immediate impression is that I’d expect, a priori, for Very Serious People to have Concerns regardless of whether they’re realistic, and these sound like about what I’d expect in that department. (Also, I have rather a lot more confidence in George Church than in the vast majority of biologists.)
If you would start a 200-person challenge trial I would expect the FDA suddenly to care a lot because that’s actually a challenge to the way they regulate drugs.
I didn’t forget that, I guessed the answer. I could imagine the rationalist community scraping together a 200-person challenge trial, but that would be a big project. (At least the vaccine-making part wouldn’t be too hard or expensive, though.)
If only a few thousand people are ever going to get the vaccine a challenge trial doesn’t make sense, especially not such a big one.
Maybe you could have some animal trials instead though.
I agree this is the main potential failure mode of that plan. That said, the upshot of challenge trials is that we can get good data with very few people, so quite a bit less than 200 could suffice; I haven’t run the numbers. More generally, it seems like the sort of thing where a bunch of folks on LessWrong would discuss it for a while and figure out a way to do it which gives maximum information for minimum risk.
Sure. Only in that specific scenario, DIY vaccine, for maybe a small community, very safe, scales well in that range; i would say the value of the information you could get from a challenge trial seems low.
Instead i would just give it to everyone.
If you really want to know that it works for sure, challenge trials are not that hard. Of course, you should probably check for immune response (T-cells and antibodies) and do some animal studies before going for a challenge trial. You don’t need to infect 200 people at once, you can do one-by-one from a healthy cohort with low infectious dose so that in the worst case it works as variolation. You can get volunteers from https://www.1daysooner.org/. You can do it anonymously. You can pay people in darknet with BTC/Monero for the experiments. You can only recruit people from countries where nobody cares about your small experiments (e.g. Africa or post-Soviet Union), in some countries, e.g. Russia, there is no criminal penalty for illegal human experiments, only general responsibility for causing harm (and Russian police and courts couldn’t care less about some guy who took some stuff on his own initiative following an anonymous internet advice and ended up sick or even dead).
Are there any English language sources where I could learn more about the legal issues surrounding human experimentation in Russia such as the one you mentioned?
Well, this is looking way better than I expected.
Looking at the RADVAC docs, I agree, this is dead simple. Required expertise is near-zero.
Regarding the cost: a few hundred dollars sounds like the right ballpark, and I’ll point out that making more doses costs next to nothing once it’s all set up. The protocol on the RADVAC site is for “10 to 15 doses”, and peptide cost is more about how many amino acids are in the sequence than how much of it you want to order. Should be quite cheap to make a lot.
On the FDA front, that sure sounds like they go after people who sell the stuff, but don’t care when it’s given away for free. So that’s pretty much ideal for a “make a thousand doses and vaccinate a whole community” scenario.
I didn’t forget that, I guessed the answer. I could imagine the rationalist community scraping together a 200-person challenge trial, but that would be a big project. (At least the vaccine-making part wouldn’t be too hard or expensive, though.)
While I also find this an interesting idea I’m wondering if this exchange maybe suggest some additional complications.
from https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/07/29/1005720/george-church-diy-coronavirus-vaccine/
Given it is from the end of July I might wonder if any evidence of the potential or making the disease worse by taking the home brew has been seen.
I am also not a big fan of the “‘no leeway’ for self experimentation” view as I tend to think more “putting your money where your mouth is” would be a better world. The concerns should really only be about significant negative externalities, such as you test on yourself and reduce everyone else’s immunity type outcomes (not that I think that particular example would be possible).
Guess I’ll read up on that too. My immediate impression is that I’d expect, a priori, for Very Serious People to have Concerns regardless of whether they’re realistic, and these sound like about what I’d expect in that department. (Also, I have rather a lot more confidence in George Church than in the vast majority of biologists.)
If you would start a 200-person challenge trial I would expect the FDA suddenly to care a lot because that’s actually a challenge to the way they regulate drugs.
If only a few thousand people are ever going to get the vaccine a challenge trial doesn’t make sense, especially not such a big one. Maybe you could have some animal trials instead though.
I agree this is the main potential failure mode of that plan. That said, the upshot of challenge trials is that we can get good data with very few people, so quite a bit less than 200 could suffice; I haven’t run the numbers. More generally, it seems like the sort of thing where a bunch of folks on LessWrong would discuss it for a while and figure out a way to do it which gives maximum information for minimum risk.
Sure. Only in that specific scenario, DIY vaccine, for maybe a small community, very safe, scales well in that range; i would say the value of the information you could get from a challenge trial seems low. Instead i would just give it to everyone.
If you really want to know that it works for sure, challenge trials are not that hard. Of course, you should probably check for immune response (T-cells and antibodies) and do some animal studies before going for a challenge trial. You don’t need to infect 200 people at once, you can do one-by-one from a healthy cohort with low infectious dose so that in the worst case it works as variolation. You can get volunteers from https://www.1daysooner.org/. You can do it anonymously. You can pay people in darknet with BTC/Monero for the experiments. You can only recruit people from countries where nobody cares about your small experiments (e.g. Africa or post-Soviet Union), in some countries, e.g. Russia, there is no criminal penalty for illegal human experiments, only general responsibility for causing harm (and Russian police and courts couldn’t care less about some guy who took some stuff on his own initiative following an anonymous internet advice and ended up sick or even dead).
Are there any English language sources where I could learn more about the legal issues surrounding human experimentation in Russia such as the one you mentioned?