When Does a "Fake" Pandemic Become "Real"?

Actually, great effort was made to go back to the origional texts for the KJV, decreed by King James himself. It’s an errant translation, (about 800 major errors have been detected), but it wasn’t due to carelessness, likely more due to politics of the time.

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I don’t think there are any original texts for the Torah.

No doubt. Well, that and the fact that they didn’t have as many text documents as we do now due to archaeological discoveries, as well as better understanding of the ancient languages.

It’s a pain to read, but they really did a great job with what they had at the time (~1600 AD).

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Russian vaccine ready by October:

Makes me wonder, if this actually works then why not use it elsewhere? I’m highly skeptical of any vaccine made in such a hurry, but the Moderna one that Bill Gates and friends are backing is even more skeptical because it’s the first MRNA vaccine. Who knows what problems it could cause in the future.

Hume is one of my personal favorites as well. As for older scientists and philosophers, I don’t find it necessary to speculate on their adherence to faith or religion.
Unless we have overwelming evidence to the contrary, I think it’s prudent to take them at their word.

It seems like there is a trend in this post-modern age to bend historical figures to our will. I. E. make them like we want them to be, or worse, make them like we personally think they should have ought to have been…

This is dangerous thinking. Times were different, their world was different and these people made revolutionary contributions to the world. Regardless of whether or not they lived as we think they they should have, or held the ‘proper’ beliefs does not demenish their contributions; or at least shouldn’t.

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Basically, there won’t be enough doses. With the number of people needing to be vaccinated there simply won’t be enough manufacturing capacity for a single company to supply everyone.

Likely very few. There’s never been any free lunch with medicine of any type, but I don’t think it is likely to cause many future issues.

Developmentally, mRNA vaccines are more flexible than traditional vaccination process. One of the reasons they are rapidly proliferating is that they are faster to develop (which is just a little bit important for pandemic situations like this), and adjust. Scaling up manufacturing is also generally said to be easier, but I can’t speak to that because it’s way out of my scope. They also show promise for NON infectious diseases, which is something the traditional process cannot do.

Both the current situation and future viruses need a more rapid response, and this is generally more easily achieved using mRNA.

100% agreed. We can’t judge long dead people by 21st century standards.

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As if the standards today are great. Slavery still exists. We still have poverty. Women are treated like property. People still believe in using violence to get what they want.

It’s funny to see some woke humanoid tweet about colonizers, slavers, murderers, capitalism… on their iPhone.

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I understand that, but with any single company it’s the same situation so why not some cooperation? Or is it because some people stand to lose money that way?

I don’t think we can actually know one way or another with the limited information available. Normally it takes several years for a vaccine to be approved for use.

True, but that is a regulatory hurdle, not a scientific one. In any case, the slow development process for conventional vaccines is exactly why mRNA vaccines have been receiving widespread attention for years. They can shorten the non-regulatory side of the pipeline. We’ve known about this type of vaccine for a long time, and now we have the technology to be able to work with it much more effectively.

As for limited information, part of that is the novel situation, part is new drug development in ANY situation. That doesn’t particularly worry me.

Well, there is more than one vaccine being developed–different processes are at work. So you would in many cases be asking a company with large sunk costs in one process as well as good progress to switch and start over (not completely, but in a manner of speaking).

It is quite possible for multiple types of equally safe and effective vaccines to be developed, so it is not like only one process can work. Currently both Moderns and Pfizer have mRNA vaccine in the works, Oxford is working with AstraZeneca on a viral vector vaccine, several Chinese companies have inactivated virus vaccine in the works and one is a viral vector.

Those are just the ones I can remember.

Also, part of this goes to freely sharing info. Chinese companies are partly state owned for example, and likely would not share information readily, not to mention the high tensions. Part of this is IP–it is most likely that each company has a proprietary aspect of drug development (not the vaccine itself, but how they use technology or techniques) they would not want a major competitor to know about. Then you also have the manufacturing limits I mentioned.

Ultimately though, the fastest vaccine ever created took 4 years to work through. We stand to have at least one inside a year. There is already unprecedented cooperation happening here, across borders and countries, it’s just not visible to the public.

I don’t think any company is going to lose money if the vaccine works. The race is for the first place, but there will be plenty of demand for doses for all vaccines that work.

What I mean is if this one were suddenly mass produced around the world, companies like Moderna would lose money on their investment.

Why is that?

Right. What I am saying is the pie is big enough to feed all the companies. You might not get bragging rights, but you’re still going to profit and make back your investment and then plenty.

Even if you were correct, and I don’t think you are, this is very much normal for the biotech industry. They are used to losing large sums when a drug doesn’t pan out.

Why have they been looked at? Or why can they shorten dev time?

This here

The non-regulatory development pipeline I mentioned consists of discovery, clinical trials, manufacturing, quality control.

Manufacturing RNA is the biochemical equivalent to photocopying. It’s much faster than culturing virus > attenuation of virus to non-infectious status > standardization of protein and bacteria yields in manufacturing > manufacturing product out the door. In contrast, mRNA is essentially give a sequence > photocopy trillions of times. 2 general steps instead of 4. I am oversimplifying here for space.

Quality control is also much much easier with RNA than live virus/attenuated virus vaccines. This is specifically due to the “photocopying” manner of replicating RNA strands. If you were to copy a paper 500 times, it’s very easy to flip through the stack and see that each page has enough ink to be readable. It is also much easier to count off sets of copies and divide them as you need.

Clinical trials are pretty fixed. They may take shorter or longer to satisfy FDA, but this is pretty much independent of how the vaccine/drug is manufactured or what type of vaccine it is. Not completely, but again looking at the general big picture.

Discovery is dependent on multiple factors and there’s no way to cover all that. However, due to the ease and rapidity with which you can create and multiply RNA it is going to be much faster in general to tweak the RNA “recipe” to see what responses you get. Again, culturing is slow and tedious by comparison.

In every drug discovery process (not just vaccines), you can screen 10s of thousands of various compounds–which you have to make yourself, a large investment–to see if one of them is useable. If the process of making each of them takes days, you’re out years. If it takes hours, you’re out months or weeks. Vaccines are a bit different because you ideally know a) what it is b) how it attacks and where c) the sequence of the proteins/RNA doing the infecting. There’s other complications there, but the short of it is you have several targets to work with already instead of blindly trying to mass produce candidate molecules and screen them.

Add in to these factors that the way any virus reproduces itself is to get inside the cell nucleus and incorporate itself into the DNA, hijack it, and start working. This is why some attenuated virus vaccines can have risks(massively oversimplified).

Messenger RNA never gets inside the nucleus of a cell–it is transcribed into whatever the cell needs outside. This eliminates a risk area for the person.

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Are MRNA vaccines essentially a form of genetic engineering? I have seen and heard people arguing that, I looked into it myself and based on my limited knowledge of this sort of stuff it doesn’t sound inaccurate. What are your thoughts?

And yes I realize a lot of stuff you see online is complete bullshit.

Short answer: not at all.

It depends on what you mean by “genetic engineering”. Generally this means changing the organism’s genetic code inside the nucleus. This is in no way anything like that.

DNA makes up your genes. In order for the cell or organism to do anything, those genes have to be expressed – ultimately that means making proteins, which are responsible for actually creating reactions, responses, and everything else.

However the DNA “alphabet” and the protein alphabet are different. You need a translation that can be understood by the protein makers. This is mRNA. It is the messenger and translator between gene and protein.

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/voices/michigan-trump-civil-war-coronavirus-fox-news-nancy-pelosi-a9495151.html%3Famp

LoL

They certainly don’t let facts get in the way of a good story! :joy:

“Rural America is ready to lock and load!..”

More like lube and load. Where are all of those small gov., constitutional originalists as the REPUBLICAN president commandeers drug prices, issues trillions of dollars of “handouts”, and threatens to send federal agents in to seize control of cities–in direct contradiction to the states governments?

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Good Morning Friends!

What goodies has Dr. Fauci indoctrinated you with today?

Lube and load my man! :joy:

Shouldn’t you be out somewhere assembling a rag tag militia by wearing tactical t-shirts and drinking coffee with a mean sounding name?

Somebody has to protect our rights. I mean, once they find out what they are. Or how they apply. :rofl:

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