Thank you. Since the publication isn't even dated, it could have been written 30 years ago because it's only buzzword soup.
Example:
> A principal benefit of the nucleic-acid-based approach to limiting the spread of infection is that genetic constructs introduced into the body would process quickly and not integrate into an individual’s genome. Similarly, the antibodies produced in response to treatment would only be present in the body for weeks to months. This is consistent with DARPA's intent to safely deliver transient immunity, halting the spread of disease by creating a firewall, and buying time for longer-term medical responses to be developed and deployed.
Actual request for proposals: [1] This was much more than a study. The winners had to be able to construct antibodies for five viruses. Trying to find more info. Hard; "fbo.gov" has been moved to "sam.gov", for no obvious reason, and the older documents lost.
"Antibody level predicted to protect against chikungunya infection achieved within hours; projected to be maintained for at least 16 weeks at the middle and high doses"
We had decades of smart thinking about this, and forsaw the need 3 years ago based on Ebola. Things are now in trial, so if it's 2020 and you're reading this, sorry, the funding is already committed. Better luck next time. Keep your ear to ground and move faster.
I wish I could share your optimism, but after watching the congressional testimony I think we're pretty fucked. I think we should just shut down the CDC and FDA (when this is over), and start from scratch with an agency focused on addressing epidemics and pandemics, as well as quick drug approvals.
The incompetence is pretty obvious and staggering, and as per Fauci's testimony, the CDC is not designed for the crisis we are now experiencing. That is, to unpack this, the Center for Disease Control is not designed for disease control. He's clearly a formidable scientist, but it's also clear that mismanagement at the agencies is pretty rampant.
They were asked point blank several times why we still can't test even the frontline medical staff, and they did not have an answer. This is 100% thoroughly fucked up beyond repair.
Not really. The proposed CDC funding cuts have been overruled by Congress. In fact the CDC gets more funding now than at any point under Obama (who BTW, also tried to cut the budget several times; e.g. 2015 CDC budget is $243M less than 2014), and this year's budget is larger than last year. It's not the lack of funds. It's total mismanagement.
$7B+/yr and we get 70 people tested per day as thousands are being infected, and hundreds are about to die.
IMO their funding should be cut to zero for this, and reallocated to people who know how to do this kind of thing. You can find such people at WHO.
There's a complete lack of leadership in handling this pandemic in large part because this incompetent administration disbanded the national security team global health security and biodefense directorate.
I don't know, it appears to me that we are running a long in place plan. (Other than troubles with testing kits which can be blamed on a one time case, but there is surely mismanagement in there). We are not panicking, as things prove to be getting worse we are seeing more and more action.
By long in place, I mean first made many years ago and updated regularly as things change. That is the CDC's job.
It is tempting to want instant actions, but they often turn out to be knee jerk and wrong.
I'm talking about the execution of what is happening on the ground. The President has a long history of overstating things and otherwise words not matching actions.
>> The President has a long history of overstating things
Also known in negotiation as "anchoring" - you give people a crazy, exaggerated version of what you want, then you tone it down and easily get what you really wanted to begin with. Anyone who ever participated in any kind of a business negotiation would recognize this immediately. But 99.99% of people haven't negotiated anything ever in their lives, so they don't.
People treat Trump as this linear simpleton, and he plays along, but he's not.
Care to explain why there was lack of leadership in 2009 when 57 million Americans got infected with H1N1? Or why Ebola response was also botched? There seems to be a long history of incompetence here. You can't fix incompetence by giving the incompetent more money or keeping them around.
And yes, you can in fact fix incompetence by giving the incompetent organization more money. Organizations are made up of people, and those people have varying levels of competence, and the set of people isn't fixed, either. Sometimes you have competent ICs begging for funding and incompetent managers who can't present the case for it. Sometimes you have competent managers who don't have enough budget to hire competent ICs at salaries competitive with industry. Sometimes everyone is competent but too afraid of risking their job to speak out against structures or processes that prevent them from doing their best work. If you think there's corruption, that's a different matter, but if it's just incompetence, throwing more money at the problem sounds like a fantastic plan.
Ah, but you see, the CDC took it upon itself to fight Ebola in Africa. And that part went as well as you'd expect after seeing their current performance: they're still dealing with it, years later.
The office Trump's administration disbanded was formed after the 2014 Ebola outbreak handling was botched, precisely to address the shortcomings you're bringing up.
It was indeed agonising at the start, but they had a very clear answer by the end.
The CDC makes reagents that are required. But the full test requires taking swabs, going to a lab, going through various steps. It's not self contained like a pregnancy test.
So the CDC spokesperson was uncertain because the CDC is providing the reagents but the labs are literally just coming online.
I am referring to this video. The exchange I am thinking about is roughly 40 minutes in but I couldn't find it quickly.
This would be a mistake on par with disbanding the Iraqi military after Iraq was "liberated". Don't do this.
Fix the agency. Don't let smart people disappear into retirement and the private sector. Don't annihilate the remaining expertise that does exist. You will never get them back.
We can ask everyone in the country to do a cancer screening and hospitals would get overwhelmed too. Just because you can test and count stuff doesnt mean jack if there is non trivial cures.
Thanks to social/mainstream media's business model deeply based on fear and outrage, leaders that we have these days are pandering to their fan clubs on both sides. We have created conditions where that is their only move, because there is always someone else from both parties, just around the corner pandering even harder.
Stuck in the middle are orgs and institutions whether it's the military one day, intelligence another, cdc or fed a third who will just have take the beating.
Because most of the population hasn't heard of the concept of Bounded Rationality and it's implications, and are most definitely not interested in hearing about it when people start dying.
Orgs over time have understood that and put up a show knowing they just need to outlast a couple news cycles.
There is no question of repairing these orgs without changing the underlying social media/news media reaction-counter-reaction, attention capture biz model.
That process is unfolding thanks to trump's election/Brexit/russia etc but it will take years. In the meantime every crisis is going to sound worse than it actually is.
That's all well and good, but when you're testing 70 specimens a day in a country of 327 million people because you've fucked up the development of the test, and _refused to buy_ a working WHO test, that's pretty inexcusable, no matter how you try to justify it. A hotdog stand operator would do a better job: just buy WHO kits and deploy them. And you only have to buy 71 a day to beat the $7B/yr CDC.
Essentially you go from recovering patient to 20,000 therapeutic doses in 60-90 days.
Note it is not a vaccine - a vaccine is something like part of a virus that then drives an immune response ( body evolves antibodies against it ) - here you are taking an antibody sequence you know works and directly putting that in the body and genetically programming the body to make it.
Here's how:
- find and clone the patients own antibody that allowed them to recover.
- deliver that antibody in nucleic acid form to new patients so they can make the antibody themselves.
The idea is to be able to produce enough doses quickly enough to protect front line staff in the containment phase.
As the antibody has already been discovered by the recovering patient, you can use single cell screening and cloning to retrieve the particular antibody gene.
The second step avoids many many months of building and scaling a protein manufacturing process ( though manufacturing steps still exist ).
It's a new technology and so carries some unknowns - but in the case of pandemic then you could argue these are justified.
There has already been a proof of principal run through and a number of companies were able to deliver proof of concepts within the timescale. The next question is how well these work in people.
Main finding was at the high dose, there were some adverse events but no serious adverse events, and they all self-resolved without intervention. At the lower doses (0.3 and 0.1mpk), it still provided months of protection against infection assuming the "protective level" is accurate.
Yes, of course, but when one signs up for the military they can inject you with whatever they want. The FDA does not get involved. Combine that with an EUA, and all of a sudden you are injecting them and the nat sec apparatus 6 months from now if things get bad.
Read “The Hot Zone” by Richard Preston. Great book about the origins of Ebola that culminates in an outbreak in Reston, VA that was primarily handled by the military. (The only reason you haven’t heard more about his particular outbreak is that it turned out to be a strain that only affected monkeys (450 at a scientific research holding facility in this case).
The military (Fort Detrick and USAMRIID in particular) is a huge part of the virology community. Civilian academics in the field interact with it regularly.
Disease prevention has been in DARPAs wheelhouse for a while now. While in grad school, a couple groups at my school worked on a project to predict the future evolution of influenza, so the vaccine order in March will be relevant to the strains dominate in November. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2016-06-13a
The last time I heard an update, it was that prediction was very difficult as unpredictable random mutation was dominating strain evolution.
It all sounds good but I’m not sure if they could do all that in 60 days with human trials needed to test actual efficiency, toxicity, etc. If you are talking about just a candidate drug yeah, that is possible with today’s tech.
This isn't vaccination, it's coding and expression of the antibody(s) your body would take weeks/months to make from a vaccination that neutralize the pathogenic target from dosing. It's a stop-gap to prevent infection, but does not offer memory response from resident B-cells/plasma cells.
With all due respect - does anyone believe the US army can deal with a pandemic? I mean you cant just shoot a huge number of weapons and kill it. That army hasn’t even been able to win wars against tribes, how can it win against a virus? I get it, there is a lot of PR surrounding it, but a pandemic is a real issue that requires science not dumb muscle. Somehow I believe the US and its army are the opposite of a solution to such an issue.
For many years it has been a worry of any competent military that the enemy is going to release a bio-weapon. As such every army is be preparing for something. They won't know what exactly is coming, but they have processes in place to deal with it as best they can. That means supplies in place, and people training in using them - it might mean a generic gas mask instead of a N95 filter, but it will get the job done.
The army is also well trained in securing an area. Need to enforce no travel, the army learns that in basic training.
Again, this isn't about the US army, it is about any competent military in the current world. Limited of course by their budget.
Well, if you know so much about preventing the spread of infectious disease, quit whining on HN and do something productive for a change.
DARPA has advanced needs, which is why they develop advanced technology. Most people do not think of needing the things that the military needs, because most people's lives are not as challenging as a soldier's.
We have universal healthcare here in Canada, and we have basically no ability to care for sufferers of this pandemic. The U.S. has a lot more acute care facilities, a lot more response.
These policies are not a panacea, you need strong, accountable institutions for any of these things to be a benefit. Italy's hospitals have been over capacity for more than a week now, we will be soon, and so will the U.S.
Also, the U.S. defense establishment and industry is the source of many of the medical advancements you pay taxes for today, you don't live alone in the world. It is extremely childish to lash out, and call everyone a joke or a bully or an idiot, when these advancements are basically stagnant in your society, but people are willing to share them with you.
We're all in this together, whether you like it or not.
Note that neither the article nor the headline mention a "Coronavirus shield". That's just the HN headline. In fact, the article never even mentions the Coronavirus at all.
The article headline is "Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3)"
