Another way of making the point: we did COVID challenge trials on monkeys first, because their immune systems are a decent model for that 80-year-old human's. Well, a 30-year-old human is an even better model of an 80-year-old human. A challenge trial on young people wouldn't prove everything, but it would give a high-information signal quickly.
Interesting, didn't know that. This makes it a bit more likely that the 13% -> 18% increase is related to general societal impacts of Covid rather than Covid being worse in itself.
What they mean is that instead of injecting viral proteins or deactivated virus (as in a flu vaccine), they are injecting mRNA which causes your own cells to make a section of viral protein, which then triggers a strong immune response. This COVID vaccine will be the first major mRNA vaccine.
Thanks for the correction and good news!
Would the pandemic situation ease the access to it for everyone, or market laws (high prices) will prevail as usual?
The software engineer in me makes me very weary of this. All of our historic vaccines came from very bad circumstances and they were tested on people without any real guards, starting with Jenner's famous Horsepox treatments.
I'm fine with this vaccine being available for people who want it, but as someone who is low risk, I really hope this doesn't become mandatory. A lot of people aren't old enough to remember the Swine Flu vaccine and all the complications from that.
No one is talking about the safety here and that's disturbing. I don't see how a vaccine can be listed as safe with less than a year of testing. Traditionally it's an 8~12 year process.
No, they showed an antibody response in the spring. That's the easy part. This is the real-deal clinical trial: they gave tens of thousands of people the vaccine candidate, tens of thousands a placebo, and then counted the resulting cases for months, as well as watching for side effects. The 90% reduction is in actual cases.
Interest on the national debt is $400-$600 billion per year depending on what you count (a lot of it is paid to the federal government itself). It's a lot of money, but it's a small fraction of the federal budget. It's also less than the amount of money in existence - M1 is $5.5 trillion and can easily be expanded, as mentioned.
(It also wouldn't necessarily matter if the interest per year were greater than the total amount of money in existence. If the money supply were $20, that wouldn't make it impossible for me to pay you $21/year; I could pay it in 21 $1 payments.)
I don't think you can define scientific computing in a way that excludes quantum mechanics, molecular dynamics, fluid dynamics, Monte Carlo simulations... There are lots of long-running applications. We don't want them to be long-running, but it's not unusual for a run to take weeks and not unheard-of for it to take months.
In chemical engineering school I learned that water is the biggest input to most chemical plants. Even oil refineries take in more water than oil (mainly for cooling).
> scientists code in the Literate Programming Paradigm
I wish. In my career as a computational scientist I have never seen this in practice, either in academia or industry.
On unit testing, I half agree. Most unit tests get quickly thrown out as the code changes, so it's a depressing way to write research code. But tests absolutely help someone trying to run old code - they show what parts still work and how to use them.
