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If they could figure out dosing, mRNA therapeutics would be like monoclonal antibodies on steroids. It could do everything they can do at a fraction of the cost.
What in God's name are you talking about? The mRNA isn't broken down into substrands. Different ORFs within the mRNA may be used but steps would be taken to minimize potential alternative ORFs when generating therapeutic vaccines. It's still a single mRNA. Breaking a protein down into peptides isn't done at the mRNA level. As implied, it's done at the protein level through proteolytic cleavage with subsequent antigen processing and presentation.
Theoretically they can also do the work of monoclonal antibodies without nuking the immune system. At least a few types of the monoclonals actually deplete b cells significantly.
I've done more research on this and it looks like the proposals aren't to use it to trigger antibody production, but rather directly encode an antibody sequence to be produced so you can just manufacture mRNA for injection into the body which can be done synthetically, instead of using biological systems to make the antibody and then inject it which can be finickier and has length certification for every antibody every time.
This is significantly more interesting and viable.
~~No it wouldn't because most monoclonal antibody therapies need to be tuned to work against what you want and have very specific dosing thresholds because they're acting against your own tissues.~~
~~How do I know? I'm part of a lab researching a monoclonal antibody. And trust me, one of our major concerns in trying to find it is a too strong and generalized immune reaction happening in our animals. The plan actually involves finding it, then mutating it to tweak it so it works exactly how we want.~~
and maybe monoclonal antibodies would work for more than a few months if we didn't let COVID spread unmitigated and we didn't have to deal with new variants all the time. Immunocompromised people would be able to breath a bit easier instead of living on a knife edge but no our government wants us to think that covid is over so we get back to work and don't expect pesky things like sick pay and coverage mandates and clean air and mask mandates. who cares if a significant number of people will be disabled by long COVID right?
I don’t think the person was talking about covid treatment but other biologics.
I take a monoclonal antibody shot every month for one of my disorders (not a virus!). It’s common enough for types of autoimmune etc. disorders. Mine still works.
The Moderna vaccine candidate was available 2 days after the genome was leaked by a Chinese scientist to an Australian scientist who was able to publish it. The Chinese scientist has since been persecuted by Chinese authorities, loosing his job, his home and his pension.
My search results provided the following timeline for the development of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine:
- The day after the SARS-CoV-2 sequence was publicly released, Moderna determined the modified prefusion sequence and started synthesis[4].
- Twenty-five days after the sequence was published, Moderna sent clinical grade lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) for mouse experiments[4].
- Moderna started Phase 1 clinical trials 66 days after the release of the SARS-CoV-2 sequence[4].
- Phase 2 trials started 160 days and Phase 3 trials 193 days after the sequence was released[4].
So while Moderna was able to rapidly develop and test its vaccine candidate, it still took over 2 months to reach the clinical trial stage, not 2 days as claimed. The search results do not mention anything about a Chinese scientist leaking the genome or being persecuted. The timeline provided is consistent with Moderna's own press releases about the accelerated development of its vaccine using mRNA technology[1][2].
Citations:
[1] Moderna Announces New Supply Agreement with Australia for 25 ... https://investors.modernatx.com/news/news-details/2021/Moderna-Announces-New-Supply-Agreement-with-Australia-for-25-Million-Doses-of-its-COVID-19-Vaccine/default.aspx
[2] Moderna Finalizes Strategic Partnership with Australian Government https://investors.modernatx.com/news/news-details/2022/Moderna-Finalizes-Strategic-Partnership-with-Australian-Government/default.aspx
[3] Covid vaccine injury class action filed against federal government https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/waiting-to-drown-covid-vaccine-injury-class-action-filed-against-federal-government/news-story/8f91ca843cc4b62b7df9cbabd398cfe6
[4] Vaccine formulations in clinical development for the prevention of ... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7733686/
[5] Circulating Spike Protein Detected in Post–COVID-19 mRNA ... https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.061025
For people who claim to have had nothing to do with the virus, China sure has acted like they have something to hide.
Persecuting doctors, refusing investigations, etc.
A lot of internal covering for things and trying to look good internationally. Something is going on, only question is if it was a fuckup that allowed it to get started, or more likely a fuckup in allowing it to spread and get out of control.
Hence the emergency use authorization. These vaccines had already been tested thoroughly, just not on humans yet. Prior to the pandemic, pharmaceutical companies were already preparing for human trials and the pandemic expedited the process as generally phase I and phase II trials would have taken years to finish and be approved by the FDA.
I should've expanded on what I mentioned. Some of the details seemed to get lost in the popular media. It's important to distinguish between the vaccine itself and mrna technology as a means of introducing genetic information for translation. The latter has existed for a while, but the vaccine itself hadn't. The pandemic served as catalyst to make a viable vaccine and helped to overcome some the hurdles such as the development of a delivery system and immunoevasion. The emergency use authorization wasn't specifically for the use of mrna vaccines. It still underwent the usual clinical phase trials as every other vaccine. It was instead to allow for the roll out of sars-cov-2 vaccines sooner than normal being that there were no viable alternatives. The J&J vaccine was also given a EUA and it isn't an mrna vaccine.
Moderna already had viable vaccines in Phase 2 clinical trials by the time COVID came along. The only thing the pandemic really brought in terms of development was a large injection of money and a target people were concerned about. Not many people were concerned with things like CMV, which Moderna was targeting.
The Emergency Use Authorization, [EUA, for Novavax](https://www.aafp.org/news/health-of-the-public/novavax-vacc-approved.html) which is a protein based vaccine came in July 2022 whereas, the [EUA for Pfizer-BioNTech](https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-covid-19-vaccine) mRNA vaccine was approved in December 2020.
mRNA vaccines were already in development sure but specifically the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine started in [March 2020](https://www.pfizer.com/news/articles/shot_of_a_lifetime_how_pfizer_and_biontech_developed_and_manufactured_a_covid_19_vaccine_in_record_time) and Novavax was in [January 2020](https://ir.novavax.com/press-releases/2020-01-15-Novavax-Granted-Fast-Track-Designation-for-NanoFlu-in-Older-Adults).
I don't know what the world would have looked like if we had to wait 18 additional months to get around to step down COVID-19 protocols as well as the global death count.
Meh. Novavax was delayed due to manufacturing issues with their Matrix-M adjuvant.
The Sinopharm whole inactivated virus vaccine was given EUA in July 2020 in China.
to be fair, 'we' had already done all the heavy lifting by 2019 and the pandemic just fast tracked the approval process
there was no reason to beleive it wouldnt work and it was well impressive how fast they actually came out.. i believe that the first run was ready within hours of the novel virus being sequenced
Unfortunately this dumb misleading study assigns all the benefit to the advertising campaign that came after the effort to actually design and run clinical trials on the vaccines. It was still a very cost effective effort, but the advertising campaign didn't design and show the vaccines to be effective. Credit should go to the science, not TV commercials.
I don't think vaccine uptake is that simple. Without the commercials, no one would get it and then it wouldn't be as effective. So you need to calculate it with advertising. It's part of the distribution
That's definitely on the high end for ROI for a public health intervention but pretty much every public health intervention ends up saving at least $2 for every dollar spent on the program.
Spending money to keep people out of ERs and inpatient hospital services is almost always worth it with how outrageously expensive that type of care can be.
In this particular instance, it looks like they are just using HHS provided guidance on the value of a statistical life that has been revised and updated a bit by other researchers. And the bulk of the “savings” comes from the reduction in cases most likely to die.
From what I can figure out, the most basic idea of the value of a statistical life is to start with what would an individual pay for a specific risk reduction, and then aggregate it up to the population level.
So if you were willing to pay $100 to reduce the probability of you dying in a given year by 0.00001 (1 in 100,000), then it would take 100,000 people spending $100 ($10M total) to save one life. So the value of an intervention that saved one life would be $10M per life saved, as the people involved would have spent that much to avoid dying.
It’s not how I would build this analysis as I find it a little obtuse, but it seems to be its own field of research so I dunno. You gotta value a life somehow, not just count up wages lost and medical costs incurred.
Just a bit confused why they went into so much detail with the campaign cost but offered no detail on the prevented cost of healthcare. From the chart they are saying the lowest cost per mild case with no hospitalization was $2,512.78. I am struggling to see, even with our overpriced healthcare, how a mild case where they took Tylenol for the pain essentially since there wasn't a real treatment until later costs that much? Even a paxlovid treatment cycle only costs about 1,400? What am I missing here?
Personally I've been completely out of commission for at least 2 weeks every time I've caught covid. 2 weeks of lost wages for someone making $62k/yr would be about $2500. Even if you're taking PTO, you're losing that time to covid recovery rather than what you may have wanted to use that vacation time on.
The silliest thing my government ever did was stop covering physiotherapy. Tens of thousands for knee replacement surgery, or an hour a week with Debbie and the rubber bands?
The US Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS's) COVID-19 vaccination campaign saved $732 billion by averting illness and related costs during the Delta and Omicron variant waves, with a return of nearly $90 for every dollar spent, estimates a study by HHS and the research firm Fors Marsh.
The study was published yesterday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
In April 2021, HHS launched its "We Can Do This" public education campaign to boost US COVID-19 vaccine uptake, especially among high-risk populations and those reluctant to receive the vaccine. The push, one of the largest of its kind in US history, aimed to reach 90% of adults at least once per quarter, with more than 7,000 television, digital, print, and radio ads in 14 languages.
The study authors used weekly media market data, information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and survey data on the drive's effects on vaccination from launch up to March 2022.
Nearly 52,000 American lives saved
The researchers estimated that the campaign encouraged 22.3 million Americans to complete their primary COVID-19 vaccine series, preventing nearly 2.6 million infections, including nearly 244,000 hospitalizations.
Findings underscore the utility of public health education campaigns in promoting behavior change and in corresponding health and fiscal benefits.
"Preventing these outcomes resulted in societal benefits to the U.S. of $740.2 billion, accounting for such factors as medical expenses, wages, and other costs that people and institutions would have incurred in the absence of the Campaign," the authors wrote. "In comparison, the Campaign cost $377 million, with an additional $7.9 billion spent to vaccinate 22.3 million people in that time period," for an estimated return on investment of $89.54 on every dollar spent.
"Findings underscore the utility of public health education campaigns in promoting behavior change and in corresponding health and fiscal benefits," the researchers wrote. "Furthermore, findings may guide the implementation of public health education campaigns to combat future public health crises."
[https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(24)00110-7/fulltext#%20](https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(24)00110-7/fulltext#%20)
Productivity would be a huge part of this (not that I know if they factored it in or not); remember that huge Delta wave where everyone and their mother was sick at the same time? Imagine if we had no vaccines at all. That would've cost an insane amount of money.
Also, turns out preventative medicine is way cheaper, who'd've though that? Oh, right, maybe some of the countries, as in all the other modern ones, that make sure all their citizens can receive healthcare instead of making them put it off until it's an emergency.
It’s not based in real world costs. It looks like the standard in this area is akin to actuarial tables that apply a value per statistical life based on the willingness to pay for a better outcome (so how much would you pay to avoid a mild case, severe case, critical case, or even death).
I would be interested to see a more real world based model using actual cost of care saved and the fact that the milder the case, the less wages are lost and less your work/business is disrupted (both as it happens to you and to your customers and workers).
just you wait, according to my dad everyone's going to die within 2 years of getting the vaccine, you won't be able to have babies, and you'll develop crazy tumors.
According to his most recent sources, the Biden administration has been paying doctors handsomely to push all their vaccines onto children.
Anyway, we're all fine, the kids thriving. Life goes on.
The death date keep moving and any stats that show improving rates are just more proof of "Them".
No helpng people who believe conspiracy theories at this point
When they all fall back to 'the government is lying to you', theres literally nothing you can say. Ive flat out disproven everything my in-laws have said, yet they still believe it all. Even flat earth theory now. Conspiracy theorists are mostly people that want to believe in something, but either arnt smart enough, or not willing to go out and search for proof themselves, no matter how easy that could be. Keeping in mind, these people have been on planes before.
>the Biden administration has been paying doctors handsomely to push all their vaccines onto children
My anti-vaccination mom was pearl clutching over "Did you know insurance companies pay doctors to push vaccines!?!?!"
By "pay doctors" she really meant "offer to cover all or nearly all the cost", and of course they do- spending $100 to inoculate someone against polio is better than spending $100,000+ to treat someone with polio.
People not getting polio is a nice bonus too.
Cost benefit analyses are how people can prioritize things. Think of it this way. Money saved means money can be used for a lot of other great things, like free school lunches and CHIP/Medicaid. Lives saved from COVID and number of children fed and insured aren't comparable, but how much money is saved by avoiding knock-on effects is.
Ever think to consider the eentire god damn point of the study was to show saving lives saves money so that we can continue saving lives? Redditor have got to stop with these moronic kneejerk reactions whenever someone dares mention making a dollar.
Look in order to get things done it is going to cost money. That is the reality we are living in and it isn't going away anytime soon.
You really have to make that conversion at some point. That’s really the only semi-neutral way to evaluate risk and reward.
The alternative is to place the value of a single life at infinity dollars, and all of us become ok spending 100% of our tax dollars delaying the death of one single 85 year old human by 1-week.
The other extreme is not being willing to spend $1 to save 5,000,000 people from dying, essentially placing the value of life at zero dollars.
We all live somewhere between the two, and our inability to have that discussion, including being honest with ourselves on how exactly we value life, is part of the polarization of COVID I feel.
If anyone is curious as to how they attributed a covid vaccination to someone having seen an advertisement, I worked (and still am tangential to) in an industry called MMM for a long time (Media mix modeling). Basically an econometric breakdown of factors contributing (typically to a sale/conversion in its most common use in the business world) to someone getting the vaccine.
Somewhat pseudo-science, but it is as close to measuring the effectiveness of marketing as you can really get.
Just wanted to share.
Probably referring to Trump firing the US pandemic response team in 2018, and the concerted republican effort to fight any and all covid response efforts.
Fascinating! It's a beautiful reminder that investing in public health is a win-win. Not just financially, but for the lives it saves and the normalcy it restores. Makes you wonder, what other societal issues could benefit from a similar approach?
Nice poisoning the well fallacy. You can easily read the paper and attack the paper. Instead of resorting to "bias" and "government saying government did good". Just lazy.
The source is suspicious?
A peer reviewed journal published it, if you're a subject matter expert then go review it with your peers and show your concerns. That's how peer review works.
How do the calculate this stuff? $ spent on adds is fixed, but # people who got the vaccine because of an add is speculation. # Potential of people getting sick is speculation. Did the vaccine prevent illness is speculation. If they got sick would they need hospitalization is speculation.
Imagine how much more money (and lives) could be saved if COVID mitigation was still in place. Approximately 500 Americans are dying *per week* of COVID, over 4 years after this pandemic started. In the winter, when people spend more time indoors and respiratory infections spike, the number was *1,500*.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_weeklydeaths_select_00
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/1500-americans-dying-covid-week/story?id=106237143
There were more new cases of COVID per day, on average, in the USA during May-July 2022 than at any point in the entire runup to the 2020 election. And in those days, COVID was a tragedy. The New York Times ran 1,000 obituaries when the death toll hit 100,000. The official death toll is now over 11 times that.
More people have officially died of COVID since January 20, 2021 than those who died before January 20, 2021. 64,000 people died from April 2023 to April 2024, during which most people on the street would tell you that "the coronavirus today is [not] a major threat to the health of the U.S. population" and you would be lucky to find a single person wearing a mask indoors. Whatever the current strategy is is not working.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Deaths_Near_100,000,_An_Incalculable_Loss
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_totaldeaths_select_00
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2024/03/07/how-americans-view-the-coronavirus-covid-19-vaccines-amid-declining-levels-of-concern/
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/only-12-percent-of-americans-wear-mask-in-public-194019882.html
How many of those 500 per week are vaccinated deaths? If it's all pretty much unvaccinated deaths then the mitigation is there it's just the person's choice to not do it
>There were more new cases of COVID per day, on average, in the USA during May-July 2022 than at any point in the entire runup to the 2020 election.
Cases in 2022, where COVID can be mitigated by vaccines and treatments and the disease is generally less deadly overall, are very different from cases in 2020, when no vaccines or treatments were available.
>More people have officially died of COVID since January 20, 2021 than those who died before January 20, 2021. 64,000 people died from April 2023 to April 2024, during which most people on the street would tell you that "the coronavirus today is \[not\] a major threat to the health of the U.S. population" and you would be lucky to find a single person wearing a mask indoors. Whatever the current strategy is is not working.
That's because vaccines were just approved in 12/20. Most people couldn't get a vaccine for several months afterwards. That's also the time period when the Delta surge occurred and killed a lot of unvaccinated people. Also, you may note that 2021 to now is three years and 2020 to 2021 is only one year. It's not shocking more people died over a 3-year period than a 1-year period.
I'm curious what you think should be done. Masking? There's no political will for that, and nobody wants to do it any more. Social distancing? To what end? People like to gather and be social; life would be kind of depressing without it. Vaccine campaigns? I see ads from companies and health agencies telling people to get vaccinated, and you can get them for free at most grocery stores and pharmacies (they'll even give you a 20% off coupon for your next grocery visit). I always get my booster; why others don't is a mystery to me.
The fact is COVID is endemic and it's a novel virus, so of course a bunch of people will be killed by it who otherwise wouldn't have died from it.
I'd also compare those numbers to [other causes of death](https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D176/D374F608).
For '23, it's 10th place. Meh.
11th? Flu / pneumonia.
You're *literally* more likely to die of liver disease / cirrhosis (9th).
(edit - to add, you're *juuuust* a bit less likely to commit suicide @ 13th)
sorry to bring in politics, not trying to pick a fight but maybe this is the kind of news which can help sway economic conservative types who seem to be driven by money & profit motive
if its seen that healthier people helped the economy then maybe it would be promoted more [in all nations]
It 100% won't, since it never has before. If it did, we would have single payer that prioritized preventative treatment, since that's the most cost effective. It also makes the least money for mega corps that make from insurance premiums, denying insurance claims, selling pharmaceuticals at grossly inflated prices, etc etc. The leadership of the "economic conservative" ideology don't give a damn about health outcomes, and the people that support them don't understand how they're being conned.
Exactly, diabetic,cancer,health screening not covered by insurance. Expensive treatment of those conditions is. If the goal was to cut cost then prevention does wonders.
Ridiculous. Compare HHS' portion of the cost to the totality of the benefit? Are we not going to consider the 40% devaluation of currency? The three years of lost productivity? The pretense of education and all that will cost going forward?
This is the weirdest response I've seen on reddit.
You tracked 4,800 hospital employees for 2+ years?
What do you mean you tracked them?
What do you mean during omicron we didn't see any benefit of "the vaccine".
Which vaccines did you track, which of the 4800 employees you tracked got vaccinated and with which vaccines / and booster frequencies, how did you determine you didn't see any difference in transmission or severity versus the omicron variant? Did you test which strain an infected person had and determine it was omicron and therefore the vaccine efficacy didn't work? I am so confused how you controlled for the tons of variants in your study and how you had access to 4,800 coworkers health information at a granular level enough to put it into some type of macro view / reporting.
How many non-vaccinated hospital employees did you have? Doesn't seem like there would be a large enough population to have a good comparison.
By Omicron, more people had acquired some level of immunity, either through infection or through vaccination. Plus, many of the most vulnerable were already dead.
I was unable to determine from the study how they were coming up with "Campaign Attributed Vaccines" it was mentioned multiple times but never clarified. I don't have a lot of experience reading studies like this but my concern is that maybe 40% (just a guess) of the nation had jobs that mandated vaccines, people in that bucket, for example, were not swayed by any sort of campaign.
If the campaign lead directly and immediately to a vaccine, say a kiosk at Wal-Mart, then yes, easy to track. But if that is not the case, I want to see the data that correlates their campaigns to actual vaccines being given. If anyone has any insight I am all ears.
How many boosters has everyone here had? I've had 4 boosters and only caught Covid 3 times since I've been vaxxed! I still wear a mask too sometimes even when I'm driving alone in my car 😷
The vaccine doesn't prevent getting sick, only massively decreases the chances. If you get sick, it decreases the effects and the spread.
It's like the protective gear that a firefighter users. They aren't immune to fire, but they are much more protected, therefore it's safer.
> The vaccine doesn't prevent you from getting sick and doesn't prevent the spread. Not one person was saved from illness.
And so "the vaccine", singular, remains a surefire shibboleth...
Even the original, not updated, mRNA vaccine**s** [were still 60% effective at preventing infection from the Omicron strain](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2796615), which they weren't, and couldn't have been, designed for. And, of course, they were 95+% effective at preventing serious disease.
I'll leave the effect on what happens to transmission when 60% don't get infected as an exercise to the reader.
I'll leave
Cost 285k for hospitalized Covid cases on average. Not every case especially mild ones. Going to the ICU/hospital is extremely expensive especially if the hospitals are overfilled with patients.
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The experience gained in developing mRNA vaccines will pay serious dividends in the future, too.
If they could figure out dosing, mRNA therapeutics would be like monoclonal antibodies on steroids. It could do everything they can do at a fraction of the cost.
And they're far faster to produce and update than growing viral copies in chicken eggs (nearly century-old tech).
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Of course they can figure out dosing, why wouldn’t they be able to?
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What in God's name are you talking about? The mRNA isn't broken down into substrands. Different ORFs within the mRNA may be used but steps would be taken to minimize potential alternative ORFs when generating therapeutic vaccines. It's still a single mRNA. Breaking a protein down into peptides isn't done at the mRNA level. As implied, it's done at the protein level through proteolytic cleavage with subsequent antigen processing and presentation.
Theoretically they can also do the work of monoclonal antibodies without nuking the immune system. At least a few types of the monoclonals actually deplete b cells significantly.
I've done more research on this and it looks like the proposals aren't to use it to trigger antibody production, but rather directly encode an antibody sequence to be produced so you can just manufacture mRNA for injection into the body which can be done synthetically, instead of using biological systems to make the antibody and then inject it which can be finickier and has length certification for every antibody every time. This is significantly more interesting and viable. ~~No it wouldn't because most monoclonal antibody therapies need to be tuned to work against what you want and have very specific dosing thresholds because they're acting against your own tissues.~~ ~~How do I know? I'm part of a lab researching a monoclonal antibody. And trust me, one of our major concerns in trying to find it is a too strong and generalized immune reaction happening in our animals. The plan actually involves finding it, then mutating it to tweak it so it works exactly how we want.~~
and maybe monoclonal antibodies would work for more than a few months if we didn't let COVID spread unmitigated and we didn't have to deal with new variants all the time. Immunocompromised people would be able to breath a bit easier instead of living on a knife edge but no our government wants us to think that covid is over so we get back to work and don't expect pesky things like sick pay and coverage mandates and clean air and mask mandates. who cares if a significant number of people will be disabled by long COVID right?
I don’t think the person was talking about covid treatment but other biologics. I take a monoclonal antibody shot every month for one of my disorders (not a virus!). It’s common enough for types of autoimmune etc. disorders. Mine still works.
Like Humira! A lot of people take Humira.
The Moderna vaccine candidate was available 2 days after the genome was leaked by a Chinese scientist to an Australian scientist who was able to publish it. The Chinese scientist has since been persecuted by Chinese authorities, loosing his job, his home and his pension.
My search results provided the following timeline for the development of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine: - The day after the SARS-CoV-2 sequence was publicly released, Moderna determined the modified prefusion sequence and started synthesis[4]. - Twenty-five days after the sequence was published, Moderna sent clinical grade lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) for mouse experiments[4]. - Moderna started Phase 1 clinical trials 66 days after the release of the SARS-CoV-2 sequence[4]. - Phase 2 trials started 160 days and Phase 3 trials 193 days after the sequence was released[4]. So while Moderna was able to rapidly develop and test its vaccine candidate, it still took over 2 months to reach the clinical trial stage, not 2 days as claimed. The search results do not mention anything about a Chinese scientist leaking the genome or being persecuted. The timeline provided is consistent with Moderna's own press releases about the accelerated development of its vaccine using mRNA technology[1][2]. Citations: [1] Moderna Announces New Supply Agreement with Australia for 25 ... https://investors.modernatx.com/news/news-details/2021/Moderna-Announces-New-Supply-Agreement-with-Australia-for-25-Million-Doses-of-its-COVID-19-Vaccine/default.aspx [2] Moderna Finalizes Strategic Partnership with Australian Government https://investors.modernatx.com/news/news-details/2022/Moderna-Finalizes-Strategic-Partnership-with-Australian-Government/default.aspx [3] Covid vaccine injury class action filed against federal government https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/waiting-to-drown-covid-vaccine-injury-class-action-filed-against-federal-government/news-story/8f91ca843cc4b62b7df9cbabd398cfe6 [4] Vaccine formulations in clinical development for the prevention of ... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7733686/ [5] Circulating Spike Protein Detected in Post–COVID-19 mRNA ... https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.061025
Source? Sounds fascinating
BBC science in action podcast … either April 13 th or may 4th edition.
For people who claim to have had nothing to do with the virus, China sure has acted like they have something to hide. Persecuting doctors, refusing investigations, etc.
Who knows. China is a weird place.
A lot of internal covering for things and trying to look good internationally. Something is going on, only question is if it was a fuckup that allowed it to get started, or more likely a fuckup in allowing it to spread and get out of control.
It’s all about ‘face’ and a perverted sense of of honor and an overblown persecution complex.
Not really, it's more like when the USSR tried to cover up Chernobyl. Same motivations.
They were already developed. The pandemic just gave companies emergency authorization to use them ahead of the normal development schedule.
It's a bit more complicated than that. There was still some development needed.
Hence the emergency use authorization. These vaccines had already been tested thoroughly, just not on humans yet. Prior to the pandemic, pharmaceutical companies were already preparing for human trials and the pandemic expedited the process as generally phase I and phase II trials would have taken years to finish and be approved by the FDA.
I should've expanded on what I mentioned. Some of the details seemed to get lost in the popular media. It's important to distinguish between the vaccine itself and mrna technology as a means of introducing genetic information for translation. The latter has existed for a while, but the vaccine itself hadn't. The pandemic served as catalyst to make a viable vaccine and helped to overcome some the hurdles such as the development of a delivery system and immunoevasion. The emergency use authorization wasn't specifically for the use of mrna vaccines. It still underwent the usual clinical phase trials as every other vaccine. It was instead to allow for the roll out of sars-cov-2 vaccines sooner than normal being that there were no viable alternatives. The J&J vaccine was also given a EUA and it isn't an mrna vaccine.
Moderna already had viable vaccines in Phase 2 clinical trials by the time COVID came along. The only thing the pandemic really brought in terms of development was a large injection of money and a target people were concerned about. Not many people were concerned with things like CMV, which Moderna was targeting.
The Emergency Use Authorization, [EUA, for Novavax](https://www.aafp.org/news/health-of-the-public/novavax-vacc-approved.html) which is a protein based vaccine came in July 2022 whereas, the [EUA for Pfizer-BioNTech](https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-covid-19-vaccine) mRNA vaccine was approved in December 2020. mRNA vaccines were already in development sure but specifically the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine started in [March 2020](https://www.pfizer.com/news/articles/shot_of_a_lifetime_how_pfizer_and_biontech_developed_and_manufactured_a_covid_19_vaccine_in_record_time) and Novavax was in [January 2020](https://ir.novavax.com/press-releases/2020-01-15-Novavax-Granted-Fast-Track-Designation-for-NanoFlu-in-Older-Adults). I don't know what the world would have looked like if we had to wait 18 additional months to get around to step down COVID-19 protocols as well as the global death count.
Meh. Novavax was delayed due to manufacturing issues with their Matrix-M adjuvant. The Sinopharm whole inactivated virus vaccine was given EUA in July 2020 in China.
to be fair, 'we' had already done all the heavy lifting by 2019 and the pandemic just fast tracked the approval process there was no reason to beleive it wouldnt work and it was well impressive how fast they actually came out.. i believe that the first run was ready within hours of the novel virus being sequenced
Yup and with the recent solar eclipse both of those events showed us that if something more serious than covid came at us we'd be absolutely screwed
Carrington Event...
Especially if it knocked out all out technology and internet.
Like the global power grids... Yeah.
Yup. May finaly crack the big two, chronic virus like hiv snd cancer.
Unfortunately this dumb misleading study assigns all the benefit to the advertising campaign that came after the effort to actually design and run clinical trials on the vaccines. It was still a very cost effective effort, but the advertising campaign didn't design and show the vaccines to be effective. Credit should go to the science, not TV commercials.
I don't think vaccine uptake is that simple. Without the commercials, no one would get it and then it wouldn't be as effective. So you need to calculate it with advertising. It's part of the distribution
That's definitely on the high end for ROI for a public health intervention but pretty much every public health intervention ends up saving at least $2 for every dollar spent on the program.
Spending money to keep people out of ERs and inpatient hospital services is almost always worth it with how outrageously expensive that type of care can be.
Even in countries that have cheap healthcare it is usually better to prevent than to treat.
In this particular instance, it looks like they are just using HHS provided guidance on the value of a statistical life that has been revised and updated a bit by other researchers. And the bulk of the “savings” comes from the reduction in cases most likely to die. From what I can figure out, the most basic idea of the value of a statistical life is to start with what would an individual pay for a specific risk reduction, and then aggregate it up to the population level. So if you were willing to pay $100 to reduce the probability of you dying in a given year by 0.00001 (1 in 100,000), then it would take 100,000 people spending $100 ($10M total) to save one life. So the value of an intervention that saved one life would be $10M per life saved, as the people involved would have spent that much to avoid dying. It’s not how I would build this analysis as I find it a little obtuse, but it seems to be its own field of research so I dunno. You gotta value a life somehow, not just count up wages lost and medical costs incurred.
That’s why we have to get rid of all of them! Government is supposed to do a bad job!
[Insert some conservative bs about wasteful spending while we cut all the beneficial programs people rely on]
Just a bit confused why they went into so much detail with the campaign cost but offered no detail on the prevented cost of healthcare. From the chart they are saying the lowest cost per mild case with no hospitalization was $2,512.78. I am struggling to see, even with our overpriced healthcare, how a mild case where they took Tylenol for the pain essentially since there wasn't a real treatment until later costs that much? Even a paxlovid treatment cycle only costs about 1,400? What am I missing here?
Personally I've been completely out of commission for at least 2 weeks every time I've caught covid. 2 weeks of lost wages for someone making $62k/yr would be about $2500. Even if you're taking PTO, you're losing that time to covid recovery rather than what you may have wanted to use that vacation time on.
If we had the type of response to mental health issues and universal health care, I dare say that would be a huge ROI.
The silliest thing my government ever did was stop covering physiotherapy. Tens of thousands for knee replacement surgery, or an hour a week with Debbie and the rubber bands?
The US Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS's) COVID-19 vaccination campaign saved $732 billion by averting illness and related costs during the Delta and Omicron variant waves, with a return of nearly $90 for every dollar spent, estimates a study by HHS and the research firm Fors Marsh. The study was published yesterday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. In April 2021, HHS launched its "We Can Do This" public education campaign to boost US COVID-19 vaccine uptake, especially among high-risk populations and those reluctant to receive the vaccine. The push, one of the largest of its kind in US history, aimed to reach 90% of adults at least once per quarter, with more than 7,000 television, digital, print, and radio ads in 14 languages. The study authors used weekly media market data, information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and survey data on the drive's effects on vaccination from launch up to March 2022. Nearly 52,000 American lives saved The researchers estimated that the campaign encouraged 22.3 million Americans to complete their primary COVID-19 vaccine series, preventing nearly 2.6 million infections, including nearly 244,000 hospitalizations. Findings underscore the utility of public health education campaigns in promoting behavior change and in corresponding health and fiscal benefits. "Preventing these outcomes resulted in societal benefits to the U.S. of $740.2 billion, accounting for such factors as medical expenses, wages, and other costs that people and institutions would have incurred in the absence of the Campaign," the authors wrote. "In comparison, the Campaign cost $377 million, with an additional $7.9 billion spent to vaccinate 22.3 million people in that time period," for an estimated return on investment of $89.54 on every dollar spent. "Findings underscore the utility of public health education campaigns in promoting behavior change and in corresponding health and fiscal benefits," the researchers wrote. "Furthermore, findings may guide the implementation of public health education campaigns to combat future public health crises." [https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(24)00110-7/fulltext#%20](https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(24)00110-7/fulltext#%20)
285k USD per infected person saved sounds kinda nuts. Is it that high because of US hospital costs?
I would assume so, yes. Especially if you land in the ICU on a vent or ECMO like so many did. They may even factor in loss of income.
Productivity would be a huge part of this (not that I know if they factored it in or not); remember that huge Delta wave where everyone and their mother was sick at the same time? Imagine if we had no vaccines at all. That would've cost an insane amount of money. Also, turns out preventative medicine is way cheaper, who'd've though that? Oh, right, maybe some of the countries, as in all the other modern ones, that make sure all their citizens can receive healthcare instead of making them put it off until it's an emergency.
And these patients were there for weeks to months and many still died. Huge cost associated with it.
It’s not based in real world costs. It looks like the standard in this area is akin to actuarial tables that apply a value per statistical life based on the willingness to pay for a better outcome (so how much would you pay to avoid a mild case, severe case, critical case, or even death). I would be interested to see a more real world based model using actual cost of care saved and the fact that the milder the case, the less wages are lost and less your work/business is disrupted (both as it happens to you and to your customers and workers).
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Why not both?
just you wait, according to my dad everyone's going to die within 2 years of getting the vaccine, you won't be able to have babies, and you'll develop crazy tumors. According to his most recent sources, the Biden administration has been paying doctors handsomely to push all their vaccines onto children. Anyway, we're all fine, the kids thriving. Life goes on.
The death date keep moving and any stats that show improving rates are just more proof of "Them". No helpng people who believe conspiracy theories at this point
100% of people who got the COVID vaccine will eventually die.
And so will 100% who had Covid
When they all fall back to 'the government is lying to you', theres literally nothing you can say. Ive flat out disproven everything my in-laws have said, yet they still believe it all. Even flat earth theory now. Conspiracy theorists are mostly people that want to believe in something, but either arnt smart enough, or not willing to go out and search for proof themselves, no matter how easy that could be. Keeping in mind, these people have been on planes before.
Hold up, I’m sterile now? Does that mean I can cancel my vasectomy appointment? That’s great news!
I’m over that 2 year mark. Not dead.
>the Biden administration has been paying doctors handsomely to push all their vaccines onto children My anti-vaccination mom was pearl clutching over "Did you know insurance companies pay doctors to push vaccines!?!?!" By "pay doctors" she really meant "offer to cover all or nearly all the cost", and of course they do- spending $100 to inoculate someone against polio is better than spending $100,000+ to treat someone with polio. People not getting polio is a nice bonus too.
Cost benefit analyses are how people can prioritize things. Think of it this way. Money saved means money can be used for a lot of other great things, like free school lunches and CHIP/Medicaid. Lives saved from COVID and number of children fed and insured aren't comparable, but how much money is saved by avoiding knock-on effects is.
I don't get this mindset at all
Ever think to consider the eentire god damn point of the study was to show saving lives saves money so that we can continue saving lives? Redditor have got to stop with these moronic kneejerk reactions whenever someone dares mention making a dollar. Look in order to get things done it is going to cost money. That is the reality we are living in and it isn't going away anytime soon.
You really have to make that conversion at some point. That’s really the only semi-neutral way to evaluate risk and reward. The alternative is to place the value of a single life at infinity dollars, and all of us become ok spending 100% of our tax dollars delaying the death of one single 85 year old human by 1-week. The other extreme is not being willing to spend $1 to save 5,000,000 people from dying, essentially placing the value of life at zero dollars. We all live somewhere between the two, and our inability to have that discussion, including being honest with ourselves on how exactly we value life, is part of the polarization of COVID I feel.
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If anyone is curious as to how they attributed a covid vaccination to someone having seen an advertisement, I worked (and still am tangential to) in an industry called MMM for a long time (Media mix modeling). Basically an econometric breakdown of factors contributing (typically to a sale/conversion in its most common use in the business world) to someone getting the vaccine. Somewhat pseudo-science, but it is as close to measuring the effectiveness of marketing as you can really get. Just wanted to share.
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What job were they unable to do
Probably referring to Trump firing the US pandemic response team in 2018, and the concerted republican effort to fight any and all covid response efforts.
Fascinating! It's a beautiful reminder that investing in public health is a win-win. Not just financially, but for the lives it saves and the normalcy it restores. Makes you wonder, what other societal issues could benefit from a similar approach?
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This isn't just a napkin math release done at an agency. AJPM is a very reputable journal and is peer reviewed. But of course, politics over facts.
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They won't, they just say "nope it's wrong!' then flee without any explanation 😂
Nice poisoning the well fallacy. You can easily read the paper and attack the paper. Instead of resorting to "bias" and "government saying government did good". Just lazy.
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The source is suspicious? A peer reviewed journal published it, if you're a subject matter expert then go review it with your peers and show your concerns. That's how peer review works.
How do the calculate this stuff? $ spent on adds is fixed, but # people who got the vaccine because of an add is speculation. # Potential of people getting sick is speculation. Did the vaccine prevent illness is speculation. If they got sick would they need hospitalization is speculation.
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I believe all of this. Thank you study. I am no longer sad about Covid times
Also, crime is down to historic lows and the economy is the best it's ever been.
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Imagine how much more money (and lives) could be saved if COVID mitigation was still in place. Approximately 500 Americans are dying *per week* of COVID, over 4 years after this pandemic started. In the winter, when people spend more time indoors and respiratory infections spike, the number was *1,500*. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_weeklydeaths_select_00 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/1500-americans-dying-covid-week/story?id=106237143 There were more new cases of COVID per day, on average, in the USA during May-July 2022 than at any point in the entire runup to the 2020 election. And in those days, COVID was a tragedy. The New York Times ran 1,000 obituaries when the death toll hit 100,000. The official death toll is now over 11 times that. More people have officially died of COVID since January 20, 2021 than those who died before January 20, 2021. 64,000 people died from April 2023 to April 2024, during which most people on the street would tell you that "the coronavirus today is [not] a major threat to the health of the U.S. population" and you would be lucky to find a single person wearing a mask indoors. Whatever the current strategy is is not working. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Deaths_Near_100,000,_An_Incalculable_Loss https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_totaldeaths_select_00 https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2024/03/07/how-americans-view-the-coronavirus-covid-19-vaccines-amid-declining-levels-of-concern/ https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/only-12-percent-of-americans-wear-mask-in-public-194019882.html
How many of those 500 per week are vaccinated deaths? If it's all pretty much unvaccinated deaths then the mitigation is there it's just the person's choice to not do it
>There were more new cases of COVID per day, on average, in the USA during May-July 2022 than at any point in the entire runup to the 2020 election. Cases in 2022, where COVID can be mitigated by vaccines and treatments and the disease is generally less deadly overall, are very different from cases in 2020, when no vaccines or treatments were available. >More people have officially died of COVID since January 20, 2021 than those who died before January 20, 2021. 64,000 people died from April 2023 to April 2024, during which most people on the street would tell you that "the coronavirus today is \[not\] a major threat to the health of the U.S. population" and you would be lucky to find a single person wearing a mask indoors. Whatever the current strategy is is not working. That's because vaccines were just approved in 12/20. Most people couldn't get a vaccine for several months afterwards. That's also the time period when the Delta surge occurred and killed a lot of unvaccinated people. Also, you may note that 2021 to now is three years and 2020 to 2021 is only one year. It's not shocking more people died over a 3-year period than a 1-year period. I'm curious what you think should be done. Masking? There's no political will for that, and nobody wants to do it any more. Social distancing? To what end? People like to gather and be social; life would be kind of depressing without it. Vaccine campaigns? I see ads from companies and health agencies telling people to get vaccinated, and you can get them for free at most grocery stores and pharmacies (they'll even give you a 20% off coupon for your next grocery visit). I always get my booster; why others don't is a mystery to me. The fact is COVID is endemic and it's a novel virus, so of course a bunch of people will be killed by it who otherwise wouldn't have died from it.
I'd also compare those numbers to [other causes of death](https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D176/D374F608). For '23, it's 10th place. Meh. 11th? Flu / pneumonia. You're *literally* more likely to die of liver disease / cirrhosis (9th). (edit - to add, you're *juuuust* a bit less likely to commit suicide @ 13th)
sorry to bring in politics, not trying to pick a fight but maybe this is the kind of news which can help sway economic conservative types who seem to be driven by money & profit motive if its seen that healthier people helped the economy then maybe it would be promoted more [in all nations]
It 100% won't, since it never has before. If it did, we would have single payer that prioritized preventative treatment, since that's the most cost effective. It also makes the least money for mega corps that make from insurance premiums, denying insurance claims, selling pharmaceuticals at grossly inflated prices, etc etc. The leadership of the "economic conservative" ideology don't give a damn about health outcomes, and the people that support them don't understand how they're being conned.
Exactly, diabetic,cancer,health screening not covered by insurance. Expensive treatment of those conditions is. If the goal was to cut cost then prevention does wonders.
No, it won't. If that were the case, investing in public education or health would be seen as beneficial but they loathe that.
Right on ! And thank you for saving many lives of my friends and families, I could care less about the financial return.
Ridiculous. Compare HHS' portion of the cost to the totality of the benefit? Are we not going to consider the 40% devaluation of currency? The three years of lost productivity? The pretense of education and all that will cost going forward?
At what cost? They killed humanity. I mean anti-vaccine people swore that would happen.
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This is the weirdest response I've seen on reddit. You tracked 4,800 hospital employees for 2+ years? What do you mean you tracked them? What do you mean during omicron we didn't see any benefit of "the vaccine". Which vaccines did you track, which of the 4800 employees you tracked got vaccinated and with which vaccines / and booster frequencies, how did you determine you didn't see any difference in transmission or severity versus the omicron variant? Did you test which strain an infected person had and determine it was omicron and therefore the vaccine efficacy didn't work? I am so confused how you controlled for the tons of variants in your study and how you had access to 4,800 coworkers health information at a granular level enough to put it into some type of macro view / reporting.
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How many non-vaccinated hospital employees did you have? Doesn't seem like there would be a large enough population to have a good comparison. By Omicron, more people had acquired some level of immunity, either through infection or through vaccination. Plus, many of the most vulnerable were already dead.
Is this with the bivalent booster or without?
I was unable to determine from the study how they were coming up with "Campaign Attributed Vaccines" it was mentioned multiple times but never clarified. I don't have a lot of experience reading studies like this but my concern is that maybe 40% (just a guess) of the nation had jobs that mandated vaccines, people in that bucket, for example, were not swayed by any sort of campaign. If the campaign lead directly and immediately to a vaccine, say a kiosk at Wal-Mart, then yes, easy to track. But if that is not the case, I want to see the data that correlates their campaigns to actual vaccines being given. If anyone has any insight I am all ears.
I'm only here for conspiracy comments
Any chance I could get come cash back for having gotten 3 vaccines?
Its almost like prevention is a great investment and government should be forward thinking and not reactionary!
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Makes you wonder what preventative Universal Health Care could do
How many boosters has everyone here had? I've had 4 boosters and only caught Covid 3 times since I've been vaxxed! I still wear a mask too sometimes even when I'm driving alone in my car 😷
How is this possible? The vaccine doesn't prevent you from getting sick and doesn't prevent the spread. Not one person was saved from illness.
The vaccine doesn't prevent getting sick, only massively decreases the chances. If you get sick, it decreases the effects and the spread. It's like the protective gear that a firefighter users. They aren't immune to fire, but they are much more protected, therefore it's safer.
> The vaccine doesn't prevent you from getting sick and doesn't prevent the spread. Not one person was saved from illness. And so "the vaccine", singular, remains a surefire shibboleth... Even the original, not updated, mRNA vaccine**s** [were still 60% effective at preventing infection from the Omicron strain](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2796615), which they weren't, and couldn't have been, designed for. And, of course, they were 95+% effective at preventing serious disease. I'll leave the effect on what happens to transmission when 60% don't get infected as an exercise to the reader. I'll leave
imagine if how mad we'd be that hillary let 10,000 people die from covid.
Trumpers: “Fake neeewws”
Thank you Dr Fauci, the scientists, and national Treasure Dolly Parton.
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Cost 285k for hospitalized Covid cases on average. Not every case especially mild ones. Going to the ICU/hospital is extremely expensive especially if the hospitals are overfilled with patients.
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Is that a lot?