4 ms·
Except that tweet isn't really accurate - vaccine research is pretty active, and modern, new vaccines have made their makers a fair bit of money. Beyond that,
by Fomite 11y ago
Except that tweet isn't really accurate - vaccine research is pretty active, and modern, new vaccines have made their makers a fair bit of money.
Beyond that, vaccines are a "Pay $X per month while healthy" treatment - you have to treat everyone whether they're sick or not, and as long as humans keep breeding, you have a replenishing customer base unless we manage the (rare) feat of eradication.
The problem is that modern vaccine targets are hard. Multiple strains, dangerous responses from partial immunity (Dengue), very rapid viral evolution (HIV, flu), etc.
- maxerickson 11y agoWhat about stuff that isn't very transmissible person to person? (like Lyme disease, which had a vaccine pulled, I'm under the impression that it was not pulled for great reasons)
- Fomite 11y agoOne of my examples, dengue, is vector born, like Lyme. That's no promise the vaccine will be easy to develop. In the case of Lyme, I'd assert there's very few drug development paradigms that are robust to anti-scientific hysterics (says the person at a conference that regularly gets chronic Lyme picketers).