[AR] Re: FW: [NASA HQ News] March 19 Administrator Statement on Agency Response to Coronavirus
- From: Norman Yarvin <yarvin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2020 03:48:30 -0400
On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 07:14:47PM -0700, Henry Vanderbilt wrote:
Entirely aside from such containment measures buying time for effective
acute-case treatments (another month at best, more likely a few months)
and a vaccine (likely a year or more) to arrive.
There's nothing set in stone about the length of time to field a
vaccine. The often-quoted 18 months (or "at least a year") assumes
the usual approval process: Phase 1 trial, then Phase 2 trial, then
Phase 3 trial -- all hurried up, but still basically business as
usual. Really we could put a lot of candidate vaccines out there as
soon as they could be fielded (starting basically now; at least one is
already in a Phase 1 trial), and collect statistics on their safety
and efficacy as we went. The ramp-up should be done somewhat
cautiously, but that wouldn't mean taking anything like a year. If,
say, a new factory came online that could ship a million doses a week,
it wouldn't be wise to use all those million doses in the first week;
instead, we might give two hundred the first week, four hundred the
second, eight hundred the third, and so forth, doubling the number
each time while continually monitoring for problems. It wouldn't take
many doublings to get to a million.
Drug design is often quite complicated, but vaccines can be simple:
take a piece of the virus, mix it with an adjuvant, and inject. There
are other approaches, but that's the tried and true one. (The
adjuvant serves as a danger signal to the immune system; it's commonly
aluminum oxide.) These days we probably wouldn't mess around with
killed or attenuated virus, but would genetically engineer bacteria to
make a piece of it -- say, one of the spike proteins, the spike being
the feature most visible to the immune system. Vaccine design gets a
lot harder if you're trying to design a vaccine for a disease that
people don't naturally become immune to (like tuberculosis), but that
doesn't seem to be the present case.
We would need politicians willing to take scientific risks, though.
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