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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the give-it-a-shot dept.

Some scientists are taking a DIY coronavirus vaccine, and nobody knows if it's legal or if it works:

Preston Estep was alone in a borrowed laboratory, somewhere in Boston. No big company, no board meetings, no billion-dollar payout from Operation Warp Speed, the US government's covid-19 vaccine funding program. No animal data. No ethics approval.

What he did have: ingredients for a vaccine. And one willing volunteer.

Estep swirled together the mixture and spritzed it up his nose.

Nearly 200 covid-19 vaccines are in development and some three dozen are at various stages of human testing. But in what appears to be the first "citizen science" vaccine initiative, Estep and at least 20 other researchers, technologists, or science enthusiasts, many connected to Harvard University and MIT, have volunteered as lab rats for a do-it-yourself inoculation against the coronavirus. They say it's their only chance to become immune without waiting a year or more for a vaccine to be formally approved.

Among those who've taken the DIY vaccine is George Church, the celebrity geneticist at Harvard University, who took two doses a week apart earlier this month. The doses were dropped in his mailbox and he mixed the ingredients himself.

Church believes the vaccine designed by Estep, his former graduate student at Harvard and one of his proteges, is extremely safe. "I think we are at much bigger risk from covid considering how many ways you can get it, and how highly variable the consequences are," says Church, who says he has not stepped outside of his house in five months. The US Centers for Disease Control recently reported that as many as one-third of patients who test positive for covid-19 but are never hospitalized battle symptoms for weeks or even months after contracting the virus. "I think that people are highly underestimating this disease," Church says.

Harmless as the experimental vaccine may be, though, whether it will protect anyone who takes it is another question. And the independent researchers who are making and sharing it might be stepping onto thin legal ice, if they aren't there already.


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  • (Score: 2) by epitaxial on Thursday July 30 2020, @12:33PM (7 children)

    by epitaxial (3165) on Thursday July 30 2020, @12:33PM (#1028563)

    Might as well suck on some pennies too. You know that chlora-whats-its-name and Zinc are the magic cure that the government is trying to suppress. Somehow these people know more than the rest of the world?

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:09PM (4 children)

    Have to lick off the copper coating first to get to the chewy zinc center. Ain't copper sposed to be magic too though? Or was that magnets?

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    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:46PM (3 children)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:46PM (#1028648) Journal

      Actually, for many diseases copper is a "sort of" magic. Most germs won't survive long on anything copper or silver plated. (Probably works for gold, to, as the explanation someone gave me had to do with electrical conductivity...whether it was right or not is another question.) Even COVID doesn't live long on most metal surfaces. (It's hard to know how long it lives, because the only test is to try to grow a culture. You can test for the presence of RNA, but that's a lot more persistent than the active virus.)

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      • (Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:00PM

        by wisnoskij (5149) <reversethis-{moc ... ksonsiwnohtanoj}> on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:00PM (#1028668)

        Yes copper is quite toxic, nothing survives being coated in it. Now I might be wrong here, but I suspect that you would kill yourself with copper poisoning long before you hurt any virus living within you. Organic orchards use it as a pesticide, but they cannot use it many years in a row of the trees die and the gwond become too toxic to grow much of anything.

      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 30 2020, @04:20PM (1 child)

        The phenomenon you're talking about works for coating surfaces outside the body, it's utterly ineffective from within because the quantity you'd need to take to reproduce the effects would be beyond toxicity by several orders of magnitude.

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        • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday July 30 2020, @07:51PM

          by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 30 2020, @07:51PM (#1028864) Journal

          O, it's probably quite effective, where it's applied. But getting metallic copper spread throughout your body...even if it weren't toxic the application would probably kill you. But it *is* sort of magic against diseases. That's why coins are relatively safe as cash. (Although, I'm told that even on paper money COVID won't last more than a week...and that's based on the RNA tests rather than trying to culture live virus particles.)

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  • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:39PM (1 child)

    by meustrus (4961) on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:39PM (#1028641)

    You mean hydroxychloroquine, which the highest executive of the literal government was signal boosting?

    You mean the zinc that we can freely buy as a dietary supplement, and which is proven to reduce the duration and symptoms of the common cold? Zicam gets to sell itself as a cold remedy because they call it "homeopathic"; no one is willing to spend millions on the FDA-required studies because people will just buy the cheap dietary supplements.

    Just because somebody knows better than you doesn't mean the rest of the world isn't with them. The world is complicated, and there are lots of people in it who know more than you and I.

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    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:48PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:48PM (#1028650) Journal

      The problem with zinc is that the dose is critical. To little zinc is harmful to the immune system, but so is too much. You're probably better of with a multi-vitamin and mineral tablet than with a zinc lozenge.

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