I give Scott credit as being smart enough to know and have considered all of this. I think much of SCC could be categorized as him giving his opponents the benefit of the doubt of being well intentioned and arguing with them in good faith and not dismissing them as trolls. Maybe this is naive of him and a waste of time. But I think the approach has produced a ton of great posts over years and I think it's just fundamentally who Scott is and it's long been clear that earnest arguments in good faith with people who might in fact not be in good faith is what SCC is all about and is the hill Scott is willing to die on.
I think it's commendable.
nevermind, looks like gjm already did the thing
My apologies for interfering with your typing practice!
I agree with more or less everything people have said about the advantages of the text being actual text.
But also it's fun and nice to have it handwritten and I think the benefits are non trivial.
So. Both? Just have both versions so everyone can enjoy the version that's best for them?
I'll go ahead and transcribe this one. (i'm currently learning two different alternative methods of typing and I'm at a stage where transcription is better practice than normal writing, and doing this will give be a nice opportunity to reflect on the post). I'll have it done this weekend. Let me know where I should post the text.
My jaw dropped at "~500 doses". At $2 per dose... that's significantly cheaper than it's costing the companies to produce the official vaccine. What am I missing here? I know you're making a different thing than Moderna, but if the thing your making exists and is this cheap then why is Pharma leaving the money on the floor and not mass producing this?
I think you're underselling the potential benefit here! Doing a batch of this and distributing it to 500 people may be unfeasible. I assume the FDA or something comes for you if you're trying to commercially d... (read more)
Both the other comments here are on-point. The materials for large amounts of radvac would cost pennies per dose, because the cost-per-unit of the peptides drops very rapidly as you scale up (remember, we doubled our order for <10% extra cost).
However, in general, people and logistics are a bigger expense than materials for most products these days, and I certainly expect that to apply to vaccines.
There are a number of costs that Moderna/Pfizer/Astrazenica incur that a homebrew vaccine does not. Of the top of my head:
1. Salaries for the (presumably highly educated) lab techs that put this stuff together. I don't know johnswentwort background, but presumably he wouldn't exactly be asking minimum wage if he was doing this commercially.
2. Costs of running large scale trials and going through all the paperwork to get FDA approv... (read more)
Oh, it's far, far worse (better?) than $2 per dose. As a thought experiment, I price estimated buying enough peptide for a hundred thousand doses, and it only costs about ten thousand dollars. Ten cents a dose is closer to realistic if you buy in bulk.
Which also brings to mind a question of civilizational inadequacy: if we really cared and it really mattered, why not have every university with a lab in the country crank out a hundred thousand doses per week to their local populace?