The hubris is to expect that someone at home can manufacture something worthy of being called a vaccine if they're just smart enough to follow the science.
Theoretically this might be true, but in practice it seems obvious that this will fail. I can think of so many ways in which this could be subtly invalid and I am in no way an expert. I would expect someone with commercial lab experience or vaccine production experience to be able to point out a hundred ways in which this won't work.
Maybe the more obvious problem though is that we can't know if it works either. Without a valid scientific study on the effectiveness it's all just a guess. To call it a vaccine is hubris because it is precisely this study that deems a concoction of ingredients to actually be a vaccine. I'd expect Less Wrong to be the first place to point out all the flaws in the idea of just getting an antibody test to decide if it's working.
> The hubris is to expect that someone at home can manufacture something worthy of being called a vaccine if they're just smart enough to follow the science.
Are you defining "vaccine" in a manner that makes those 19th century things called "vaccines" not actually vaccines?
Vaccines aren't magic that can only be done by a suitably blessed priest and aren't necesarily even very high tech...
The paper does appear to assume that the reader is indeed an expert or at least a somewhat experienced amateur. If you sign up on their researchers map, they do ask whether you have a science degree and/or lab experience:
I must admit I'm stymied by your implication that an antibody test wouldn't constitute evidence that the vaccine had been effective in that instance (n=1). What makes you say that?
Theoretically this might be true, but in practice it seems obvious that this will fail. I can think of so many ways in which this could be subtly invalid and I am in no way an expert. I would expect someone with commercial lab experience or vaccine production experience to be able to point out a hundred ways in which this won't work.
Maybe the more obvious problem though is that we can't know if it works either. Without a valid scientific study on the effectiveness it's all just a guess. To call it a vaccine is hubris because it is precisely this study that deems a concoction of ingredients to actually be a vaccine. I'd expect Less Wrong to be the first place to point out all the flaws in the idea of just getting an antibody test to decide if it's working.