You’re talking about MRNA the stock?

Not enough manufacturing capacity. Doesn’t have solid IP. Not enough resources to do a fast followup with a gen 2 vaccine. Hasn’t inked many deals for MRNA1273. Not much in the way of other programs. Top executives selling stock like crazy.

Of the mRNA vaccine companies, I prefer BNTX. Half the valuation. Lots of capacity via PFE. Multiple followup candidates in the lab. Many deals cut, at a solid price. A lot of programs besides BNTX162, with major pharma/biotech partners, that are reasonably advanced - and not infectious disease vaccines, which are normally not a great market.

I don’t have much hope for the little latecomers like NVAX. Besides the so-so data, how are they going to do a 30,000 subject trial in 2021 when approved vaccines are widely available? “Dear volunteer, please take this shot which has a 50% chance of being placebo and a 50% chance of being an unproven maybe vaccine, instead of getting an actual known effective vaccine”. Unless the approved vaccines are very ineffective, there are actually ethical problems with that. I think there’s like a 4-5 month window to start and complete any further phase 3 trials on new vaccines - after that, need to do them in some other country that lacks access to approved vaccines. Or, run their trials against an approved vaccine instead of against placebo. Now you’re trying to prove superiority of your vaccine against the approved one, if the approved one is 50% effective and you think yours is 70% effective, you might need a trial even larger than 30,000 for enough statistical power. But if the rate of new infections is coming down due to vaccination or other, how long will it take and how much will it cost to enroll 50,000 subjects . . . and if someone is out there selling vaccine at cost (as Astrazeneca has committed to do for the first year I think) and has ramped up supply to many billions of doses/yr, how much money can you make when your vaccine finally gets approved in (maybe) 2H2021? Your vaccine will need to be really, clearly superior. Tough bar to clear.

I meant the stock yes. I always like the guy that sells shovels to the miners...

Illumina was great for a while...

Yes, but the way you are talking about looking at it disregards pre-existing conditions entirely.

And 74 is the median of all age groups, not an age. Either talk of people who are 74 or talk of medians. You are mixing apples and oranges.

Yep. But to get people, they will pay them...and some people need the money.

I think the Moderna will get approved first, but as you said, they don't have the capacity. Most people will probably end up with the J&J vaccine.

Yeah but a shovel company has to have revenues and then won’t get a 100X revenue multiple or get taken out at 2X premium. And there are a lot fewer shovel companies than miners, and a lot fewer varieties of shovels to make than places to dig. Hence there’s only been a few ILMNs whereas there’s dozens of new MRNAs every year.

Honestly I think what the world needs more than any new drug is effective blood or urine screening for cancer. And there are interesting little companies trying to do it. If they succeed, they might get to $5-10BN market cap. A wing and prayer biotech can get to $5BN on some press releases and in vitro data. Get something cool to phase 3 and you’re $10BN. Actually get a good drug approved, or develop a “platform”, and $20-40BN. Meanwhile the cancer screening company that is actually saving lives instead of merely extending survival is plugging along in small cap land. It ain’t fair, but oh well.

I think MRNA and BNTX/PFE will be neck and neck for first US approval, then the -80F cold chain required for PFE limits it while MRNA’s capacity limits it. Not sure who’s next, JNJ trial just got “paused”, AZN trial still halted (in US), others haven’t really got going yet. For US alone, MRNA and PFE can probably supply the domestic market by 2Q 2021, especially considering the % of vaccine refusers. But for the world, or at least the part of the world that the US trades with, to get vaccinated the other companies need to get approved. AZN probably will, in Europe, potentially even before MRNA/BNTX get EUA in US. They’ve already started the rolling approval process with the European Medicines Agency.

Interesting that LLY’s antibody trial of LLY-CoV555 got paused too. This was their trial in hospitalized Covid pts with more severe disease, and they are using a huge dose. The limited info released suggests it wasn’t a individual pt, but that the trial overall hit a safety boundary. Meaning the drug arm as a whole may be showing worse safety trends than the placebo arm. My speculation is that if you take a hospitalized patient with more severe disease, he’s potentially at the point where the immune overreaction is the biggest threat, and administering a big dose of antibodies might turn out to be not helpful but harmful. And maybe doing that on top of remedsivir is also not a good idea. Pure speculation.

REGN has not had their hospitalization trial paused, but it’s a risk. REGN does seem to maybe have been cleverer than LLY. In their trial of REGN-COV2 in outpatients, they tested natural antibody levels before dosing, so they got detailed data on exactly who the drug helped and figured out that it helped those pts who hadn’t developed their own antibody response. If they did this in the hosp pt trial, then if they run into a safety issue like LLY may have, they might be able to adjust and keep going.

Fingers x’d.

Though I just listened to a doc panel and they thought MRNA would be first across the wire.

The value of stock for a company like this is the hope they will get gobbled up by a large company for huge stupid money, which is likely if they hit a home run with the vaccine.
The risk-reward doesn't work for me but might for others.

Unclear what you're saying.

Anyway, here is the more detailed calculation by age cohort. Appx 2.6MM years of life expectancy lost to Covid in the USA so far.

The largest part of that is from deaths of persons in the 50-64 y/o cohort.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1602777589.jpg

CDC has age data for only 154,405 deaths through 10/14/2020, I calculated for those deaths then scaled up to current total 217,000 deaths. That assumes the deaths of unknown age have the same age distribution as the deaths of known age.

If you want to assume the deaths of unknown age are all in the 85+ y/o cohort (basis?), that reduces the result to 2.2MM years of life expectancy lost.

If you want to assume that everyone who died had 5 yrs less life expectancy than the average (basis?) , that reduces the result to 1.5MM years of life expectancy lost.

EDIT: Also, the table above uses the shorter life expectancy for males, because I didn't have time to find the CDC data for Covid deaths by age and sex. Female life expectancy is significantly longer than male life expectancy in every age cohort. Total Covid deaths so far are 54% male, 46% female. If you want to assume that % split is the same for each cohort, then that increases the result to 2.9MM years of life expectancy lost. I actually think that is a fairly reasonable assumption, and should have included it from the start. Oh well.

You cannot compare the life expectancy of a 74 year old to the median age of death of 74 years. One is combining data of a group of all people with trait "X" (dying of Covid). They other is looking at subset of people with Trait "Y" (being 74 years old).

The fact that they share the number 74 is meaningless.

I take jyl's post as being the life expectancy at age x, which is very common usage


he selected x= 74 as a common or median age of entry to nursing home care, FAIK

And that’s not what I did.

If you want to know how much longer an average 74 y/o man will live, you go to the actuarial tables, look up 74, male, and get 11.76 yrs.

I used this actuarial table https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/table4c6.html
“the period life expectancy at a given age is the average remaining number of years expected prior to death for a person at that exact age, born on January 1, using the mortality rates for 2017 over the course of his or her remaining life.”

So, if that average 74 y/o man is killed - by gunshot, accident, Covid, whatever - that is 12 years of life erased.

So combine the Covid deaths by age cohort, with actuarial tables, and you can calculate how many years of life have been lost to Covid.

It isn't just about the U.S., and it isn't just about mortality. We will see what happens. Very complex situation. I just hope that those folks working hard in the publicly traded companies can endure the stress. It has got to be hard. Especially for the C-suite.

All very challenging, stressful and complex.

You can get those directly without the vaccine.

The 1st generation vaccines have a good chance of failing if I read it correctly.

You are not getting it. A median age 74 is not equal to a person who is 74. Apples and Oranges. The median 74 is an average of All age groups. So you must use age 0 off the actuarial tables.

The antibody cocktails (e.g. REGN- COV2) will be in extremely short supply. IIRC, Regenron is talking about being able to make 4-8MM doses/yr at the low dose level (the "prevention" dose) and that's with big pharma (Roche) helping. For the high dose (the "treatment" dose, they might be able to make 100K doses in 2021.

All the vaccines currently in ph 3 clinical trials reliably induce production of neutralizing antibodies at levels higher - in some cases vastly higher - than measured in pts who have recovered from Covid. They also induce T cell responses. That is in persons in the 18-70 y/o range. Data hasn't been that plentiful for pediatric or older, though it is starting to come out.

The vaccines may not be effective, or not as effective as hoped, but failure to produce antibodies won't be the reason (again, can't say if that's true for kids/older yet).

Edit: I meant that to apply to the vaccines in US and other Western trials. There is at least one Chinese vaccine that I am pretty dubious about. They used a viral vector that is already endemic in humans, as a result something like a third (don't recall exactly) of ph 2 subjects demonstrated pre-x immunity to that viral vector and hence did not have much of an antibody response. I don't know if they are doing ph 3 trials - the Chinese seem to have decided that ph 3 trials aren't needed (being sarcastic but that seems to be effectively what is going on) or (my cynical speculation) they've already done secret non-consensual ph 3 trials on populations who can't say no (Yighurs, say). Similar comment for the Russian vaccine (for which little data has been released, other than Putin approves it).

Red Beard, is it an rNA vaccine you are testing from Moderna?

Messenger RNA vaccine.