Amazing initiative John—you might give yourself a D but I am giving you an A+ no doubt.
Trying to decide if I should recommend this to my family.
In Spain, we have 18000 confirmed COVID cases in January 2021. I assume real cases are at least 20000. Some projections estimate that laypeople might not get vaccinated in 10 months, so the potential benefit of a widespread DIY vaccine is avoiding 200k cases of COVID19 (optimistically assuming linear growth of cases).
Spain pop is 47 million, so the naïve chance of COVID for an individual before vaccines are widely available is 2e4*10 / 5e6 ie about 1 in 250.
Let’s say that the DIY vaccine has 10% chance of working on a givne individual. If we take the side effects of the vaccine to be as bad as catching COVID19 itself, then I want the chances of a serious side effect to be lower than 1 in 2500 for the DIY vaccine to be worth it.
Taking into account the risk of preparing it incorrectly plus general precaution, the chances of a serious side effect look to me more like 1 in 100 than 1 in 1000.
So I do not think, given my beliefs, that I should recommend it. Is this reasoning broadly correct? What is a good baseline for the chances of a side effect in a new peptide vaccine?
I think the chances of side effects as serious as COVID are much lower than that. I also think the chances of success are higher, but on that front it probably makes sense for you to wait a few weeks at least until I, and possibly others, have some test results.
But my biggest difference from this calculation is that I’d account for the benefits of not-having-to-try-hard-to-avoid-COVID. The chance of catching it is only low if you avoid going out and socializing; with a successful vaccine, you can have a low chance of catching it without paying that cost.
So that’s how my calculation would differ. On a meta level:
So I do not think, given my beliefs, that I should recommend it. Is this reasoning broadly correct?
… your reasoning is reasonable, and I do not think anyone should defer to my reasoning on this subject; I do not have enough legible expertise to merit that. Upvote for writing out the calculation.
I do not know the baseline for chances of a side effect in a new peptide vaccine. I expect that if side effects anywhere near as bad as COVID happened with any non-negligible rate, then I would have heard about it already, but I don’t have numbers or data on it.
Amazing initiative John—you might give yourself a D but I am giving you an A+ no doubt.
Trying to decide if I should recommend this to my family.
In Spain, we have 18000 confirmed COVID cases in January 2021. I assume real cases are at least 20000. Some projections estimate that laypeople might not get vaccinated in 10 months, so the potential benefit of a widespread DIY vaccine is avoiding 200k cases of COVID19 (optimistically assuming linear growth of cases).
Spain pop is 47 million, so the naïve chance of COVID for an individual before vaccines are widely available is 2e4*10 / 5e6 ie about 1 in 250.
Let’s say that the DIY vaccine has 10% chance of working on a givne individual. If we take the side effects of the vaccine to be as bad as catching COVID19 itself, then I want the chances of a serious side effect to be lower than 1 in 2500 for the DIY vaccine to be worth it.
Taking into account the risk of preparing it incorrectly plus general precaution, the chances of a serious side effect look to me more like 1 in 100 than 1 in 1000.
So I do not think, given my beliefs, that I should recommend it. Is this reasoning broadly correct? What is a good baseline for the chances of a side effect in a new peptide vaccine?
I think the chances of side effects as serious as COVID are much lower than that. I also think the chances of success are higher, but on that front it probably makes sense for you to wait a few weeks at least until I, and possibly others, have some test results.
But my biggest difference from this calculation is that I’d account for the benefits of not-having-to-try-hard-to-avoid-COVID. The chance of catching it is only low if you avoid going out and socializing; with a successful vaccine, you can have a low chance of catching it without paying that cost.
So that’s how my calculation would differ. On a meta level:
… your reasoning is reasonable, and I do not think anyone should defer to my reasoning on this subject; I do not have enough legible expertise to merit that. Upvote for writing out the calculation.
I do not know the baseline for chances of a side effect in a new peptide vaccine. I expect that if side effects anywhere near as bad as COVID happened with any non-negligible rate, then I would have heard about it already, but I don’t have numbers or data on it.