3 ms·

This is not big news. Wild polio is only endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan anymore, and it's known that the vaccine itself can cause a form of polio in a ver

• ars 6y ago
  That's the exact problem. It's not a small number of cases anymore. I read the documentation they put out about their plan to deal with this. The plan failed. Currently these mutated cases are the biggest risk to this entire process, bigger even than wild type. The only way to stop them is to immunize people against the subtype but they no longer are immunizing people because the immunization itself causes more mutated cases. So this new mutated vaccine derived polio is spreading unchecked because young children are not immunized to it. I suspect they may need to switch to using IPV to immunize, people but it will be ferociously expensive.
  • xbar 6y ago
    The plan was a gamble, just like using a live polio virus in the vaccine. For people in communities where the vaccine-derived strains are spreading, is there another choice except IPV?
    • chess_buster 6y ago
      Can CureVac's and BioNTech's mRNA-based vaccines be a solution?
      • ars 6y ago
        There already are vaccines that would solve this. It's just there is no infrastructure (cold storage, sterile needles, medical documentation/identity) in place to administer it. The new vaccines you mention are even more delicate than the existing one, so would not be helpful. The current vaccine (the bad one) needs nothing more than a backpack and a marker (to mark those who were vaccinated). There is research to develop a new, temperature stable, vaccine that can not mutate. But so far no success.