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Maybe, but the idea here is not to use any strain found as a vaccine directly, but as a tool to test other vaccines. Instead of running a large Phase III field
by danieltillett 6y ago
Maybe, but the idea here is not to use any strain found as a vaccine directly, but as a tool to test other vaccines.
Instead of running a large Phase III field trial where we wait for people to get infected, we could use the safer strain to do a challenge trial where we deliberately try to infect the volunteers with the attenuated strain. This will give us an answer much sooner and avoid exposing many people to a vaccine that maybe doesn’t work.
- alkonaut 6y agoThe problem I think is that the step where people are infected with a (supposedly!) less harmful virus is just like testing a vaccine. It’s another substance to be tested on healthy individuals. You can’t know the long term effects on the attenuated virus in a large group so the same caution and slow pace would have to be used to test that. First! All you did was go from testing one thing to testing two things (an attenuated virus and the vaccine). If the attenuated virus could somehow (quickly) be deemed harmless in humans then I agree it could be a shortcut, but is that really possible?
- danieltillett 6y agoYes. The whole idea of looking for a natural attenuated strain is we can use the natural spread of this strain to prove it is safe. This is explored in a lot more detail in the other recent posts on my blog. Yes it is possible, but the only way we will know is if we look. I am arguing we should look.