8 ms·

If there is one thing I certainly wouldn't just play around with it's the immune system. It's incredibly dangerous and easily capable of causing all kinds of ha

If there is one thing I certainly wouldn't just play around with it's the immune system. It's incredibly dangerous and easily capable of causing all kinds of harm to yourself up to killing you outright. A vaccine is designed to produce an immune response of the right magnitude. Too low and it doesn't work, too high and it'll cause damage. At least one of the vaccine candidates in development was put back to the drawing board because the immune response wasn't strong enough. So this is not an area that is entirely predictable, you have to carefully test this to know if it works. I'd also be very careful about the inhalation route. Inhalable insulin is a well-known failure, in part because of side effects due to the inhalation. And that is a protein that isn't designed to activate your immune system. I also hope the synthesized peptides were carefully purified, you really don't want to inhale e.g. residual trifluoracetic acid.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
zests 6y ago
Can you provide more information about how vaccines can cause damage?
- dante_dev 6y ago
  I think he was referring generically to any bad crafted vaccine. Not the one approved by authorities. Indeed any improvised drug can be harmful.
- wiml 6y ago
  Some vaccines in the past have been withdrawn for causing autoimmune disorders, eg arthritis.
- recursivedoubts 6y ago
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/04/14/cutter-polio-vaccine-paralyzed-children-coronavirus/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/04/14/cutter-pol...
- fabian2k 6y ago
  I said that the immune system can cause damage. Vaccines have a very high safety standard as they are given to large numbers of healthy people, so the tolerance for serious side effects is very low. So the development there is very careful, and anything that looks too dangerous is hopefully caught in animal experiments or at worst at phase I. A well known example of how dangerous the immune system can be is the following phase I trial: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa063842 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa063842 That drug caused a cytokine storm in the participants in the phase I trial. Allergies are another example of how dangerous the immune system can be if it is triggered against the wrong targets.
  - jerf 6y ago
    I have suspected for much of the last year that a lot of people are running on an unexamined "Only crazy people think vaccines cause autism -> Only crazy people think vaccines are ever dangerous in any way -> All vaccines are perfectly safe" psuedo-syllogism. This is false. Put another way, the very fact that we run such massive tests on them before deploying them is itself evidence that the wrong ones can be very dangerous. (Mostly, as I understand it, "very dangerous" to a small set of people who will have very large reactions, even if most people are fine. The ones that are very dangerous to everyone never gets past the initial phases at all, of course.) We're not doing that because vaccines are all perfectly safe under all conditions, but we just want to hold them back for a year for no reason. We're doing it because we need to be very careful with them. Though I'd also observe a non-trivial component of that danger is also because we're injecting them. Bypassing the body's co-evolved with the environment's defenses is not to be done lightly. This sort of inhaled vaccine is likely to be much less dangerous. I won't say "safe", but less dangerous; the body already has to deal with essentially arbitrary small amino acid sequences being inhaled all the time. I'd still be a bit worried about sythesizing things that we haven't co-evolved with. (If you don't know what co-evolution is, I'd suggesting taking a moment to learn about it: https://www.britannica.com/science/coevolution https://www.britannica.com/science/coevolution It's a very important part of understanding the disease landscape holistically.)
    - bawolff 6y ago
- bawolff 6y ago
  For vaccines in general, i imagine it depends on the type a lot. Live vaccines for example have the obvious risk factor of maybe giving you the disease, but i dont know much about the topic. I imagine for this article the biggest risk is you make something other than you expect and poision yourself, or you just make something that does nothing. (IANAexpert)
  - m-ee 6y ago
    You can actually do much worse than nothing with antibody dependent enhancement. Let's say you make something that at first glance appears similar to the virus but is a little off. Maybe you chose the wrong proteins, or maybe you used an inactivated virus and the inactivation step damaged some key part of the virus. You inject the vaccine and your body learns how to make antibodies for this particle. Now the real virus shows up, your body goes "Aha! I've seen this before let me make those antibodies." But it wasn't trained on the real virus, so the antibodies it makes aren't actually effective against the real thing. The virus replicates and your body makes more and more antibodies but they do nothing to stop it. Meanwhile the the antibodies are running rampant in your body causing inflammation and blood clots. This has happened before with vaccine candidates, and is analogous to what goes in on severe covid. The body tries to respond to the invading virus but does so ineffectively and causes potential deadly damage.
    - ntr-- 6y ago
      Isn't it possible your body would have the same response if it was exposed to a variant of a virus that it already has antibodies for? Maybe the explanations are simplified but I don't quite understand how the immune system could fail to recognise permutations of proteins or any other differentiating factor between COVID-19, its variants and mRNA vaccines; nor what makes this specific example of vaccination riskier.
      - Vecr 6y ago
        Your immune system is not intelligent. Through natural selection it has evolved to be able to handle some things, but it can't see permutations like that, as they are not something it evolved for, it's all chemical/physical matching.
- m-ee 6y ago
  The goal of the vaccine is to train the immune system to recognize the real virus when it shows up. If you get it wrong, the vaccine may not simulate the virus very accurately which can lead to a number of issues. You may not mount an immune response when the virus shows up, or worse the vaccine may have improperly trained your immune system and you create antibodies that are ineffective against the virus but wreak havoc on your body. This has happened before with vaccine candidates like RSV or Dengvaxia. It can be deadly. That's not even getting into the issues that may arise from skipping all the GMP/GLP guidelines. They can be tedious but exist for a reason.
- passivate 6y ago
  Well, a vaccine is a rather vague and generic term. Are you talking about an FDA approved product? An experimental vaccine? A vaccine whose use is contra-indicated for certain people? etc. etc. If I may - perhaps one alternative question is "Can an unapproved vaccine product cause harm?". With that re-wording, the answers become a bit more clear. Yes, chemicals used in the formulation maybe toxic, or the final vaccine might give rise to an auto-immune response, or could induce anaphylaxis in certain people. There could be cell debris/endotoxins that a purification process doesn't remove properly and causes problems. Maybe the vaccine contains an attenuated pathogen that can "revert", etc, etc.
fpgaminer 6y ago
I recall a researcher talking about previous attempts at creating coronavirus vaccines. How they resulted not in immunity, but in training the immune system to _over_ respond when a real infection came along. After a bit of digging I found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/ > An early concern for application of a SARS-CoV vaccine was the experience with other coronavirus infections which induced enhanced disease and immunopathology in animals when challenged with infectious virus I didn't dig deep enough to see if any experimental vaccines caused similar issues, but it definitely appears to be a concern. So yeah, I'd be _very_ cautious with any homebrew vaccine. You might accidentally train your immune system to self destruct when you get exposed to a real SARS-CoV-2. That said, I have little to no experience with biology, so it's entirely possible that radvac based vaccinations have already been demonstrated not to have this particular problem.
- ufo 6y ago
  A recent attempt at a dengue vaccine faced a similar problem. The most dangerous kind of dengue fever happens when you are infected a second time, by a different variant than you were infected the first time. It turns out that the vaccine ended up having a similar effect as catching dengue for the first time. People who never had dengue and got vaccinated had a lower chance of catching the disease in the future. But if they did catch it there was a higher risk of it being the more dangerous version. The end result is that the vaccine is now only recommended for people who already had dengue before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengvaxia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengvaxia
  - Igelau 6y ago
    This is specifically mentioned in the Radvac paper in the section titled "POSSIBLE MECHANISMS OF VACCINE-ENHANCED DISEASE, VACCINE-INDUCED AUTOIMMUNITY, AND MITIGATION STRATEGIES"
- buildstatements 6y ago
  Homebrew seems unfair: https://radvac.org/a-homepage-section/ https://radvac.org/a-homepage-section/ Trying it is IMHO a risk calculation once you've jumped the "is this credible" bar.
Uhhrrr 6y ago
Super-dumb question: Could you try it out on a rat or a vial of your own blood first?
- boyband6666 6y ago
  Not a dumb question at all. In medicine we test on two different animal species before it goes close to a human. For a reason.
- Symmetry 6y ago
  The sites where the body evolves adaptive immune responses like antibodies and killer T cells aren't actually in the blood so that wouldn't produce any result. Rats don't have good ACE2 receptors for getting sick with Covid-19 but ferrets do so you could try testing this on them.
michaelterryio 6y ago
Something like that advice would have been good for Ben Franklin too. And Marie Curie. Some people want to survive and some people want to be heroes.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Those people tested their theories, did experiments. They didn't just stick something up their nose and assumed it worked with no further investigation.
  - Carlton2082 6y ago
    I believe GP is trying to conjure up images of flying kits in thunderstorms or walking around with radioactive material in your pocket.
  - concordDance 6y ago
    > They didn't just stick something up their nose and assumed it worked with no further investigation. Good thing that's not what the article author has done, ey?
    - bawolff 6y ago
      But it is. The author has made no attempt to test whether he is immune to covid as of this writing. He talks vaugely about future blood tests, but its unclear what test specificly, if a positive result would actually mean he is immune, if a Negative test would mean he is not, so its basically a test that tells us nothing, and he hasn't even done it yet. If your experiment is not falsifiable, you are not doing science.
      - concordDance 6y ago
        He explicitly has not "assumed it worked", nor has there been "no further investigation" (there has been some and will be more). Both parts of the great grandparent's sentence are false. I don't think saying false things for rhetorical effect is good for the health of hackernews discourse.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

zests 6y ago

Can you provide more information about how vaccines can cause damage?

dante_dev 6y ago
I think he was referring generically to any bad crafted vaccine. Not the one approved by authorities. Indeed any improvised drug can be harmful.
wiml 6y ago
Some vaccines in the past have been withdrawn for causing autoimmune disorders, eg arthritis.
recursivedoubts 6y ago
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/04/14/cutter-polio-vaccine-paralyzed-children-coronavirus/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/04/14/cutter-pol...
fabian2k 6y ago
I said that the immune system can cause damage. Vaccines have a very high safety standard as they are given to large numbers of healthy people, so the tolerance for serious side effects is very low. So the development there is very careful, and anything that looks too dangerous is hopefully caught in animal experiments or at worst at phase I. A well known example of how dangerous the immune system can be is the following phase I trial: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa063842 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa063842 That drug caused a cytokine storm in the participants in the phase I trial. Allergies are another example of how dangerous the immune system can be if it is triggered against the wrong targets.
- jerf 6y ago
  I have suspected for much of the last year that a lot of people are running on an unexamined "Only crazy people think vaccines cause autism -> Only crazy people think vaccines are ever dangerous in any way -> All vaccines are perfectly safe" psuedo-syllogism. This is false. Put another way, the very fact that we run such massive tests on them before deploying them is itself evidence that the wrong ones can be very dangerous. (Mostly, as I understand it, "very dangerous" to a small set of people who will have very large reactions, even if most people are fine. The ones that are very dangerous to everyone never gets past the initial phases at all, of course.) We're not doing that because vaccines are all perfectly safe under all conditions, but we just want to hold them back for a year for no reason. We're doing it because we need to be very careful with them. Though I'd also observe a non-trivial component of that danger is also because we're injecting them. Bypassing the body's co-evolved with the environment's defenses is not to be done lightly. This sort of inhaled vaccine is likely to be much less dangerous. I won't say "safe", but less dangerous; the body already has to deal with essentially arbitrary small amino acid sequences being inhaled all the time. I'd still be a bit worried about sythesizing things that we haven't co-evolved with. (If you don't know what co-evolution is, I'd suggesting taking a moment to learn about it: https://www.britannica.com/science/coevolution https://www.britannica.com/science/coevolution It's a very important part of understanding the disease landscape holistically.)
  - bawolff 6y ago
bawolff 6y ago
For vaccines in general, i imagine it depends on the type a lot. Live vaccines for example have the obvious risk factor of maybe giving you the disease, but i dont know much about the topic. I imagine for this article the biggest risk is you make something other than you expect and poision yourself, or you just make something that does nothing. (IANAexpert)
- m-ee 6y ago
  You can actually do much worse than nothing with antibody dependent enhancement. Let's say you make something that at first glance appears similar to the virus but is a little off. Maybe you chose the wrong proteins, or maybe you used an inactivated virus and the inactivation step damaged some key part of the virus. You inject the vaccine and your body learns how to make antibodies for this particle. Now the real virus shows up, your body goes "Aha! I've seen this before let me make those antibodies." But it wasn't trained on the real virus, so the antibodies it makes aren't actually effective against the real thing. The virus replicates and your body makes more and more antibodies but they do nothing to stop it. Meanwhile the the antibodies are running rampant in your body causing inflammation and blood clots. This has happened before with vaccine candidates, and is analogous to what goes in on severe covid. The body tries to respond to the invading virus but does so ineffectively and causes potential deadly damage.
  - ntr-- 6y ago
    Isn't it possible your body would have the same response if it was exposed to a variant of a virus that it already has antibodies for? Maybe the explanations are simplified but I don't quite understand how the immune system could fail to recognise permutations of proteins or any other differentiating factor between COVID-19, its variants and mRNA vaccines; nor what makes this specific example of vaccination riskier.
    - Vecr 6y ago
      Your immune system is not intelligent. Through natural selection it has evolved to be able to handle some things, but it can't see permutations like that, as they are not something it evolved for, it's all chemical/physical matching.
m-ee 6y ago
The goal of the vaccine is to train the immune system to recognize the real virus when it shows up. If you get it wrong, the vaccine may not simulate the virus very accurately which can lead to a number of issues. You may not mount an immune response when the virus shows up, or worse the vaccine may have improperly trained your immune system and you create antibodies that are ineffective against the virus but wreak havoc on your body. This has happened before with vaccine candidates like RSV or Dengvaxia. It can be deadly. That's not even getting into the issues that may arise from skipping all the GMP/GLP guidelines. They can be tedious but exist for a reason.
passivate 6y ago
Well, a vaccine is a rather vague and generic term. Are you talking about an FDA approved product? An experimental vaccine? A vaccine whose use is contra-indicated for certain people? etc. etc. If I may - perhaps one alternative question is "Can an unapproved vaccine product cause harm?". With that re-wording, the answers become a bit more clear. Yes, chemicals used in the formulation maybe toxic, or the final vaccine might give rise to an auto-immune response, or could induce anaphylaxis in certain people. There could be cell debris/endotoxins that a purification process doesn't remove properly and causes problems. Maybe the vaccine contains an attenuated pathogen that can "revert", etc, etc.

fpgaminer 6y ago

I recall a researcher talking about previous attempts at creating coronavirus vaccines. How they resulted not in immunity, but in training the immune system to _over_ respond when a real infection came along. After a bit of digging I found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/ > An early concern for application of a SARS-CoV vaccine was the experience with other coronavirus infections which induced enhanced disease and immunopathology in animals when challenged with infectious virus I didn't dig deep enough to see if any experimental vaccines caused similar issues, but it definitely appears to be a concern. So yeah, I'd be _very_ cautious with any homebrew vaccine. You might accidentally train your immune system to self destruct when you get exposed to a real SARS-CoV-2. That said, I have little to no experience with biology, so it's entirely possible that radvac based vaccinations have already been demonstrated not to have this particular problem.

ufo 6y ago
A recent attempt at a dengue vaccine faced a similar problem. The most dangerous kind of dengue fever happens when you are infected a second time, by a different variant than you were infected the first time. It turns out that the vaccine ended up having a similar effect as catching dengue for the first time. People who never had dengue and got vaccinated had a lower chance of catching the disease in the future. But if they did catch it there was a higher risk of it being the more dangerous version. The end result is that the vaccine is now only recommended for people who already had dengue before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengvaxia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengvaxia
- Igelau 6y ago
  This is specifically mentioned in the Radvac paper in the section titled "POSSIBLE MECHANISMS OF VACCINE-ENHANCED DISEASE, VACCINE-INDUCED AUTOIMMUNITY, AND MITIGATION STRATEGIES"
buildstatements 6y ago
Homebrew seems unfair: https://radvac.org/a-homepage-section/ https://radvac.org/a-homepage-section/ Trying it is IMHO a risk calculation once you've jumped the "is this credible" bar.

Uhhrrr 6y ago

Super-dumb question: Could you try it out on a rat or a vial of your own blood first?

boyband6666 6y ago
Not a dumb question at all. In medicine we test on two different animal species before it goes close to a human. For a reason.
Symmetry 6y ago
The sites where the body evolves adaptive immune responses like antibodies and killer T cells aren't actually in the blood so that wouldn't produce any result. Rats don't have good ACE2 receptors for getting sick with Covid-19 but ferrets do so you could try testing this on them.

michaelterryio 6y ago

Something like that advice would have been good for Ben Franklin too. And Marie Curie. Some people want to survive and some people want to be heroes.

bawolff 6y ago
Those people tested their theories, did experiments. They didn't just stick something up their nose and assumed it worked with no further investigation.
- Carlton2082 6y ago
  I believe GP is trying to conjure up images of flying kits in thunderstorms or walking around with radioactive material in your pocket.
- concordDance 6y ago
  > They didn't just stick something up their nose and assumed it worked with no further investigation. Good thing that's not what the article author has done, ey?
  - bawolff 6y ago
    But it is. The author has made no attempt to test whether he is immune to covid as of this writing. He talks vaugely about future blood tests, but its unclear what test specificly, if a positive result would actually mean he is immune, if a Negative test would mean he is not, so its basically a test that tells us nothing, and he hasn't even done it yet. If your experiment is not falsifiable, you are not doing science.
    - concordDance 6y ago
      He explicitly has not "assumed it worked", nor has there been "no further investigation" (there has been some and will be more). Both parts of the great grandparent's sentence are false. I don't think saying false things for rhetorical effect is good for the health of hackernews discourse.