[rudra]

Hi,

I applied to be part of the first phase clinical trials for covaxin in india. They replied the very next day requesting me to contact them with documents if i was a resident of Delhi. Sadly, I am not. I so wanted to do something good in this regard. oh well..

just hope other trials happen in my state eventually so i can take part. I am now waiting for the declaration of venues for the serum institute vaccine trials. Please let one be in WB.

What about you guys ? did you join any ? I would like to hear the full story.

Soham. You are in Delhi I think. So may be you can join in future if you want to.

[Sn1F3rt]

That's extremely nice of you @rudra. They are in need of active volunteers.

As far as I'm concerned, firstly I can't apply. This is because the eligibility criterion for age is 18-55 and I'm still a minor (17). Moreover even if I would be eligible to apply, my parents won't let me.

Probably there will be a center for the vaccine testing in West Bengal too, glad to see you're so interested in participating.

Good luck!

Regards,

[rudra]

ohhh !! yeah... i remember how parents usually are. now in your case they are Indian and probably both Bengalees ... so parenting overload... hyperdrive

haha
poor guy !

if everyone thinks like that then they won't have volunteers to work with. which will only hamper the whole effort of making vaccines.

parents here teach their kids how to write good things in essays, but do the exact opposite in reality...yuk

thanks. i hope i get a chance to do my part.

[ikk157]

Hi,

I applied to be part of the first phase clinical trials for covaxin in india. They replied the very next day requesting me to contact them with documents if i was a resident of Delhi. Sadly, I am not. I so wanted to do something good in this regard. oh well..

just hope other trials happen in my state eventually so i can take part. I am now waiting for the declaration of venues for the serum institute vaccine trials. Please let one be in WB.

What about you guys ? did you join any ? I would like to hear the full story.

Soham. You are in Delhi I think. So may be you can join in future if you want to.

First and foremost, kudos to you @rudra for volunteering in this... the covid 19 pandemic has only been making things worse as time passes, so we are in desperate need of a working vaccine... so the fact that you’re willing to take many risks in order to aid in this process is very generous of you! 

Now for my opinion:

I personally initially wanted to participate on said trails, it just feels like a way to help the world (yes! The entire world as this is a worldwide pandemic!). However, upon second thoughts, i backed off.

Why?

Well, first off, these vaccines are, as you know, in their trial phase. What that means is that a lot is unknown about them. We don’t know if they’re safe, we don’t know their side effects, we don’t know their long term impact on our health... there’s just too much we don’t know about them that makes them a huge risk. I’ve heard of many people dying because of these trials... so it’s really not worth it.

Secondly, the only way to really test if these vaccines work is to try to infect you with covid 19 after taking the vaccine... if the vaccine works, you’ll be all good. The trouble comes in if the vaccine doesn’t work... so here you are getting intentionally infected with this deadly virus to only realize the vaccine you tried out isn’t going to protect you against it! That’s plain horrible to say the least.

So you just have to ask yourself, is it worth the risk? 

For me, that was a non-hesitant no.

[Sn1F3rt]

ohhh !! yeah... i remember how parents usually are. now in your case they are Indian and probably both Bengalees ... so parenting overload... hyperdrive

haha
poor guy !

if everyone thinks like that then they won't have volunteers to work with. which will only hamper the whole effort of making vaccines.

parents here teach their kids how to write good things in essays, but do the exact opposite in reality...yuk

thanks. i hope i get a chance to do my part.

Agreed @rudra, and that's exactly my point. If no one volunteers to take a dose of the vaccine, clinical trial will never be possible. And I can give a signed guarantee that even if I was of the requisite age I wouldn't have been allowed to volunteer either.

@ikk157 Well yeah your opinion and viewpoint is quite radical, after all you're gonna risk your life even if slightly to let your body be experimented upon with a vaccine that's purely untested. But again, as I said someone will have to volunteer to get this vaccine a clean sheet, and henceforth public benefit at large.

Now I'd like to ask something else at this point, well, as far as I knew, these clinical trials were only to test if the body produces the requisite antigens and antibodies to fight against the virus, and further to see that there are no unwanted and alarming side effects. I don't think there was a mention of infecting you with COVID and getting this tested. This is a vaccine and not a medicine, I think the latter is what you're talking about. In that case, of course the medicine that passes intal trials would be administered to volunteer (already infected) patients from various places.

[rudra]

@HostSlick
omg ! none is paying even a dime here for this. I think I should keep Germany in my list of countries to emigrate to then.

@ikk157 @sohamb03

Thanks .. i would like to take this opportunity to clarify some things...

1) Search ' genetic chimera' in Google. There are people like that. also remember that from count of living cells in your body, more than half of the cells that make you are not yours or contain your genetic code. what we are is a joint effort of many. you really need the colonies / microbes living in your guts, skin, orifices , tracts. you need them. without them, you will have to live locked up in a artificially made very sterile environment.
so getting some live but attenuated ( non damaging) or dead virus or some protein (s) / chemical parts from them is not going to harm you in any significant and lasting way.

2) those rumors about vaccine test killing subjects is just bull crap. they test their safety on animal models first.

At worst what you might get is severe fever or / and some other symptoms. all these will clear up within months, if not weeks.

3) vaccines trigger matching immune response before the real threat gets in your body. so body gets time to prepare. that is triggering production of antibody.

antigen is what gets in and triggers .... the harmful things. so vaccine mimics antigen to trigger response ....

4) i hear they are going even more direct than this... they are taking samples from people who didnt even show much symptoms after getting infected and finding the antibodies in them and cloning those and going to use these super powered antibody doses on those who could not produce that kind of response ...or did but weak ones... this technology is already being used in case of ebola and cancer (pancreatic cancer ) etc i think.

so what this means is, we dont produce same kind of antibody when exposed to the same antigen. it is like calling the seal team to fight for you..

vaccines get used on healthy bodies ...i dont see what could be the point of using vaccines on someone already ill. the invading pathogen is already inducing the immune response. but these cloned antibody doses are used after you are ill. so there is that...

5) you dont need to get infected to test the viability of the vaccines. stage one trial ensures safety... in later stages they work to detect effect and effectiveness and doses etc .. so they just take blood samples and detect whether enough number of antibodies are being generated in your body by using laboratory tests. you dont need to get infected for that..

one can use live testing ....it has slight speed advantage. but due to high risk...not used usually..

FINALLY

Did you know that Isaac Newton used to prod inside his eyes using a needle so he could understand how eyes worked etc....i know that is a very high bar for dedication to science. but scientists are a mad bunch ...lol

SO IF YOU BELIEVE IN THE AUTHORITY OR THE PEOPLE WORKING ON THE VACCINE TO NOT LIE AND BE RESPONSIBLE, THEN PLEASE JOIN THEIR TRIALS...

[ikk157]

Agreed @rudra, and that's exactly my point. If no one volunteers to take a dose of the vaccine, clinical trial will never be possible. And I can give a signed guarantee that even if I was of the requisite age I wouldn't have been allowed to volunteer either.

@ikk157 Well yeah your opinion and viewpoint is quite radical, after all you're gonna risk your life even if slightly to let your body be experimented upon with a vaccine that's purely untested. But again, as I said someone will have to volunteer to get this vaccine a clean sheet, and henceforth public benefit at large.

Now I'd like to ask something else at this point, well, as far as I knew, these clinical trials were only to test if the body produces the requisite antigens and antibodies to fight against the virus, and further to see that there are no unwanted and alarming side effects. I don't think there was a mention of infecting you with COVID and getting this tested. This is a vaccine and not a medicine, I think the latter is what you're talking about. In that case, of course the medicine that passes intal trials would be administered to volunteer (already infected) patients from various places.

But then if you’re not infected with the virus, technically the body won’t produce the antibodies (because why would it?)... so testing the vaccines effectiveness might not yield reliable results. Sure vaccines tend to be a weakened pathogen to give the body time to identify how to fight it, hence when the real thing strikes the body knows exactly what to do. However, even if the body does produce antibodies for the weakened virus, there’s no guarantee that this will work on the real deal unless you actually test it.

But this is in theory of course... I don’t really know how they test its effectiveness in these trials. If it’s the method you described, then, yet again, it might not yield reliable results.

---

@HostSlick
omg ! none is paying even a dime here for this. I think I should keep Germany in my list of countries to emigrate to then.

@ikk157 @sohamb03

Thanks .. i would like to take this opportunity to clarify some things...

1) Search ' genetic chimera' in Google. There are people like that. also remember that from count of living cells in your body, more than half of the cells that make you are not yours or contain your genetic code. what we are is a joint effort of many. you really need the colonies / microbes living in your guts, skin, orifices , tracts. you need them. without them, you will have to live locked up in a artificially made very sterile environment.
so getting some live but attenuated ( non damaging) or dead virus or some protein (s) / chemical parts from them is not going to harm you in any significant and lasting way.

2) those rumors about vaccine test killing subjects is just bull crap. they test their safety on animal models first.

At worst what you might get is severe fever or / and some other symptoms. all these will clear up within months, if not weeks.

3) vaccines trigger matching immune response before the real threat gets in your body. so body gets time to prepare. that is triggering production of antibody.

antigen is what gets in and triggers .... the harmful things. so vaccine mimics antigen to trigger response ....

4) i hear they are going even more direct than this... they are taking samples from people who didnt even show much symptoms after getting infected and finding the antibodies in them and cloning those and going to use these super powered antibody doses on those who could not produce that kind of response ...or did but weak ones... this technology is already being used in case of ebola and cancer (pancreatic cancer ) etc i think.

so what this means is, we dont produce same kind of antibody when exposed to the same antigen. it is like calling the seal team to fight for you..

vaccines get used on healthy bodies ...i dont see what could be the point of using vaccines on someone already ill. the invading pathogen is already inducing the immune response. but these cloned antibody doses are used after you are ill. so there is that...

5) you dont need to get infected to test the viability of the vaccines. stage one trial ensures safety... in later stages they work to detect effect and effectiveness and doses etc .. so they just take blood samples and detect whether enough number of antibodies are being generated in your body by using laboratory tests. you dont need to get infected for that..

one can use live testing ....it has slight speed advantage. but due to high risk...not used usually..

FINALLY

Did you know that Isaac Newton used to prod inside his eyes using a needle so he could understand how eyes worked etc....i know that is a very high bar for dedication to science. but scientists are a mad bunch ...lol

SO IF YOU BELIEVE IN THE AUTHORITY OR THE PEOPLE WORKING ON THE VACCINE TO NOT LIE AND BE RESPONSIBLE, THEN PLEASE JOIN THEIR TRIALS...

I’d like to comment on your point of testing the vaccines safety on animals:

While this is a great step in figuring out how safe the vaccines are, it’s not really that great of an indication. As everyone knows, animal’s bodies tend to behave very differently from human beings in many aspects. So just because a vaccine proves itself safe in animals won’t necessarily mean it’s actually safe on humans. The risk is still there!

As for you calling the deaths caused by the trials rumors, would you mind pointing us to the source of that?

And for your point in the way they test the viruses effectiveness, please refer to my response to @sohamb03’s post.

But the remainder of your points are quite reasonable and I fully agree on those!

[rudra]

@ikk157

actually there are other effective ways too that are used to test potential toxicity in humans. and yes, they can be much more reliable too. i don't know what the reality is out there in this regard. also i must agree that animal testing is nowhere near close enough to being sufficient.

but they do cell line, tissue, organ model tests.. these are more reliable i hear.

last phases of trial are for testing effectiveness. they don't need you to get infected by the pathogen. once body generates enough and keeps that up and once those generated antibodies are shown to be effective on samples outside the body, that is enough. it mitigates doubts about both safety and effectiveness.

this is not psychology....

[ikk157]

@ikk157

actually there are other effective ways too that are used to test potential toxicity in humans. and yes, they can be much more reliable too. i don't know what the reality is out there in this regard. also i must agree that animal testing is nowhere near close enough to being sufficient.

but they do cell line, tissue, organ model tests.. these are more reliable i hear.

last phases of trial are for testing effectiveness. they don't need you to get infected by the pathogen. once body generates enough and keeps that up and once those generated antibodies are shown to be effective on samples outside the body, that is enough. it mitigates doubts about both safety and effectiveness.

this is not psychology....

Aha i see... this is much different from what I initially thought... what i had in mind was that these trials consisted of vaccinating the volunteers, then checking how well the vaccination protects them from the virus by simply intentionally infecting them with... guess i was wrong.

This proves that it’s actually much less risky than I initially anticipated, that’s great news! 

Just one thing sparked some doubt in me, just because the body is producing enough antibodies, doesn’t necessarily prove that they’re actually effective to fight the pathogen. For all we know, even though their number is sufficient, they might not be capable of doing what they’re supposed to, no matter how much of said antibodies are present. So judging the vaccines’ effectiveness based on the numbers of antibodies produced alone isn’t very reliable in my opinion. I’m sure there has to be more to it! These trials take a lot of time, so there’s for sure more things being tested/monitored. 

But again, I may be wrong... i hardly have any  experience in this field. This is why i love this thread, it’s a great learning opportunity... one that’s much needed!

[rudra]

@ikk157

yes. just counting numbers or percentage is not the whole picture. as i said in my point about cloning the more suitable antibodies extracted from people with minimal to no suffering after contracting the disease (asymptomatic). they have ways to detect, compare and measure the effectiveness. also that is the reason why they can't launch vaccine that fast. they need to ensure that it will work as intended.

which most of us who are uninformed and don't have time and or inclination to read don't know about and keep being indignant at why they are taking so long to bring it out or why they are not ready yet and still talking about couple more months.

live vaccine testing is a way. but very risky and i don't know of instances when they were used in recent past.