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Could One Shot Kill the Flu?
- Valmar 5y agoNo, it most certainly can't. The flu, like all viruses like it, mutates quite rapidly. It'll just mutate in response to the "one shot" to get around it. So, "one shot" will turn into multiple... oh wait... we do that every flu season, and it's a never-ending game of cat and mouse.
- tdrdt 5y agoI think this is the right answer. Like Corona it mutates too fast. So you need to vaccinate all living creatures that can transmit the virus all at the same time. Another way to get rid of it is to go into a global 100% lockdown for two weeks at the same time. Again animals that can transmit it included.
- hunterb123 5y agoCoronaviruses spread easily indoors, people need necessities eventually and will spread it in some form. Lockdowns don't work and never worked for this virus, they cause worse damage than the disease, lowers immune systems, destroys the economy and livelihoods, and they are authoritarian. Sunlight and open air is a better baseline.
- ceejayoz 5y agoIt's not outrageous to think that mRNA vaccines may allow for more specific targeting in a way that may be less subject to immune escape than previous approaches.
- hunterb123 5y agoThe specific targeting makes it easier to allude the vaccine as only a small part of it has to mutate. For example, natural immunity recognizes the entire coronavirus, not just the spike as the covid vaccine does. There was a study that natural immunity was more effective against the virus and variants because of this. You could however have yearly subscription shots like we do now, just mRNA flavored that target the new strains, but there are hundreds. I don't see the advantage mRNA would have over traditional vaccines for the flu, but for something like cancer or HIV it seems promising. Doing something your immune system can't do by itself.
- ceejayoz 5y ago> The specific targeting makes it easier to allude the vaccine as only a small part of it has to mutate. Nothing says an mRNA vaccine can't express more than one protein. That said, I'm talking more about being able to target a portion of the virus that's more fragile than others - somewhere a mutation is likely to make the virus useless if a mutation occurs there. (The ability to rapidly adjust for mutations is a bonus, too. I'm hoping we get to a regulatory regime eventually where they can tweak overnight and produce fairly locally.) > There was a study that natural immunity was more effective against the virus and variants because of this. There's information in the other direction now. https://news.yahoo.com/vaccine-confers-better-protection-than-natural-immunity-cdc-finds-201511956.html https://news.yahoo.com/vaccine-confers-better-protection-tha...
- newaccount74 5y ago> I'm hoping we get to a regulatory regime eventually where they can tweak overnight and produce fairly locally. I don't think that's likely. Even if a scientist was able to adjust a vaccine overnight, you'd still need to do a clinical trial to verify that the vaccine doesn't accidentally target something that it shouldn't.
- hunterb123 5y ago> There's information in the other direction now. https://news.yahoo.com/vaccine-confers-better-protection-tha https://news.yahoo.com/vaccine-confers-better-protection-tha... The way they conducted that study was terrible, read the qualifications and the limitations in the discussion at the bottom. Personally the Israeli study looks a lot more sound.
- spurgu 5y agoHere's an analysis going over the two: https://brownstone.org/articles/a-review-and-autopsy-of-two-covid-immunity-studies/ https://brownstone.org/articles/a-review-and-autopsy-of-two-...
- 5y ago
- onychomys 5y agoThe entire article is about how they're addressing (or at least trying to address) this exact problem.
- TuringNYC 5y ago>> The flu, like all viruses like it, mutates quite rapidly. >> It'll just mutate in response to the "one shot" to get around it. Curious how we manage to so effectively vaccinate against Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Smallpox, Chickenpox but cannot seem to do so against the Flu? Why dont those other viruses mutate rapidly to get around vaccines?
- Vecr 5y agoMeasles can't create an escape mutant, or at least it's so hard that centuries of immunity exerting pressure and gain of function experiments can't produce one. Flu recombines and reassorts like crazy. It has RNA segments (the media likes to call them "chromosomes", but they are not) that are pretty much interchangeable, so if you or a non-human animal gets infected with multiple strains, you can get a virus with a hybrid of those segments quite often. I think rubella actually can escape. The chickenpox vaccine mostly just suppresses symptoms. The smallpox vaccine is just another orthopoxvirus, so you get pretty good cross reactive immunity.
- hunterb123 5y agohttps://discoverysedge.mayo.edu/2021/03/30/researchers-clarify-why-measles-doesnt-evolve-to-escape-immunity/ https://discoverysedge.mayo.edu/2021/03/30/researchers-clari... > The data presented in the manuscript show that, to escape immunity, a disease-causing, or pathogenic, measles virus would need to generate a large set of mutations — simultaneously — affecting multiple parts of the surface proteins. Simultaneous disruption of at least five antibody targets is required before the virus starts developing resistance to the diversity of neutralizing antibodies in the bloodstream.
- krisrm 5y agoThis is extremely impressive research. I think if COVID has taught us anything though, even an array of available, safe, preventative medicine is not convincing for some people.
- imperio59 5y agoIf only it worked for more than a few months at a time it might be worth it for more people. As of right now natural immunity is still much much better protection for those who have already recovered from COVID.
- encryptluks2 5y ago[flagged]
- Mvandenbergh 5y agoThis is not the case. The protection from vaccination is both higher and more consistent than natural infection with Covid-19. The very best immunity observed is in people who have been naturally infected and subsequently vaccinated (I don't think any studies yet out that have tested the other way around). Those people produced antibodies which showed strong in vitro activity against even highly mutated and apparently immuno-evasive mutants and against other known coronaviruses. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04005-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04005-0
- sjg007 5y agoI am impressed at the amount and spread of disinformation. Absolutely amazing that world wide we have zero critical thinking skills at the population level. We allow ourselves to be controlled by a minority of very loud idiots.
- airstrike 5y ago"No", I suppose. From the last paragraph: > For now, we remain on the cusp of a breakthrough that could neutralize our foe. A few months after my tour, BiondVax announced the results of its Phase III trial. The researchers found that, in a randomized, double-blind test involving more than twelve thousand people, M-001 did not significantly reduce the incidence or severity of the flu. “For now, the M-001 vaccine candidate remains on the shelf, and we may return to it in the future,” Joshua Phillipson, the company’s director of business development and investor relations, told me.
- Perceval 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
- sdenton4 5y agoThere's a lot more going on than this pull quote suggests. Mosaic vaccines sounds like they're still in the running, and the discovery of people with universal immunity suggests the problem may be solvable.
- sjaak 5y ago> Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. I'm curious what (if anything) the unintended consequences of this would be.
- colechristensen 5y agoYou evolved to get sick. Autoimmune diseases (your immune system gets bored and starts attacking you) can be caused by living in a too sterile environment.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- odyssey7 5y agoIs this no longer an unproven hypothesis? My impression was there’s just a lot of correlation evidence.
- tux3 5y agoHaving just recently watched the OME videos on Immunology, at least they still think this is an unproven hypothesis. What the consensus seems to be is that autoimmune diseases are a combination of genetic and environmental factors. Wikipedia claims there is "significant evidence" for the Hygiene hypothesis, but says disagreement still exists, no definitive proof.
- martin_a 5y agoMy brother has served for around 9 years on a warship. Modern warships are using pressurized cabins to keep chemical weapons and alike out. He has developed allergies against cat hairs, dust and other stuff in these times. Prolonged times out on the sea with high levels of cleanliness (is that a word? non-native speaker here) might have played their fair share in this. edit: Maybe another point or just a corelation for this thesis.
- 5y ago
- Saint_Genet 5y agoEven if such a vaccine was developed, our current reality shows that not enough people would take it.
- encryptluks2 5y agoThe good ol hypothetical shot. If only people would take this shot that doesn't exist yet.
- hammock 5y agoWe don't have a vaccine that reliably kills coronavirus in "one shot", so we don't really know. For the vaccines that work, uptake is much higher than that for the covid jab.
- icehawk 5y agoWell yes. We don't have a vaccine that kills coronavirus, because vaccines don't "kill" anything.
- hammock 5y agoObviously. I'm using "kill" colloquially, in the same way the article title does. No need to be pedantic.
- merpnderp 5y agoNeither do forks put food in your mouth, yet no one would quibble with saying they do. What's with the purposefully uncharitable reading of people's points on Hacker News lately? Is the last bastion of rational polite discussion on the internet going away?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- onychomys 5y agoThat uptake is high in large part because we require them to go to public school. And, let's not forget, the vast majority of childhood vaccines are multidose: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolescent.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolesc...
- corobo 5y agoIf it could the title wouldn't have a question mark on the end, you'd get more clicks with a definitive title and newspapers wouldn't waste that
- jedimastert 5y ago> you'd get more clicks with a definitive title Unfortunately, demonstrably not true.
- carlmr 5y agoFrom context clearly a mistake when writing.
- vikingerik 5y agoBy definitive, he meant if it were truthful. But since it isn't, they get more clicks with the false headline, since the truthful one would simply say that the flu isn't stopped, which isn't a substantive story. As we know, a question mark in a headline indicates that it's false, since if it were true, they'd just write the headline without the question mark.
- corobo 5y ago> if it were truthful Aye exactly. The priority is legally covered, clicks. This is also why you see "allegedly" even when something isn't actually alleged haha "The man was allegedly murdered blah blah".. no, the man was murdered, we know this for fact. There is a body with 20 knives in it. The suspect allegedly did it, though. Journalism lmao
- toyg 5y ago[flagged]
- samschooler 5y ago[flagged]
- verisimi 5y agoPerhaps this is an unfashionable opinion, but if you think that 'flu' is a process whereby your body gets rid of toxins, why would you want to stop it? Rather than repress the symptoms, instead you would want to indulge it in order to get rid of as many toxins as your body is capable of flushing out in sweat, phlegm, mucus, etc.
- yosito 5y agoYeah, if by "flu" you mean "not flu", then anything you say is possible.
- macintux 5y ago> if you think that 'flu' is a process whereby your body gets rid of toxins I hesitate to ask, but who thinks that?
- verisimi 5y agoThere are alternative explanations - such as the terrain theory. Eg if you eat something bad, you are sick as your body gets rid of the thing that made you ill. The process of detoxing is similarly, but on a longer timescale. As you accumulate toxins, your body then gets rid of them in ways that we characterise as disease - eg sweating, phlegm, etc. I think we are all aware of fasting, juicing, etc as other means of detoxing - ie getting rid of accumulated poisons that are in our system. I'm saying fever, etc is a natural system that our bodies undertake to heal ourselves.
- ch4s3 5y agoDetoxing is nonsense. A grade school level understanding of liver and kidney function easily shows these ideas as ridiculous. If there were every-day toxins that accumulated in your body, they'd show up in blood serum or tissue samples, but I don't see anyone putting forth these detox "treatments" trying to even research that. Very few things like PFAS chemicals and heavy metals linger in human bodies, that's the who function of the liver, to filter out and dispose of random detritus you body can't use. * Edit: This is straight up germ theory denialism and utter bullshit.
- Vecr 5y agoProbably not. Even if you got a "universal" influenza A vaccine, enough is known about the type of immune response required that there's no way it could remain protective for more than a few months. If your hemagglutination inhibition titer gets too low (and it does, within months), you are no longer protected against infection and disease. Sure, you still have T-cells, but getting an actual influenza A infection is the only real way of getting enough of those. The live attenuated vaccine works somewhat for that in children, but it's not optimal.
- nodemaker 5y agoNot an epidemiologist. But I also find myself saying this sometimes in context of covid. An actual infection is the only way to get any kind of long term immunity (the next best alternative being booster shots every year). If youre young, healthy, have access to high quality care and without any preconditions this could be a viable strategy for you. (Serious disclaimer - Please get vaccinated first before going down this road). Alas i find myself to be the minority in this argument. Edit. Reference https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v... Edit. I agree its not a safe strategy. Kids please dont do this at home. Consult a doctor, epidemiologist etc.
- hbrav 5y agoSerious question: if you're not an epidemiologist, why do you tell people this? Do you have some research you can link to that actually supports your assertion?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- motohagiography 5y agoEpidemiologists are mainly social scientists and policy analysts, and not biologists or MD's anyway, as then they would be infectious disease specialists. From what I've seen, most data scientists could provide equal or better analysis.
- guilhas 5y agoHope not. Flu exists for a reason, if we believe in evolution, probably more valid than the sick and old we might save by getting rid of it
- Aloha 5y agoI suspect we're going to find in the future that Influenza will have been replaced by a variant of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), the disease spreads the same way, and outcompetes the flu in every way, furthermore, our public health response for CoV-2 (Masking, Quarantine, Isolation, etc) also impacts flu (probably disproportionately), and flu unlike CoV-2 is truly seasonal. So we may have eradicated flu, by simply replacing it with a much more fearsome illness.
- foxhop 5y agoThis is our 5th endemic coronavirus. They tends to mutate into less lethal more viral over time. Check out the newest varient out of South Africa which looks promising for a healthy future.
- garmaine 5y agoPrior coronavirus species tend to evolve toward non-lethality because their peak transmission coincides with peak symptoms. Covid-19 is not like that and so has no evolutionary push towards non-lethality. A variant of COVID as lethal as MERS would spread just as well since carriers are asymptomatic most of the time they are infecting others.
- valenaut 5y agoI agree that asymptomatic transmission reduces this pressure, but symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 carriers are often still contagious, and there is more public will to enact extreme precautions for more lethal illnesses. So there is still some evolutionary benefit for lower lethality.
- Aloha 5y agoI'm trying not to read too much into the new variant yet, there isnt enough data to form a meaningful conclusion. But hope springs eternal. ;-)
- christkv 5y agoI can tell you right now from having gone through 2 colds in the last month due to kids, that competition in the marketplace of cold viruses is working. lots of competing products to acquire.
- smnrchrds 5y ago> After the swine flu’s relatively harmless nature became apparent, many people asked if the alarm it provoked had been warranted. A Swiss survey found that trust in institutions had decreased. Some scientists and officials accused the World Health Organization of stirring up a “faked” pandemic to justify its budget. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
- magneticnorth 5y ago[flagged]