I asked Alex from RADVAC on reddit about antibody responses to the vaccine. He replied by saying 4 of the researchers saw a “positive antibody response.”
“Some of our core group started performing ELISA assays to determine the presence of anti-Spike antibodies, beginning back in May/June. Since only a handful of us had at that point been collecting samples rigorously, the sample size available to us was small, so although we saw a positive antibody response, we didn’t consider the (n=4) data credible as a data set.”
I dare not interpret the implications of this finding on how much we should expect out of these vaccines, but I thought that this would be important to discuss.
Ah excellent, thank you for getting ahold of someone. This matches the qualitative impression I had from the white paper.
It’s not clear from that comment what the denominator is—i.e. 4 out of how many who tested for it? The white paper says that about 100 researchers had taken the vaccine (most of them presumably not as early as May/June), and the comment says “only a handful” were collecting samples rigorously as of May/June, so I’d guess ~10 or less. That gives ~40% chance or higher of antibody response with that version of the vaccine (where “or higher” includes a significant chance that only 4 people ran the ELISA assays, in which case Laplace’ rule would give 80% chance of antibodies). Though note that the current version focuses on a different immunity strategy so it may not generalize, and the error bars were pretty wide to begin with.
One thing to note: if there’s an antibody response in a significant fraction of people but not everyone, that’s exactly the world where I’d expect “more dakka” to work.
I asked Alex from RADVAC on reddit about antibody responses to the vaccine. He replied by saying 4 of the researchers saw a “positive antibody response.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/radvac/comments/ig2b1q/related_news_open_for_suggestions/
“Some of our core group started performing ELISA assays to determine the presence of anti-Spike antibodies, beginning back in May/June. Since only a handful of us had at that point been collecting samples rigorously, the sample size available to us was small, so although we saw a positive antibody response, we didn’t consider the (n=4) data credible as a data set.”
I dare not interpret the implications of this finding on how much we should expect out of these vaccines, but I thought that this would be important to discuss.
Ah excellent, thank you for getting ahold of someone. This matches the qualitative impression I had from the white paper.
It’s not clear from that comment what the denominator is—i.e. 4 out of how many who tested for it? The white paper says that about 100 researchers had taken the vaccine (most of them presumably not as early as May/June), and the comment says “only a handful” were collecting samples rigorously as of May/June, so I’d guess ~10 or less. That gives ~40% chance or higher of antibody response with that version of the vaccine (where “or higher” includes a significant chance that only 4 people ran the ELISA assays, in which case Laplace’ rule would give 80% chance of antibodies). Though note that the current version focuses on a different immunity strategy so it may not generalize, and the error bars were pretty wide to begin with.
One thing to note: if there’s an antibody response in a significant fraction of people but not everyone, that’s exactly the world where I’d expect “more dakka” to work.