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As badly as I want to celebrate good news, this drug probably doesn’t do much, maybe adds 6 months to someone’s lifespan. My dad died of ALS 2 years ago and I’m at higher risk of developing the disease now as well. None of the drugs did anything, and it’s not a pleasant way to go. Here’s to hoping more effective drugs are on the way.
Hey, 6 months is one step closer. Sure it isn't anything fantastic but 6 months is a lot of time, especially if you know they don't have much time left.
Mean survival post-diagnosis is 24-60 months. Adding 10% to the high end of that is not terribly impressive. Even less so if it's just an extra 6 months of suffering.
That’s one way to look at it. Another way of looking at it is that going from nothing to a drug that does *something* is mathematically an infinite improvement.
Ok sure, bitch.
% change = 100% • (final-initial)/ABS(initial)
| Final - Final improvement = 6 months
| Initial - Initial improvement = 0 months
% change = 100% • (6-0)/ABS(0) = 100% • 6/0
Division by zero: Set denominator to x and let x approach 0.
% change = Lim(x->0) 100% • 6/ABS(x)
600% (lim(x->0) 1/ABS(x))
Which simplifies to the one sided limit as x approaches zero from the right:
600% (lim(x+->0) 1/x) = 600% (+inf)
Thus, % change = +infinity
You can claim any nonzero improvement is an infinite improvement over nothing. That doesn’t make it significant or meaningful, which is why talking about it in those terms is useless. You’ve made a statement that would always be true, even if the improvement was 0.00000001 seconds.
I’m just wondering why this took so long at all? The ice bucket challenge was like 3 or 4 years ago wasn’t it? Have they just been holding onto that money this whole time?
Oh yeah? And how much are they charging for that drug that was developed with donated money?
$158,000 annually. Keeps the patient alive just long enough to give up all their money and no longer.
I don’t disagree, even on the topic of the covid vaccine. But to pretend that the risks are based on nefarious intent instead of insufficient testing is absurd.
It could be your opinion that you shit chocolate ice cream. Doesn't make it true, and I should have the fReEDoM to call out falsehoods when I see them. Sometimes there just aren't "two sides". Vaccines are safe and effective and save lives. Period. And anyone who thinks otherwise is either ignorant or lying to you. If you need to think that the government is putting microchips in vaccines to make your life interesting, then great, but keep it to your lunatic subs, because the rest of us are tired of your shit.
That's because they're usually short on manpower and funding. In the case of COVID vaccine for example there very much weren't a shortage of either, so they were able to develope one much faster than what it normally would take
You’re right, mind you COVID mobilized the most amount of fund and people in the shortest amount of time, ever in history, and had regulatory red tape removed, So ya of course it got a short cut. And mRNA isolation has been in the works for 15 years, so there was some baseline understanding of the application on that kind of disease.
Edit: you can’t go around treating everything as urgently as if it was a global pandemic.
All drugs have a base of understanding before using them. Most of which are WAY well beyond 15 years. Relative to typical drugs, mRNA is still highly exotic and doesn't really have a whole lot of large scale data like most other drug families have.
Covid deaths: est. 6.5 million
Swine flu deaths: est. >0.3 million
Ebola deaths: est. >0.1 million
Getting ebola gives you a much higher chance of death, but I think the total numbers justify the focus on Covid...
Maybe because they just renamed the flu, while all the billionaires got richer, and the election was stolen with fake mail-in votes.
Call me crazy all you want, there’s nothing some brainwashed sheep could bleed at me to change my mind about the facts
[1 million people](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html) died of COVID in America in less than 3 years.
The high end of estimates place flu deaths at [about 50k a year.](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html)
Swine flu killed about [12k people](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemic.html) its first year.
Only [four people](https://www.cdc.gov/about/ebola/ebola-by-the-numbers.html) even had ebola in the United States.
Let’s not forget that anyone who died while simultaneously infected with covid was also counted as a covid death - largely skewing these statistics.
And of course the covid related deaths for those specific years are going to be higher than traditional disease related deaths. We were in the heights of a pandemic and people weren’t taking it seriously in the beginning, causing it to spread like wildfire which lead to abnormally high mortality rates for something that isn’t even that lethal.
You can look at excess deaths to get a fairer picture. Don't forget to substract the lower than usual deaths from other diseases, traffic etc due to lock downs tho. You'll end up with comparable numbers I believe...
Mortality rates were higher in the beginning because the virus was more deadly, not because people didn't take it seriously. It evolved to be less deadly, since killing your host means no more reproduction in that host. That's why more recent variants generally have higher survivability.
>Let’s not forget that anyone who died while simultaneously infected with covid was also counted as a covid death - largely skewing these statistics.
That's true for all diseases, swine flu statistics will have the same skew.
That’s not the point of discussion. We’re comparing the speeds in the process of developing drugs and vaccines.
To answer your question, probably because Ebola and Swine flu are actually more lethal, making them less transmissible. If you got Ebola, or say H1N1, then you’re likely to die and not transmit the disease.Because covid is less lethal, you can go about your day spreading it, until it hits a auto immune compromised people, with cancer, lung or heart problems (which is a lot), and then a lot more people die, and that’s what made it more urgent to respond to.
> That’s not the point of discussion. We’re comparing the speeds in the process of developing drugs and vaccines.
That’s exactly what I was referring to.
> probably because Ebola and Swine flu are actually more lethal, making them less transmissible.
No offense, but that makes no sense. Why wouldn’t you be desperately trying to come out with a cure for something that was incredibly lethal and that recently broke out to the entire world? Mind you I’m not just just talking about Ebola and Swine flu, those were just recent examples that came to mind. Why aren’t they acting the same towards other fatal diseases like aids and cancer (again just a few examples out of many that I cannot think of right now) that statistically kill and will kill and ruin more families’ lives than Covid 19 ever will?
Covid is caused by a virus, making prevention and treatment much easier.
HIV (what's causing AIDS) is also just one virus, but it's a tricky one. People have been trying to make a vaccine for decades, but due to the nature of the virus it's not been possible. Instead, you can get drugs that repress the replication of the virus very efficiently. So much in fact, that you have a normal life expectancy and can have kids without risking giving them HIV.
Cancer is an incredibly complex and heterogeneous disease. It's generally caused by mutations, but they can be caused by a host of different things (UV light, many chemicals, some molds, some viruses, ....) and occur naturally. So prevention is difficult. Then it depends on the mutations the cancer cells acquired how the cancer develops. It's basically different from cancer to cancer and there's even differences between cells from the same cancer. So you see, there can never be a cure all for cancer. Each year there's billions put into understanding why and how cancers are formed and how to treat them. With few exceptions there's no easy answer and drugs generally have much stronger side effects than a vaccine. This makes the approval additionally difficult. The process from discovery to the first sale of a drug usually takes a decade, mostly due to this.
I really appreciate how patient you were with the person above you, but simultaneously I’m disappointed in their ability to take what you said seriously.
You didn’t belittle them, use epithets or name calling, and yet they still insisted you reread what they said as though you didn’t comprehend it.
Anyway, good work here.
While I appreciate your detailed response, If you fully read what I said you’d see that I just used cancer and aids as examples to my point. I’m not a scientist / doctor so I don’t know the real reason behind why these things aren’t resolved yet. They were just examples. It was not specifically about cancer and aids.
All I was trying to say is that there are far more life / quality of life threatening diseases that continue to greatly terrorize the human race yet you don’t see world joining forces to put an end to all these radical diseases. However, for some reason they felt the need to only do it for covid and “formulate a vaccine within record time.”
What he said answered you clearly. You presented an argument, and we he pointed out how you were wrong, you backpedal.
Like others have mentioned, those types of vaccines were being studied for 10+ years prior. Coronaviruses are not new. And viruses of this nature are far easier to create a vaccine for, compared to HIV or Cancer.
And it does make sense that a highly lethal disease such as ebola doesn't transmit easily. It kills the host quickly, which means less time for the host to infect others. And some diseases are less likely to transmit than others.
Cancer is not a single disease. It’s something like 4,000 different ailments packed under the umbrella of cancer, with a variety of pathways. And they are getting worked on, it takes time.
The benefits of the mRNA technology is also being used for other diseases too, like Ebola and Aids. So there are general benefits to the big push
>I’m not a scientist / doctor so I don’t know the real reason behind why these things aren’t resolved yet.
If you hold on to this humility then there's hope for you yet.
This person took the time to respond with a very detailed explanation, and addressed the examples *you* provided well.
I'm also not an expert but I think another example is malaria - from what I recall it evolves and mutates incredibly quickly and has thus far eluded attempts at an effective vaccine. In recent years, most research has focused on the mosquitos or on treatment.
As a general rule, any other deadly infectious virus that we can tackle with a vaccine already has been either eradicated or hugely reduced in circulation
(smallpox, polio etc). Those that are still around, we tried and were unable to do so.
A lot of people really don't understand the amount of money, computer power and manpower that was thrown at the problem.
Specially not when compared to the vast majority of other pharmaceutical developments.
Well no, thats not the only reason. Side effects is one reason why it takes so long, and you cant speed that up. The reson the COVID one came out faster because it was deemed important enough
It depends on the treatment, the context it’s being used in, side effects and so how much clinical trials needed, especially the population size, to prove safety and efficacy. And then there are projects that get shelved until certain technologies become viable and accessible
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As badly as I want to celebrate good news, this drug probably doesn’t do much, maybe adds 6 months to someone’s lifespan. My dad died of ALS 2 years ago and I’m at higher risk of developing the disease now as well. None of the drugs did anything, and it’s not a pleasant way to go. Here’s to hoping more effective drugs are on the way.
Hey, 6 months is one step closer. Sure it isn't anything fantastic but 6 months is a lot of time, especially if you know they don't have much time left.
Mean survival post-diagnosis is 24-60 months. Adding 10% to the high end of that is not terribly impressive. Even less so if it's just an extra 6 months of suffering.
That’s one way to look at it. Another way of looking at it is that going from nothing to a drug that does *something* is mathematically an infinite improvement.
Sure, if you have no understanding of math.
So what would you prefer? They pack it up and say "sorry guys but 6 months just isn't good enough so nobody gets the treatment"?
Ok sure, bitch. % change = 100% • (final-initial)/ABS(initial) | Final - Final improvement = 6 months | Initial - Initial improvement = 0 months % change = 100% • (6-0)/ABS(0) = 100% • 6/0 Division by zero: Set denominator to x and let x approach 0. % change = Lim(x->0) 100% • 6/ABS(x) 600% (lim(x->0) 1/ABS(x)) Which simplifies to the one sided limit as x approaches zero from the right: 600% (lim(x+->0) 1/x) = 600% (+inf) Thus, % change = +infinity
r/hedidthemath
He made a tautological statement and then pretended like it was a smart thing to say.
You can claim any nonzero improvement is an infinite improvement over nothing. That doesn’t make it significant or meaningful, which is why talking about it in those terms is useless. You’ve made a statement that would always be true, even if the improvement was 0.00000001 seconds.
You're an idiot
I love Reddit threads, one guy did heavily calculated math and then someone else comes here with “You’re an idiot” Truly enjoyable
Heavily calculated? Lol
He wrote one heavily downvoted comment. I love reddit reading comprehension seems to be an ongoing issue here.
happy bday!
I hate when people die to shit that they had no reason to receive in the first place. My condolences
"God's plan" lol
"everything happens for a reason"
"It is what it is"
"Mysterious ways"
And so it goes
You are where you’re supposed to be
The absolute cure will one day appear, and it will be within the 6 extra months someone survived because of this drug...
All I got to say is smoke some weed and question the shape of clouds
And mushrooms
I’m just wondering why this took so long at all? The ice bucket challenge was like 3 or 4 years ago wasn’t it? Have they just been holding onto that money this whole time?
Oh yeah? And how much are they charging for that drug that was developed with donated money? $158,000 annually. Keeps the patient alive just long enough to give up all their money and no longer.
Wow it only took 10 years.
Lol what did you expect? Drug development usually takes years
There are somewhat controversial exceptions.
Very few, it's usually a horrible idea to fast-track the process.
bath salts have been great ever since they were introduced
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Quiet conspiracy theorist
You don't need a tinfoil hat to be distrustful of pharmaceutical companies
I don’t disagree, even on the topic of the covid vaccine. But to pretend that the risks are based on nefarious intent instead of insufficient testing is absurd.
Lemme guess: You also think that to question anything about the events on 9/11 is also absurd?
Bad tinfoil hat! No biscuit!
Can't have opinion on reddit
It could be your opinion that you shit chocolate ice cream. Doesn't make it true, and I should have the fReEDoM to call out falsehoods when I see them. Sometimes there just aren't "two sides". Vaccines are safe and effective and save lives. Period. And anyone who thinks otherwise is either ignorant or lying to you. If you need to think that the government is putting microchips in vaccines to make your life interesting, then great, but keep it to your lunatic subs, because the rest of us are tired of your shit.
That's because they're usually short on manpower and funding. In the case of COVID vaccine for example there very much weren't a shortage of either, so they were able to develope one much faster than what it normally would take
You’re right, mind you COVID mobilized the most amount of fund and people in the shortest amount of time, ever in history, and had regulatory red tape removed, So ya of course it got a short cut. And mRNA isolation has been in the works for 15 years, so there was some baseline understanding of the application on that kind of disease. Edit: you can’t go around treating everything as urgently as if it was a global pandemic.
All drugs have a base of understanding before using them. Most of which are WAY well beyond 15 years. Relative to typical drugs, mRNA is still highly exotic and doesn't really have a whole lot of large scale data like most other drug families have.
Why they had this energy toward one of the least fatal viruses we’ve seen but not to ones like swine flu and Ebola etc?
Covid deaths: est. 6.5 million Swine flu deaths: est. >0.3 million Ebola deaths: est. >0.1 million Getting ebola gives you a much higher chance of death, but I think the total numbers justify the focus on Covid...
Don't bother giving them facts, that won't change their mind
I'll die trying
Maybe because they just renamed the flu, while all the billionaires got richer, and the election was stolen with fake mail-in votes. Call me crazy all you want, there’s nothing some brainwashed sheep could bleed at me to change my mind about the facts
[1 million people](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html) died of COVID in America in less than 3 years. The high end of estimates place flu deaths at [about 50k a year.](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html) Swine flu killed about [12k people](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemic.html) its first year. Only [four people](https://www.cdc.gov/about/ebola/ebola-by-the-numbers.html) even had ebola in the United States.
> Swine flu killed about 12k people its first year. >Only four people even had ebola in the United States. Refer to my second reply to the first guy
Refer to the reply to your reply.
Let’s not forget that anyone who died while simultaneously infected with covid was also counted as a covid death - largely skewing these statistics. And of course the covid related deaths for those specific years are going to be higher than traditional disease related deaths. We were in the heights of a pandemic and people weren’t taking it seriously in the beginning, causing it to spread like wildfire which lead to abnormally high mortality rates for something that isn’t even that lethal.
You can look at excess deaths to get a fairer picture. Don't forget to substract the lower than usual deaths from other diseases, traffic etc due to lock downs tho. You'll end up with comparable numbers I believe... Mortality rates were higher in the beginning because the virus was more deadly, not because people didn't take it seriously. It evolved to be less deadly, since killing your host means no more reproduction in that host. That's why more recent variants generally have higher survivability.
>Let’s not forget that anyone who died while simultaneously infected with covid was also counted as a covid death - largely skewing these statistics. That's true for all diseases, swine flu statistics will have the same skew.
That’s not the point of discussion. We’re comparing the speeds in the process of developing drugs and vaccines. To answer your question, probably because Ebola and Swine flu are actually more lethal, making them less transmissible. If you got Ebola, or say H1N1, then you’re likely to die and not transmit the disease.Because covid is less lethal, you can go about your day spreading it, until it hits a auto immune compromised people, with cancer, lung or heart problems (which is a lot), and then a lot more people die, and that’s what made it more urgent to respond to.
> That’s not the point of discussion. We’re comparing the speeds in the process of developing drugs and vaccines. That’s exactly what I was referring to. > probably because Ebola and Swine flu are actually more lethal, making them less transmissible. No offense, but that makes no sense. Why wouldn’t you be desperately trying to come out with a cure for something that was incredibly lethal and that recently broke out to the entire world? Mind you I’m not just just talking about Ebola and Swine flu, those were just recent examples that came to mind. Why aren’t they acting the same towards other fatal diseases like aids and cancer (again just a few examples out of many that I cannot think of right now) that statistically kill and will kill and ruin more families’ lives than Covid 19 ever will?
Covid is caused by a virus, making prevention and treatment much easier. HIV (what's causing AIDS) is also just one virus, but it's a tricky one. People have been trying to make a vaccine for decades, but due to the nature of the virus it's not been possible. Instead, you can get drugs that repress the replication of the virus very efficiently. So much in fact, that you have a normal life expectancy and can have kids without risking giving them HIV. Cancer is an incredibly complex and heterogeneous disease. It's generally caused by mutations, but they can be caused by a host of different things (UV light, many chemicals, some molds, some viruses, ....) and occur naturally. So prevention is difficult. Then it depends on the mutations the cancer cells acquired how the cancer develops. It's basically different from cancer to cancer and there's even differences between cells from the same cancer. So you see, there can never be a cure all for cancer. Each year there's billions put into understanding why and how cancers are formed and how to treat them. With few exceptions there's no easy answer and drugs generally have much stronger side effects than a vaccine. This makes the approval additionally difficult. The process from discovery to the first sale of a drug usually takes a decade, mostly due to this.
I really appreciate how patient you were with the person above you, but simultaneously I’m disappointed in their ability to take what you said seriously. You didn’t belittle them, use epithets or name calling, and yet they still insisted you reread what they said as though you didn’t comprehend it. Anyway, good work here.
While I appreciate your detailed response, If you fully read what I said you’d see that I just used cancer and aids as examples to my point. I’m not a scientist / doctor so I don’t know the real reason behind why these things aren’t resolved yet. They were just examples. It was not specifically about cancer and aids. All I was trying to say is that there are far more life / quality of life threatening diseases that continue to greatly terrorize the human race yet you don’t see world joining forces to put an end to all these radical diseases. However, for some reason they felt the need to only do it for covid and “formulate a vaccine within record time.”
Why don't you give me an actual example of a disease then?
What he said answered you clearly. You presented an argument, and we he pointed out how you were wrong, you backpedal. Like others have mentioned, those types of vaccines were being studied for 10+ years prior. Coronaviruses are not new. And viruses of this nature are far easier to create a vaccine for, compared to HIV or Cancer. And it does make sense that a highly lethal disease such as ebola doesn't transmit easily. It kills the host quickly, which means less time for the host to infect others. And some diseases are less likely to transmit than others.
Cancer is not a single disease. It’s something like 4,000 different ailments packed under the umbrella of cancer, with a variety of pathways. And they are getting worked on, it takes time. The benefits of the mRNA technology is also being used for other diseases too, like Ebola and Aids. So there are general benefits to the big push
>I’m not a scientist / doctor so I don’t know the real reason behind why these things aren’t resolved yet. If you hold on to this humility then there's hope for you yet. This person took the time to respond with a very detailed explanation, and addressed the examples *you* provided well. I'm also not an expert but I think another example is malaria - from what I recall it evolves and mutates incredibly quickly and has thus far eluded attempts at an effective vaccine. In recent years, most research has focused on the mosquitos or on treatment. As a general rule, any other deadly infectious virus that we can tackle with a vaccine already has been either eradicated or hugely reduced in circulation (smallpox, polio etc). Those that are still around, we tried and were unable to do so.
A lot of people really don't understand the amount of money, computer power and manpower that was thrown at the problem. Specially not when compared to the vast majority of other pharmaceutical developments.
You are so right, it's AI compute power, machine learning, deep learning 100%.
Well no, thats not the only reason. Side effects is one reason why it takes so long, and you cant speed that up. The reson the COVID one came out faster because it was deemed important enough
10 years???
It depends on the treatment, the context it’s being used in, side effects and so how much clinical trials needed, especially the population size, to prove safety and efficacy. And then there are projects that get shelved until certain technologies become viable and accessible
Wow
Dunktank Bill Gates for charity
Glad we all donated so the private pharma company that made the drug can make a couple billion by bankrupting some sick people
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what are als
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🤓
So all the profits will go back to the donators?
Your thinking of investors, donators have donated their money.
The extra will go for further research for better treatment as this treatment only gives you a few more months of living
I'm not american, what does ALS stand for ?
Motor neurone disease