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The quest to make a 'contagious' animal vaccine
- chrononaut 5y agoReminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_worm#Worms_with_good_intent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_worm#Worms_with_good_...
- nathanyz 5y agoWaiting for conspiracy theorists to claim that the Omicron variant was the first test of this technology since it was fairly mild and spread so quickly giving most people who caught it some immunity against other COVID strains that are deadlier.
- human 5y agoChecking-in.
- soperj 5y agousername checks out.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nawgz 5y agoI'm pretty unconvinced this thought is well-baked. It's more like, well, whoever thought it is baked. According to the CDC [0], Omicron had 9 deaths per 1000 cases, Delta 13, and original COVID 16. While I admit the hospitalization numbers are slightly more friendly for Omicron, it's clear no work was done to separate vaccination status in this data, and it'd take someone more dedicated than I to argue Omicron really exhibited markedly different characteristic than original COVID to a degree necessary to even make this plausible [0]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e4.htm?s_cid=mm7104e4_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e4.htm?s_cid=mm...
- nathanyz 5y agoI'm with you. If conspiracy theories required well-baked thoughts, then we wouldn't have things like flat earthers. Not sure how well a thought logically makes sense is in any way relevant. What seems more important is how conveniently it can prove a point that the person already is trying to push forward.
- somenameforme 5y agoThere is one major bias in the sort of studies you just linked to that can't really be smarted away. When looking at things like a mortality rate, you need to somehow determine how many people are infected. Imagine there were some weird disease where it was completely asymptomatic in 99% of cases and fatal in 1%. The vast majority of contemporary COVID related studies would claim this disease would have an extremely high mortality rate, far higher than 1%. The reason is because diagnosis is almost never done randomly, but instead relies on different avenues like hospitalization data. So you tend to already be biasing yourself to severe outcomes because milder cases are not going to end up getting diagnosed. In omicron's case this effect has been extreme as things like sewage samples showed dramatically higher rates of of the disease than were being officially reported. In the study you mentioned it determined diagnosis using: "CDC used data from three surveillance systems to assess U.S. disease related to COVID-19 during December 1, 2020–January 15, 2022. COVID-19 aggregate cases and deaths reported to CDC by state and territorial health departments¶ were tabulated by report date.* ED visits with COVID-19 diagnosis codes were obtained from the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP).†† Hospital admissions and inpatient and ICU bed use among patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 were obtained from the Unified Hospital Data Surveillance System." So your numbers are biased to heavily rely on things like hospitalization data, which is going to make the numbers borderline useless for trying to evaluate the overall mortality rate. To be fair I'm not really attacking the study either. Like I said this is a problem that really can't be solved in any way other than an involuntary lottery with mandatory testing + reporting + profiling/classification, which is something I'd expect to see in China, but not the US - for better and for worse.
- bhk 5y agoHere's a more recent study: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/234736/people-with-omicron-variant-less-likely/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/234736/people-with-omicron-v... It says the risk of death with Omicron is 69% lower than with Delta. Among the unvaccinated, the risk is 80% lower than with Delta. These numbers jibe with the statistics on case rates and mortality that we've seen over the last three months, when Omicron has been dominant. I suspect the difference would be much more pronounced if we were to account for asymptomatic cases. Looking at wastewater measurements, which have been a good proxy for (and predictor of) case rates, we see far fewer confirmed cases, relative to virus levels, during the Omicron phase than we saw during prior variants. The ratio of deaths to wastewater virus levels is about 1/10th of what it was with Delta.
- nomdep 5y agoAnd don’t forget the fact that is a direct mutation of the early strain of the virus, instead of the other variations that mutated from the previous one. Maybe a coincidence, maybe not.
- ada1981 5y agoYes.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- scythe 5y agoSimilar arguments were made months ago: https://twitter.com/stevensalzberg1/status/1479257537920835592 https://twitter.com/stevensalzberg1/status/14792575379208355...
- gfodor 5y agoProposing a theory is not the same thing as making a claim. But disparaging people as conspiracy theorists without first understanding the theory doesn't do much but slow down science. There is/was plenty of reason to think omicron had a lab origin.
- alexfromapex 5y agoIt is my personal opinion that because of the extremely high potential for abuse, all delivery mechanisms should be designed to require the host's consent. I would also have to agree that bodily autonomy is a fundamental human right.
- babyshake 5y agoWould it be possible for these contagious vaccines to require some secondary medication be taken to be activated? Ideally something with no active ingredients that could be sold OTC at pharmacies.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kwhitefoot 5y ago> Ideally something with no active ingredients that could be sold OTC at pharmacies. Which could then be added to tap water, soft drinks, added as a fortifying agent in flour and bread. That would surely be the response from conspiracy theorists, except of course that they would replace could then be with already is.
- hanselot 5y ago
- im3w1l 5y agoThis technique could be used to make extremely frightening bioweapons - think a disease that has no symptoms as it spreads, allowing it to fly under the radar, until a certain condition is met at which point it kills everyone at the same time. Imo it must be considered extremely taboo. Moreso than just contagious vaccines.
- jayd16 5y agoThe article is about inoculating wildlife so host consent is a tall order there. I guess that would make this unfeasible in your view?
- boomchinolo78 5y agoThe main problem is the reductionist approach people try to apply to biology, trying to gloss over the combinatorial complexity of actual living organisms, their biochemistry and their genetics.
- sebastianconcpt 5y agoThere are one million reasons why that's a no-no. Here is one: the difference between medicine and poison is dosage. Each individual requires its own dosage. This idea is talking about a forced universal. But nobody has the right to poison an individual, not to mention a minority, in the name of the good for everybody. It would be a false good forced with an illegitimate right. In other words, necessary fraud. And we didn't even started about the side effects.
- fsh 5y agoThe article is about animals.
- yonaguska 5y agoThat's an interesting point that should have been considered with the covid vaccines. Previous infection should have had some bearing on the dosage one was compelled to take. As should adverse reactions to the first dose. A vaccine injured friend is still trying to get an exemption in the state of California for work. She wants to work in healthcare, and had a severe adverse reaction to the second shot, but no doctor will give her an exemption for fear of being investigated by medical boards.
- teknopurge 5y agoThere is such a thing as a bad idea; this is a bad idea.
- hirundo 5y agoIt is difficult for me to imagine trusting the public health apparatus enough to feel that informed consent to medical procedures is a vestigal, dangerous liberty.
- asperous 5y agoSad to see commenters here not reading the article and just reacting to the headline. The article is about contagious vaccines for animals for diseases that do not currently spread to humans.
- tomrod 5y ago.. That do not spread to humans yet, surely?
- pohl 5y agoThe word "currently" serves the same function as "yet" here, doesn't it?
- _Microft 5y agoThe whole topic sounds very risky to me indeed but they seemed to have been very careful with their choice of virus: "Although the evolutionary factors underlying CMV’s [cytomegalovirus] species-specificity are not entirely known, there has never been a documented case in the wild or in a laboratory of a successful cross-species CMV infection."
- tomrod 5y agoEh, but the risk that once the knowledge is published and the tools are available to the public we now have a novel and frankly horrible way to once again murder the biosphere seems high, no?
- brenns10 5y agoTo be fair, the article is walled off behind a mailing list signup CTA. Those of us not interested in signing up can't read it anyway.
- striking 5y agoIf folks haven't read the article, why should they try and comment on it?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- calebm 5y agoThis sounds like a good contender for the cause of human extinction.
- slackfan 5y agoLooking forward to biotech companies doing this anyways, having a good number of people die due to allergic reactions, and then society shrugging and going 'but it's for the greater good, and if you don't agree you're a conspiracy theorist'.
- datameta 5y agoHow many people have died from allergic reaction to covid vaccine?
- juanani 5y ago
- slackfan 5y agoWhat does the covid vaccine have to do with anything? Anaphylactic reactions to vaccines are common, and are an assumed side effect of any vaccine. Multiply the entire population of the world by 1%, which is a normal assumed rate of an allergic reaction to most vaccines, and then figure out how many people don't have ready access to epi pens (a temporary fix that gives you an hour or so to get to the hospital, and the price of which has been significantly jacked up by the pharmaceutical monopoly), or live anywhere where an ambulance response time is >20 minutes (most major US cities). And then you have a fun little number that's expendable for the common good, so to speak. No, it isn't large, but it sure as all hell isn't 0.
- tux3 5y agoYou're confidently incorrect. Allergic reactions to vaccine are not 1 in a hundred, they're generally closer to 1 in a million.
- slackfan 5y agoLooking at the data from the CDC, (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7002e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7002e1.htm) the most recent, best tested, most safe vaccine that we have has a rate of 11,1/million, so we're both off by a factor of ten in opposite directions. ;)
- transfire 5y agoHow about working on actual cures instead of vaccines. (Of course the problem is that cures are antithetical to Capitalism.)
- dane-pgp 5y agoHave you heard of the expression "Prevention is better than cure"? I'd be interested to know how well you think it applies to vaccines.
- transfire 5y agoWhomever said that didn’t have the disease. The problem with preventatives is that they can proliferate on marginal effectiveness. In fact they are more lucrative that way.
- gameswithgo 5y ago
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- joshuaissac 5y agoThe live attenuated oral polio vaccine is contagious and has already been widely used in many countries.
- jinpa_zangpo 5y ago"The oral polio vaccine that's used primarily in low- and middle-income countries - it's been the workhorse of this global effort to eradicate polio. But it is a live vaccine. It's cheap. It's easy to administer. "However, this live vaccine is continued to be used worldwide. And while you're doing that, some of that vaccine has gotten out into the world. And it's mutated. It starts circulating again, just like regular polio. But early on, it's just - it's still a vaccine. It's not dangerous. And then slowly, it sort of regains strength. And they're finding they can actually genetically see this - that scientists can actually trace it back directly to the vaccine. And now these vaccine-linked cases are actually causing more cases of paralysis each year than actual traditional - what scientists call wild polio." https://www.npr.org/2019/11/16/780068006/how-the-oral-polio-vaccine-can-cause-polio https://www.npr.org/2019/11/16/780068006/how-the-oral-polio-...
- btown 5y agoAn important note from that article, lest the quote out of context feed any anti-vaccine fears: SIMON: Now, we should underscore, Jason, this is not the version of the vaccine that's given to youngsters in the United States. BEAUBIEN: Yeah. SIMON: Why are other countries still using it? BEAUBIEN: Right. So in the United States and in Europe and other countries like that, it - we're using an injectable vaccine, which is a dead vaccine. It is not a live virus, and it cannot cause polio. So that should not at all be a concern. The issue, however, is that it's an injection that has to be given. It's given four times between the ages of 2 months and 7 years. So just administering it is difficult. And just frankly, there is not enough global stockpile of that vaccine to vaccinate all of the children around the world, you know, four times over the course of their childhood.
- ComradePhil 5y agoIt has also mutated to act like the wild-type virus and cause polio. https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/poliomyelitis-vaccine-derived-polio https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/pol... A few years ago, there were more polio cases caused by vaccine-derived virus than the wild virus.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- TrevorJ 5y agoA plausible sci-fi story could probably be written about some ancient high-tech earth civilization doing this to rid themselves of bacterial infections and accidently inventing viruses.
- wcarss 5y agoor... of viruses being von neumann probes, possibly corrupted from some original purpose like "find, adapt to, and take over hosts, then build signals"
- adhesive_wombat 5y agoSomething like this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-08-08 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-08-08
- otikik 5y agoThey should implement those new viruses in Rust, so they are type safe and mostly inmutable. Except for the unsafe parts
- dang 5y agoAll: please don't post shallow, predictable, reactive comments*. Those lead to boring threads. We want reflective responses, not reflexive ones: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=reflective%20reflex%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... For this it would probably be a good idea to read the article. * (I posted this because at the time, there were a ton of those in the thread, making the thread bad, and leading to offtopic complaints like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30758587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30758587.)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jovial_cavalier 5y ago"Hmm.. I don't like what nature is doing. I think I will fuck with it." What could possibly go wrong?
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- scythe 5y ago>Advocates for self-spreading vaccines say they could revolutionize public health by disrupting infectious disease spread among animals before a zoonotic spillover could occur—potentially preventing the next pandemic. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense. You have no (or at least not much) idea which disease is going to spill over from animals into humans. Unless the plan is to eliminate all diseases — which sounds dangerous — this technology might be applied to contain known zoonotic diseases (rabies and Lyme seem particularly notable) but seems unlikely to stop new ones. >CMVs also infect a host for life, induce strong immune responses yet do not often cause severe disease. Aren't these... like... uh, lemme check... >A substantial portion of the immune system is involved in continuously controlling CMV, which drains the resources of the immune system.[41][42] Death rates from infectious disease accelerate with age,[43] and CMV infection correlates with reduced effectiveness of vaccination.[44] Persons with the highest levels of CMV antibodies have a much higher risk of death from all causes compared with persons having few or no antibodies.[45][46] ...bad? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_betaherpesvirus_5#Pathogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_betaherpesvirus_5#Pathog...
- fsh 5y agoThe article is about animal CMVs, not human CMV. "Nuismer and Redwood both say it is highly unlikely that a CMV-based vaccine could ever jump species given the virus’s biology. Although the evolutionary factors underlying CMV’s species-specificity are not entirely known, there has never been a documented case in the wild or in a laboratory of a successful cross-species CMV infection."
- scythe 5y agoThe point isn't that it could jump to humans. The point is that the "less harmful" CMV carrier produces a lifelong infection with deleterious consequences for the health of the host. That could be a problem even if it never jumps to humans.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- giantg2 5y agoPaywall
- Zenst 5y agoCertainly a good approach if done right, and been mindful with the whole looming birdflu virus and it's spread amongst birds that will lead to an increased risk of human tranfer and equally mutation that enable that cross-over more easily. However, a thought about how antibiotics got used in animals and in many respects we have to admit - abused in their usage leading to decrease in how effective they are. So with that history in mind, certainly be prudent to vist that whole aspect cure/exposure. Maybe that early intevention at source may be better and I suspect it may well be as shifting the zoological landscape of fighting a virus's at a stage prior to human exposure. But that may well just see over time, more robust virus's that rise up thru evolutionary exposure to any vacine we put into the wild. So many aspects to look at. Just the whole leasons from antibiotics into animals and how that went is something we need to be very mindful of in not repeating as the possibility of solving a problem in the short/middle term and creating a larger threat longer term is something that can not be rulled out. One thing that I hope they do look at is having some kill-switch method, be it anothe virus that attacks the one they release. A fail safe.
- Uptrenda 5y agoThis would be like lvl 99 difficulty to get any kind of approval by researchers though and if it did get approved it would probably cause a political shit storm. People are now scared of both vaccines and viruses. They want to combine both into one? YYYikes. Tough sell!
- zivkovicp 5y agoProbably not, most people will let fear, ethical considerations, etc. take a back seat if they are given an opportunity to work on truly "world-changing" research and technology, and politicians can be ea$ily per$uaded with the right incentive$. I don't want to imply that it would be unethical either, because I haven't thought about it and just don't know; and while it seems like taking the cynical view is prudent at the moment, ultimately I imagine we (humans) will succeed in making these ideas a reality, but it will no doubt be a bumpy road.
- nyxtom 5y agoOur hubris knows no bounds
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI remember reading a Tracy Hickman story (I think it was called The Immortals). Anyway, the gist was that there was this awful disease, going 'round, called "VCIDS," or something like that. It was similar to AIDS. The government was rounding up people with this disease, jamming them into concentration camps, and incinerating them with FAE bombs. Turns out, the disease was caused by a (government-created) bioengineered virus that was created to counteract AIDS.
- 3np 5y agoSimilarly relevant fiction: UK TV-series Utopia (2014, not the terrible Amazon remake)
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.ph/viPhp https://archive.ph/viPhp
- anamax 5y agoGreat. The plot-driver of the most recent Bond film is somewhat real.
- textcortex 5y agoThat sounds like the start of a zombie movie.
- elromulous 5y agoTo all those commenting on how terrible of an idea this is: what if it includes a kill switch that's fundamental to its existence? (Where kill switch is eg. a vaccine to the vaccine as a break glass option)
- dvh1990 5y agoJurassic Park, while a fictional story, illustrates the problem beautifully. "Life finds a way".
- lb0 5y agoBecause when the original thing didn't work as intended (with which we were pretty sure, otherwise we'd never done it cause of the risks) then the kill switch will work 100% as intended for sure, and also have no unexpected side effects?
- tempestn 5y agoNothing is 100% without risk, but each layer of safeguard reduces it. The standard shouldn't be zero risk, but rather weighing the risk of one (in)action vs another. To draw an analogy to the obvious vaccine-related situation on everyone's minds, no one who knows what they're talking about would say that mRNA covid vaccines are 100% safe. But they are far, far safer than not having a vaccine, so it makes sense to accept that risk. I'm not saying the same is necessarily true of any given 'contagious' animal vaccine, but it could be.
- lb0 5y agoTrue. > I'm not saying the same is necessarily true of any given 'contagious' animal vaccine, but it could be. That's what I think I wanted to say.. there is a huge difference to anything self-spreading / replicating - be it self-reproducing true AI nano robotors, simple things as self replicating plants (and here we have already a dozen examples of promised containment not working with bad consequences involved - oops) or 'contagious' vaccines.. it needs to be magnitudes safer, not? So if as an individual there is a minimal risk to my health by taking a mRNA vaccine, I can decide for myself vs the risk of infection or consequences, or also let my doctor decide. It is also easy to run "trials" among the population for studies. But if there is a risk to our complete biosphere, that is just very different for the risk calculation?
- ComradePhil 5y ago
- pvaldes 5y agoWe must take in mind that National Geographic is basically a photo and travels journal depending on advertising, not a fully scientific journal. They have been caught before "enhancing" the history when convenient to support the images. Thus, to discusse the original source would be a safer option. The idea is too close to "lets enhance Coronaviruses to made it more contagious and see what happens" to feel comfortable. We don't ever know how many [1] ebola relatives we have in the west and how that could interact here. Changing our behavior respect to food safety (i.e learning how to sterilize somehow vine sap palms or banning to market bats to use it as food) could be a safer, less unpredictable solution. [1] We know about one species native from Spain at least
- technothrasher 5y ago> We must take in mind that National Geographic is basically a photo and travels journal depending on advertising, not a fully scientific journal. Since all I really see of National Geographic these days are the 'special issues' at the supermarket checkout going on about the life of Jesus or the latest alternative healing trends, I basically ignore them now. They've had a very sad fall from grace.
- jsnodlin 5y agoThat’s not true. I recently restarted my subscription to NG and NG History and they have detailed, in depth long form articles that aren’t just pop fluff.
- theknocker 5y ago