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If this turns out to work as promised, in a idealistic universe, Moderna gets a big influx of money from all countries in the world and they immediately publish details and surrender any patent allowing the treatment to be produced worldwide and be affordable for everyone.
i love this idea. worldbank or imf or gates or thiel foundation compensates the company for opening the patent for the benefit of humanity.
imagine the conspiracy theories though...
"No you can't just fight cancer this way, that's cheating, drink this completely natural juice made from pulped fruits and vegetables that have been growing separately for 80 million years."
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What incentive do Gates or Thiel have for doing that?
I imagine an individually customized vaccine would still be expensive even if produced at-cost. Things get cheap when they can be mass produced.
From what they said it doesn't actually need to be individually produced. Rather, there are 34 possible targets, which ones are actually used depends on the patient's cancer. You aim at the targets which the tumor expresses, the others would simply cause side effects for no gain.
Thus, instead of custom manufacture your distribution system is 34 separate compounds, the patient receives whatever combination would be best for their tumor. Probably not viable at the ordinary pharmacy level, but viable at the cancer center level or a compounding pharmacy.
We have seen how that went during covid, so dont i wouldn't hold your breath on it. The only hope is competition from China and others initiating a race to the bottom.
Maybe in 30 years when all the patents have expired.
I mean, it seemed like it worked pretty well with covid. Vaccine was produced very quickly, and in most countries was free.
It's not a general vaccine , but a tailored one aimed at people being treated for cancers that have a high risk of it coming back. So it's not something that can just be handed out to everyone.
I agree though if a general vaccine is created.
I'm really looking forward to a future where this and heart disease or just merely annoying.
> a big influx of money from all countries
We don’t know how valuable this tech is. It could be worth trillions. It could be niche. Risk sharing, not cost, is the currency of deal making.
> immediately publish details and surrender any patent
mRNA vaccine production methods are tough, e.g. Moderna’s encapsulation technology. Add to that the personalisation required for these treatments, and we’re still far from economies of scale.
> mRNA vaccine production methods are tough, e.g. Moderna’s encapsulation technology
…and were invented with publicly-funded research that they’ve now privatized, resulting in large death tolls from vaccine inequity in poor countries.
> were invented with publicly-funded research that they’ve now privatized, resulting in large death tolls from vaccine inequity in poor countries
This is an odd complaint for this circumstance.
Those poor countries didn’t materially fund these vaccines’ development. And production was fundamentally constrained; nations entered into bidding wars to secure them. In the end, geopolitics dictated which vaccines—if any—poor people got. Covid vaccines were distributed through non-market channels.
It’s not at all odd because we learned the disastrous, widespread international consequences, of privatization of HIV/AIDS treatments in the 90s and 2000s. Treatments were developed with publicly-funded research in rich western countries, hoarded for profit at the cost of mass death in the developing world, which led to increased severity of the disease from unchecked spread, which then spread back into the countries that hoarded them. There is nothing more fundamentally stupid than trying to manage global pandemics with nationalism and IP restrictions in a world with interconnected economies and constant international travel.
Free market would automatically cause a big influx of money.
A "big influx of money from all countries in the world" - if from governments themselves and not individual citizens buying - would in fact be a proof point against its claimed effectiveness, if forcing the otherwise free market (via easily-commonly captured political-government-institutional channels) is what's required to drive funding towards it, e.g. regulatory capture to provide profits when they may not actually be deserved-warranted - say by trying to get approval for a fraudulently approved product, e.g. "... the 26 pharmaceutical companies paid some $33 billion in fines during the 13-year period. The top 11 alone accounted for $28.8 billion" - https://www.pharmaceuticalprocessingworld.com/gsk-pfizer-and-jj-among-the-most-fined-drug-companies-according-to-study/ https://www.pharmaceuticalprocessingworld.com/gsk-pfizer-and...
And arguably this is just the tip of the iceberg and the industry hasn't been held accountable for most of their fraud since the industrial complex formed.
This isn't just a problem with the pharmaceutical industry but with clearly corrupt-captured regulators like the FDA - who allowed this fraud to happen to begin with, missing or not checking into whatever lies were presented for the fraud to occur and the products to make it to market.
And that's why headlines like "Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than expected" should be taken with extreme skepticism.
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Past mRNA cancer vaccines haven't failed to get through trials because of ineffectiveness. They failed clinical trials in the 2000s and 2010s due to their side effects being too bad. The side effects of mRNA vaccines are getting less and less severe over the years, but the proof of the pudding will come in phase III for this vaccine, as with all the other ones.
The headline borders on clickbait. The topic is a skin cancer vaccine, not a cancer vaccine.
Should this really be called a “vaccine”? I feel like that is going to give people the wrong impression about what it does. I think labelling it gene therapy, immune therapy, or something like that would be closer to what it actually does.
Also really interested to see if people will need and/or benefit from periodic re-treatment. I guess they can figure that part out if it makes it to market.
Yes the word 'vaccine' seems misleading to me as well, as people tend to think of vaccinations as ways to prevent contagious illness. I think immune therapy is a much better term.
Yes this should really be called a vaccine. A vaccine is a preparation that stimulates the body's immune response against diseases. For example, a specific vaccine injection (such as a flu shot) can boost the body's own immune system to help protect against a specific disease (such as the year's flu variant).
All previous vaccines were aimed at preventing infectious diseases. None of them are (primarily) indicated for preventing recurrence of a non-infectious disease. Whether it meets the technical definition or not, we can probably agree this is fundamentally different to all other vaccines.
Also, since no other vaccines are custom to each patient, using the term “vaccine” could cause confusion. Do we really want to give people the idea that they can be “vaccinated against melanoma” when the reality is that they can receive a treatment to prevent their specific melanoma, which they have to have already had, from recurring? It seems laden with confusion. Personally, I’ll just call it immunotherapy.
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mRNA can be used as indirect vaccine, by manipulating cellular factories to produce a foreign object that draws the attention of the immune system.
There is no known pathway of persistence in this mechanism, and there is good reason to believe such a mechanism cannot exist as it would be a highly versatile attack vector and viruses would have evolved to be much more virulent by using it. Retroviruses do complex work to infiltrate the DNA repository of a cell, if all it took is to drop some mRNA it would have been exploited and 'patched' a billion years ago.
And if some of that mRNA happens to land in cells that don't readily get replaced, like heart muscle, what happens next?
>There is no known pathway of persistence in this mechanism
No known, and published in a paper, pathway. Engineering is about using things in practice we don't yet understand. They didn't know why suspension bridges kept falling down, so they just used a "safety factor" to decide how much to over-build a structure vs its theoretical capacity.
We have no idea what the long term consequences are of this gene treatment. It's not possible to have 10 year or more data on something just cooked up in the past 3 years.
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It wasn't free, just paid by the government means tax money means money that's now missing for other things in countries like Germany because they still are fixated on the 60% debt ceiling based on an Excel error.
It was a bit expensive, and it took some time to ramp up production. Still impressive, though.
The problem was that almost everyone who got the vaccine also caught the disease.
I'm not sure that patent is worth much to be honest. The general approach has been known and published in research circles for the better part of a decade before the patent was filed, and actually training a machine learning system in that way that gives usable predictions is still an open problem afaik.
We saw the same in case with covid too. But, ..., the main issue is that those poor countries have increased their population by many orders of magnitude and this makes large scale support incredibly hard. Imagine if African population was still around 200 million people as it was in 50s instead on 1.5 billion it is today.
IMO they resulted in massive reductions of death across the world. In a world where pharma companies needed to surrender their IP if it was too useful, Moderna wouldn't have gotten funded to pioneer this new and difficult technology, and mRNA vaccines simply wouldn't exist.
Having publicly-funded research doesn't mean you can ignore profit either — the public funding for mRNA was that the initial research was done at UPenn, which receives NIH grants. But large research universities don't exist on public funding alone — they license the patents they hold to companies to develop them, which is a huge part of their revenue. For the mRNA royalties alone, in 2022 UPenn received over $750 million, which exceeded the total of all of UPenn's NIH grants for that year combined. Even in smaller-revenue years like 2020, public funding represents significantly less than half of UPenn's revenue sources. Take away UPenn's ability to monetize their research, and their ability to fund the fundamental research goes down too.
In my view the default isn't that diseases cure themselves. The default is people die. If pushing forward the state of the art of vaccine tech didn't need money in order to be built, what was stopping anyone else from doing it? And if it does need money, well... Then it needs to be well-funded, meaning it needs to show the potential for profit. I don't think charity has proven an excellent model for funding advanced scientific development of this kind.
A long wall of obfuscation and pharmaceutical industry apologetics that can be trivially dismissed by simply pointing at myriad other vaccines that were also publicly-funded, are not constrained by IP, and saved millions of lives.
Your last point is also hysterical because yes, the research needs massive investment, the state provides it, and then allows private companies to run off with it and charge them again for the very thing they made possible in the first place. It’s about as insane and corrupt as could ever be imagined.
I’ll also highlight that Cuba developed a highly effective COVID vaccine as a poor country, under extreme sanctions, and shared hundreds of millions of doses to other poor countries, which further demonstrates what you claim to be untrue.
> Your last point is also hysterical because yes, the research needs massive investment, the state provides it, and then allows private companies to run off with it
A research is only the beginning. It usually takes many years and lot of investment to bring a drug to the market. There is also high risk that none of the investment will be recouped. That’s the role that private companies can do well. They don’t just “run off with it”.
ASML, for example, benefits heavily from EUV research done in the US with public fund. Yet you can’t say they ran off with it. They invested heavily, and it took them many years to perfect the technology.
Using existing vaccine tech isn't the same as developing entirely new technology, which mRNA is and Cuba's vaccine isn't. And the tech Cuba used was developed by pharma companies first, too — protein subunit vaccines are well established, used for hepatitis B, tetanus, and others.
And if existing tech works well enough — great! Then use it, and don't use the more expensive mRNA ones.
Of course, there are benefits to mRNA vaccines, which is why they were deployed first — Moderna had a working vaccine barely over a month after starting work on it, with only the gene sequence of the virus from Chinese labs to work with. All the rest of the time was just testing. Effectively being able to print a vaccine given a gene sequence is extremely useful.
And again — the state (aka the United States) does not fully fund research. It provides less than half of funding in a non-banner year, and a fraction in boom years. Cutting funding not only would hurt deployment and development, it would also harm fundamental research.
I never argued that they should cut funding, but should reap the benefit of their investment and not allow private companies to run roughshod over them at the expense of global public health. I have no idea why I’m on a VC-backed website explaining the concept of ROI, surrounded by special pleading about how the initial investor (the state) isn’t owed anything in return.
For coronavirus maybe, because it's not much of danger for you in the first place, but those risks would be thousands of times more acceptable for cancer.
There are no side effects observed from mRNA CV vaccines that could be worse when compared to cancers with 1%+ mortality rate.
As a reminder you won't be taking it before the cancer, you would be taking it after the fact.
There are maybe no effects that we know about right now. Different people have different opinions on what their risk tolerance is, so there could be people that may outright disagree with your statement.
And there were even fewer such effects when the vaccines have rolled out back in 2020 with emergency approval, but without being used “in production” beforehand.
Now we know much more about the mRNA platform, but I still can’t exclude the possibility entirely for me. So I will take my chances and focus much more on quality of food, on staying fit, reducing stress etc. etc.
You should do the healthy things to avoid cancer in the first place, but once you are diagnosed with a cancer with high mortality rate, it's a whole different calculation in terms of risks vs benefits compared to Covid-19.
Indeed. My view on vaccines is that they are not a cure but act as prevention agents.
There's multiple vaccines that can also work after you've been exposed to a pathogen. In many such cases risks vs benefits will change by the event.
For example rabies vaccines is not given to everyone, however after you get rabies you will be given that vaccine.
Vaccine in this case is a less harmful training tool to prepare you for the more harmful pathogen that may still be reaching its peak strength.
You can think of vaccines as a training tool. In some cases it might provide you with a response that can completely throw the pathogen out, in other cases it will just be able to fight it better.
This is a treatment
>You should do the healthy things to avoid cancer in the first place
What are those?
Many cancers are caused by random chance, not factors you can do something about. sure, don't smoke and all, but odds are still high cancer gets you.
Can you completely exclude that there are some awful long-term consequences of Covid-19 we do not know about and that could be prevented by vaccine?
>those risks would be thousands of times more acceptable for cancer.
This might be true if the treatment was thousands of times more effective than the best available alternative treatment. I don't know enough about this treatment to know if that's the case or not
mRNA will eventually save the day for everyone, including for perfectly healthy individuals, but to me as a healthy 40yo person, with no known immunity issues, not overweight etc. etc. it is in my opinion still too risky to take just like that.
It's an interesting take. From what we know so far, the risk from taking vaccine is much smaller than from covid infection. You might counter this with highlighting the "so far" part, but keep in mind that many studies keep coming out with surprises not only regarding vaccine side effects, but also negative long term effects of covid.
There's a key difference here that cancer mRNA vaccine you are taking after you've been diagnosed with cancer.
Otherwise for Coronavirus vaccines you couldn't argue that risks are much smaller for any given person under any given conditions. E.g. a person could be completely isolated for the next 10 years and have virtually 0% chance of getting Covid-19, so in this case there's no calculation that could show a vaccine being with more favourable benefits/risks.
If there's a 1/10,000 chance of giving you a sore shoulder that would be worse in the calculations if you are for sure to be isolated from being anywhere near the virus.
Otherwise for Coronavirus vaccines you couldn't argue that risks are much smaller for any given person under any given conditions. E.g. a person could be completely isolated for the next 10 years and have virtually 0% chance of getting Covid-19, so in this case there's no calculation that could show a vaccine being with more favourable benefits/risks.
Well yes, in completely absurd and unrealistic situation the risk of taking vaccine might be larger than that of Covid-19.
> Well yes, in completely absurd and unrealistic situation the risk of taking vaccine might be larger than that of Covid-19.
What about a person living in simple solitude who works remotely and orders everything in? This is a realistic, non-absurd scenario and they would possibly risk getting Covid-19 on their way to the appointment of getting the vaccine.
I would argue that any person isolating for 10 years will for sure have very significant health drawbacks, so that would also have to be factored in.
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>the risk from taking vaccine is much smaller than from covid infection
Does that matter if you get covid anyway?
Yes. The vaccine trains your immune system to create antibodies used to fight off the disease. Already having those antibodies when the virus appears means that it will not last as long and the symptoms will not be as severe.
Without the vaccine, your body has to create those antibodies while you are already sick, and that takes time. This gives the virus a huge head start.
Plus, the trick that this virus uses to kill is that it kicks off a cytokine storm, which is far more likely if your body is racing the virus to eradicate it than if your immune system is already primed and squashes the virus when its infection volume is small and localized.
We're not just talking the flu-like symptoms here, the most relevant symptoms are "risk of death decreased."
It's not a dichotomy. The vaccine is effectively only for a couple of months so you have to compound the effects of the vaccine PLUS the effects of infection. You also don't know if the effects of the vaccine are cumulative with each new booster.
And that's even assuming it's effective in the first place. The "it reduces symptoms" mantra is gaslighting since the whole point of its accelerated approval and forced application was for the reduction of transmission.
I'll tell that to my colleague that got Covid vaccine induced blood clots, and has been told he will be on blood thinners for life.
While this is anecdotal, the amount of people I know personally that have told me they had significant health issues with a Covid vaccine or covid booster is weird.
You haven’t written anything of substance but antivax fearmongering.
I have to disagree with this, clearly visible under my profile. In general I try to stay clear of any vaccine debates, in general because of being labeled in certain ways I don’t identify myself with at all.
> the ones for the CV vaccine were listed on many pages of tiny text (both from Pfizer and from Moderna)
The size of the pages side effects were written on says absolutely nothing about what the side effects are or their severity.
> Then there are the long term consequences, many studies keep coming out with surprises (recent buzzword “Ribosomal frameshift”
Ribosomal frameshift is in itself not a “long term consequence.” It is simply that depending on where translational of a piece of mRNA starts, different proteins can be produced. This is an essential part of how our own (or any other organism’s mRNA) is translated into proteins. other proteins present in a cell can regulate which proteins can be produced - again an essential part of how our cells function. This has been known about for decades.
It is one of the main potential areas that could lead to side effects of an mRNA vaccine so understanding what other proteins might be translated and under what circumstances is important.
Please don’t fear monger without any actual evidence to back it.
> The size of the pages side effects were written on says absolutely nothing about what the side effects are or their severity.
Naive question: Do they say what the side effects are and their severity in an easily accessible manner somewhere?
The official package insert can be read here: https://www.drugs.com/pro/moderna-covid-19-vaccine.html https://www.drugs.com/pro/moderna-covid-19-vaccine.html
From the sibling comment link I would say, yes:
5 WARNINGS AND PRECAUTIONS
5.1 Management of Acute Allergic Reactions
Appropriate medical treatment to manage immediate allergic reactions must be immediately available in the event an acute anaphylactic reaction occurs following administration of Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine.
Monitor Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine recipients for the occurrence of immediate adverse reactions according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/clinical-considerations/managing-anaphylaxis.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/clinical-consideration...).
5.2 Myocarditis and Pericarditis
Postmarketing data with authorized or approved mRNA COVID-19 vaccines demonstrate increased risks of myocarditis and pericarditis, particularly within the first week following vaccination. For Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine, the observed risk is highest in males 18 years through 24 years of age. Although some cases required intensive care support, available data from short-term follow-up suggest that most individuals have had resolution of symptoms with conservative management. Information is not yet available about potential long-term sequelae.
The CDC has published considerations related to myocarditis and pericarditis after vaccination, including for vaccination of individuals with a history of myocarditis or pericarditis (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/clinical-considerations/myocarditis.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/clinical-consideration...).
5.3 Syncope
Syncope (fainting) may occur in association with administration of injectable vaccines. Procedures should be in place to avoid injury from fainting.
5.4 Altered Immunocompetence
Immunocompromised persons, including individuals receiving immunosuppressive therapy, may have a diminished response to Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine.
5.5 Limitations of Vaccine Effectiveness
Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine may not protect all vaccine recipients.
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I think the methylated pseudouridine is actually a tRNA component. Could be wrong. I’m not sure what the 3D structure of the vaccine mRNA is, but it could depart quite a bit from the high-school-biology linear strand portrayal of mRNA.
> other proteins present in a cell can regulate which proteins can be produced - again an essential part of how our cells function
I thought manipulating this was a design goal.
Regardless, I somewhat doubt the simple story presented to the public is 100% accurate.
Where, exactly, are the long term consequences of mRNA vaccination for SARS-CoV-2? Compared with, say, actually developing COVID? (Please note I’m not arguing that receiving a COVID mRNA vaccine is entirely risk free, however on a risk weighted basis receiving a COVID vaccine is much safer than having COVID)
To me the biggest risk is still the unknown, as in not enough experience. They have never been used “in production” until 2020.
I saved this post as a favorite and set up a reminder in 2 years and in 5 years about it. Hope there will be nothing to add, and we just got ourselves a mighty vaccines platform at zero long term consequences.
Get ready to see vaccines be used to prevent and cure conditions you that you probably think are outside the scope of what vaccines can address.
Projecting further into the future, the world is going to be divided into those with access to and willingness to use biotechnology and those who don’t. Note that I am including things like fitness and health tracking apps under the umbrella of biotech.
> but the ones for the CV vaccine were listed on many pages of tiny text (both from Pfizer and from Moderna).
A whole bunch of OTC drugs carry CYA lists like this, it's not the gotcha you think it is.
> but to me as a healthy 40yo person, with no known immunity issues, not overweight etc.
My father is getting a stent put in for a 70% artery blockage. Older of course but skinny, looks after his health, exercises. He had no symptoms like pain or being out of breath. Just high cholesterol.
A friend of mine in his early 30's healthy nearly got taken out by RSV last year because it aggravated a heart condition he was unaware of.
People aren't as healthy as they like to convince themselves they are.
The side effects of most cancer treatments are aweful. How do they compare?
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> bar for side effects is much stricter for preventative treatments like vaccines
These vaccines are for treatment. They don’t prevent cancer. They treat it. They’re vaccines because they work by arming your immune system versus doing the fighting themselves.
> The cancer vaccine: Moderna and pharma giant Merck are developing an mRNA-based cancer vaccine, mRNA-4157 (V940), for people who’ve had high-risk melanomas removed.
A comparison with rabies vaccine may be useful here.
On the scope of the entire human body, the virus usually enters first, before the vaccine is used.
However on the scope of individual tissues and cells,
the vaccine is often the first on the scene, prepping your cells before the (sneaky, slow) virus makes its main attack.
All of this is completely based on the individual case.
If the Rabies virus, or cancer, "beats" the vaccine on a significant scale, then it matters little what it is called because you will probably be dead in short order.
Rabies post-exposure prophylaxis is different because it's made up of several components: human rabies immune globulin (HRIG) and the vaccine. The vaccine takes a while to work so HRIG is the first line of defense that prevents the virus from entering the nervous system until the immune system is able to fight the virus.
From what I've heard it's still usually "preventative" because we can't confirm that the rabies infection will successfully infect until it's too late. So we vaccine anyone with (very) likely case.
This further redefinition of the term "vaccine" is a huge problem
by definition a vaccine should NOT be a treatment, a vaccine has to be preventative, and further personally I believe only Sterilizing immunity should be considered a "vaccine"
This is very important, because a "vaccine" in the US has legal protections other medical drugs, treatments, etc do not get, which is why there is a push to include alot of these things under the definition of "vaccine" so now they get the legal shield
I mean the general problem is that the word vaccine has been merged with two meanings of "creating something so your immune system gets prepped to prevent disease".
Moderna here create something so your immune system gets prepper but it doesn't prevent it's used to fight.
I mean this word came from cow, you are right, it's time to redefine some of these terms.
That's not the definition of a vaccine. A vaccine is something that registers our active immune system against an antigen, so that our body detects and eradicates it upon detection. The timing doesn't really matter and there are a lot of therapeutic vaccines [1].
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9729511/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9729511/
It is now, it has been expanded over the years most recently in response to covid as to include mRNA in the definition of what a vaccine is explicitly to shield these big pharma companies from liability for any harm adverse reactions to mRNA may have to individuals
It is shocking to me that soo many people that normally at against large companies, and against even capitalism do not see the huge danger in classifying these things as something that gives the companies creating them an almost complete liability shield from harms caused by their products.
Once something is a "vaccine" in the US you lose all ability to sue for most harms caused by said vaccine.
This does not appear to be a preventative treatment. It treats existing melanoma by inducing the body to produce antibodies against it, no?
It is intended for people who’ve had high-risk melanomas removed, to prevent cancer from coming back.
You’re both right. It’s preventative, not prophylactic.
We’re strict with the latter because they’re administered to healthy adults. That doesn’t apply here. If you took every coronavirus mRNA vaccine side effect and multiplied the severity and frequency by two orders of magnitude, this vaccine would still be worth it for many with melanoma.
The reason preventative treatments are held to a higher standard is because they are given to a very large number of people who might never get the disease anyway. Hence, a 1 in 1000 risk is significant. If you are treating people who have had cancer, their risk of getting it again in much higher than 1 in 1000.
It's also personalized, which to me says that it's unique and each could have different likelihood of autoimmune response.
The vaccine works by instructing the body to make up to 34 “neoantigens.” These
are proteins found only on the cancer cells, and Moderna personalizes the
vaccine for each recipient so that it carries instructions for the neoantigens
on their cancer cells.
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Most of them are awful but only in rare cases do they cause permanent damage beyond what is already happening with the cancer and usually the patient can recover after the treatment is stopped.
Anything that stimulates the immune system runs the risk of increasing its sensitivity too much till it attacks normal cells and at that point, a lot of horrible things can happen ranging from a new mild allergy to neurological disorders like multiple sclerosis to acute organ failure.
Since the point of the therapy is to get immune cells to attack the cancer cells, there's the very real risk of instead targeting the tissue the cancer evolved from.
> Most of them are awful but only in rare cases do they cause permanent damage beyond what is already happening with the cancer
That's simply not true. Chemotherapy, in particular, is ridiculously bad.
Chemo brain is a thing. Another example, people have to wear cold packs on their hands and feet in order to minimize the neuropathy that some chemotherapies can cause. Other chemotherapies cause your veins to leak with attendant swelling everywhere. Several years after therapy, some of that swelling still persists. Radiation is horrendously bad at damaging intestinal tissue. etc.
Yes, it beats being dead. That's about all you can say about it.
I agree. I have not been through it, myself (crosses self), but I live on Long Island, which means that I have watched a lot of people go through it.
Most recover nearly completely, but they all suffer some permanent effects, like sun sensitivity, hair loss, digestive problems, anemia, weakened immune system, etc.
> failed clinical trials in the 2000s and 2010s
We didn’t start testing neoantigen mRNA cancer vaccines until 2017 [1].
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8942458/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8942458/
I think you might be confusing mRNA vaccines with immunological cancer treatments in general, which have been tried in trials for decades and have occasionally caused horrible side effects in some patients.
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Down voted by those who don't understand marketing, human behavior, read the Heath Brother's "Made to Stick", etc.? Love you HN but you're jumping the shark.
> All previous vaccines were aimed at preventing infectious diseases.
This is a common misconception, and that's whythe U.S. CDC is now emphasizing that vaccines can do more to help people.
The most important recent example is the world's widespread rollout of COVID vaccines. These are primarily aimed at better protection against severe illness, hospitalization, and death; these are not primarily aimed at preventing an individual from ever being infected by any COVID variant.
Well that’s just plain revisionist history.
Name another example. The flu vaccine, maybe? But that’s because they don’t know which strains to target.
Both the CDC director at the time and Biden said the vaccine would prevent you from getting COVID.
It’s insane we’re changing the definition of words because the COVID vaccines were kinda crappy and that would be bad politically.
Not that the vaccine discussed here shouldn’t be called one - it absolutely is.
No, covid vaccines were not kind of crappy, just the virus itself evolved so rapidly that the virus had evolved enough even before complete rollout of the vaccines. Yet even then the boosted vaccination was highly effective against the delta variant and still effective against omicron on the level par with flu vaccines. Omicron was just infectious on the level of measles and with very short incubation period giving the immune system very little time to ramp up the immune response.
I'd argue that a vaccine that allowed the virus to evolve rapidly out of it because it's only targeting on small section of the virus is pretty crappy by definition.
Don't get me wrong, it saved a lot of lives. Compared to every other vaccine we've all taken in our lives it's the absolute bottom of the barrel, and the fact that politically (and possibly for public health reasons) a good portion of politicians effectively lied about that made it so companies didn't feel like they should invest in making a better vaccine. I've had Covid twice and both times I was very sick - I'd love a better, more broad, vaccine.
I'd argue it's definitely not as effective as flu vaccines vs omicron. On a good year the flu vaccine can prevent 50% of flu cases in those that take it. Everyone I know has gotten Covid, vaccinated or not.
> Name another example
Sure, another example is the flu vaccine as you mention. The primary aim of the flu vaccine in the U.S. medical system is to protect high-risk people from life-threatening symptoms, even during infections from different strains.
Another example is the shingles vaccine. The primary aim is to prevent severe symptoms (such as neural damage and long term pain) during a reactivation of an existing chronic infection.
> It’s insane we’re changing the definition of words
The semantic meaning of the word vaccine hasn't changed. All that's changed is the U.S. CDC official definition text, to clarify that the primary aim of vaccines is to activate the body's immune system, rather than solely to prevent a new specific infection.
If you're curious about the language exactness, beyond the U.S. CDC, the U.S. FDA is also involved. For example, the U.S. FDA during COVID stated that a vaccine would need to be at least 50% effective for diminishing the severity of COVID-19 symptoms to obtain regulatory and marketing approval. In other words, the primary aim was to help people reduce damage; the primary aim was not to full-stop prevent infection.
Well, they could at least always say something like “…vaccine, but not like you are thinking. You, like billions of other people, have a misguided and frankly incomplete understanding of the word. …”
Why do you wanna call a thing that stimulates an immune response to an antigen a gene therapy?
It's using the same mechanism as vaccines (exposure to the proteins in question), it's utterly bizarre to conflate it with gene therapy.
It's probably reasonable to call it a vaccine based immunotherapy.
It is definitely not a gene therapy.
It primes the immune system to be vigilant for certain patterns. That's a vaccine. It is not altering genes, it's not gene therapy. It is not otherwise boosting the immune system, it's not immune therapy.
The fact that it's target isn't realistically transmissible has no bearing on it's nature. We don't give people rabies vaccine to people to keep them from spreading it, either. In humans the R0 for rabies is exceedingly close to zero in any society that understands what rabies is.
It’s been tested for decades. The issue is protein-based platforms deliver the protein outside the cell. This means most do not get processed and presented by MHC-1 and 2 the way a genetically encoded therapeutic does. The issue with DNA is it separates the innate immune activation signal (eg cGAS and TLRs) from the presentation so you don’t get co-signaling. This may be the ticket why mRNA could work…
The reason they got immunity is that the percentage of claims about vaccines that are valid are minuscule. Juries don't do well when faced with an obviously harmed "victim" and a "bad guy" with deep pockets. They see the suffering victim and no evidence to prove yes or no on whether the "bad guy" inflicted the harm and tend to side with the victim.
The only way the vaccine industry can survive in such a legal climate is to get the claims reviewed by medical people rather than juries. Lawyers hate it because they can't woo the jury with the plight of the victim.
Society would work a lot better if more systems worked this way. Locally the lawyers utterly hated the system where to bring a malpractice case you had to go before a board of three lawyers and three doctors first. While you could then go to trial with less than 4 votes from that board your chances were minimal when the jury heard what the board said. Effectively that meant you had to convince one of three doctors your claim was sound--if you can't do that why do you think you have a case?
But then you get to following parameters as well:
1. Age. Not all age groups were recommended the vaccine.
2. Last time or where you have had Covid-19 at all.
3. General pattern of activity and the amount of contacts with other people.
4. Last time you have had the vaccine.
E.g. in my country through it's technical systems didn't allow you to get a Covid-19 vaccine when you had the virus within last 6 months. While US recommended the vaccine much shorter period of time after having had Covid-19.
> Almost no one is actually living as a hermit
Also consider that in 2021, there were actually many people living as hermits, including I, as I really didn't want to get the virus. At the time I was terrified of getting it. In 2020-2021, I did live with my partner, but we worked remotely, worked out outside away from other people and we did cardio/gym, but with home made equipment or outside keeping distance to other people.
I think it was quite common in 2021.
> What about a person living in simple solitude who works remotely and orders everything in? This is a realistic, non-absurd scenario and they would possibly risk getting Covid-19 on their way to the appointment of getting the vaccine.
The biggest whine from anti-vaxers was that they were being told they needed a vaccine to do social things they enjoyed , like air travel or coughing on the elderly.
I don't think you're hypothetical neo-hermit would being doing either of these, so itseems unlikely they'll be "forced" to get a vaccine.
No, it's a myth (albeit a popular one) that the human immune system benefits from being "toughened up" by actual pathogens. It's more about calibration by non-pathogens we co-evolved with.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1700688114 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1700688114
What about the isolated populations, e.g. Sentinelese that are documented to die because they don't have the immune system developed to protect themselves against the viruses rest of the World has?
Although I would agree that 10 years later in your life is unlikely to create an issue.
> The Andaman and Nicobar Islands Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation 1956[9] prohibits travel to the island, and any approach closer than 5 nautical miles (9.3 km), in order to protect the remaining tribal community from "mainland" infectious diseases against which they likely have no acquired immunity. The area is patrolled by the Indian Navy.[10]
I think that confuses:
A: What behaviors or environments lead to adult immune systems calibrated to minimize autoimmune dysfunctions.
B: Comparing populations that already/ haven't developed inherited countermeasures against certain diseases.
C: (In some cases) Specific pathogens where it is less-damaging to encounter them at different phases of life.
In particular, I'd point out that sometimes a population strong against a particular disease does not necessarily have "better" immune systems... Sometimes it's literally survivorship bias, where all of the vulnerable individuals they used to have already died in tragic ways.
I thought that we had some new hard evidence, or revelation. So does this mean we still don’t know, or is there a considerable skew to one side in the statistical meaning, like in the case of eating red meat, or climate change, but as with everything there are contradicting studies?
None of the studies showing some level of effectiveness against transmission/infection show anything close to what would be necessary to establish herd immunity and thus provide durable protection against eventual infection for those who can't be vaccinated.
Citation please? Here is the procedure for getting compensated for vaccine caused issues - https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation
It should not matter to you whether the compensation is paid by the government or a company, but you can file for compensation and if valid, get compensated for it.
there are all kinds of problems first and foremost is incentives if tax payers (i.e government) are paying for the losses why should they care if they injure anyone? removing product liability is universally a bad idea
Further there is all kinds of Due process issues that make filing a Vaccine claim problematic and very expensive to appeal, there are all kinds of horror stories out there about denied claims, and to appeal the denial is $$$$$$$$$$$$ and no lawyer will take it with out up front payment, and no class action is possible to spread the costs out...
That is why vaccines need FDA approval in the first place.
Everything else you said is true for all kinds of appeal and not just for vaccines. There are horror stories about everything and lawyers not wanting to take things up without upfront payment. But that does not stop those things. Marriage and divorce, child custody, DUI cases, police excess, companies overcharging for things, DMCA being used incorrectly, tech companies having too much power etc. are all problematic and very expensive to appeal. But we live with those. Similarly, there are trade-offs here.
>>That is why vaccines need FDA approval in the first place.
this is probably where the most of our different world view comes from, I believe the FDA is just a corrupt organization rubber stamping big Pharma, and serves no actual safety purpose. Given the revolving door between the major companies and top level positions in the FDA and the actions of the FDA during COVID I have lots of examples to prove my position.
>>Everything else you said is true for all kinds of appeal and not just for vaccines
Incorrect, the Vaccine process establishes an extra Judicial process where by a committee at the DHHS gets to choose if you were actually injured by the vaccine or not, skipping the jury process completely. if you are denied by the DHHS you have to jump right to the Expensive Appeals process, there is no way to fine a standard civil lawsuit and get a Jury of your peers.
Also there is no way to form a class if the FDA screws up and a vaccine causes harm to 100's. 1000's or 10'000s of people, each case has to go through the process individually
I understand that this point you believe the FDA is infallible organization that only cares for the individual, but the FDA has proven time and time again that to be false.
I think our worldviews are different. While I do not think everything is perfect with FDA, the world without FDA is much, much worse than the one with it.
Just because criminals break laws does not mean no laws should be passed. Just because corruption happens in FDA does not mean FDA is entirely corrupt and we should let everyone sell whatever drugs they can think of into the market.
I took it as the literal and previously accepted definition was uniformly changed by both government and secular organizations in near unison. As late as January 2021 vaccines were thought of as dead pathogens - https://web.archive.org/web/20210118194713/https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vaccine https://web.archive.org/web/20210118194713/https://www.merri...
There were plenty of protein subunit vaccines and a few viral vector vaccines in use in humans prior to the COVID vaccines. Neither of these are dead pathogens.
it started as live pathogens (cowpox) so it must have gone through many iterations if that were the case
Merriam Webster's old definition did not exclude therapeutic vaccines. But it did exclude vaccines prepared from viruses.[1]
Probably you heard about diphtheria and tetanus vaccines before 2020. They are prepared from toxins.
Other definitions did not restrict what a vaccine must contain.[2]
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20190118214500/https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/virus http://web.archive.org/web/20190118214500/https://www.merria...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160402152957/https://www.dictionary.com/browse/vaccine https://web.archive.org/web/20160402152957/https://www.dicti...
The word “vaccine” comes from the recognition that people could gain immunity against smallpox via infection with the less-deadly (and live) virus cowpox.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccinia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccinia
The definition has never been constrained to dead pathogens.
> As late as January 2021 vaccines were thought of as dead pathogens
Oh, stop lying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine
"The first successful demonstration of a polio vaccine was by Hilary Koprowski in 1950, with a live attenuated virus which people drank."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuated_vaccine#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuated_vaccine#History
> The technique of cultivating a virus repeatedly in artificial media and isolating less virulent strains was pioneered in the early 20th century by Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin who developed an attenuated tuberculosis vaccine called the BCG vaccine.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html
> MMR is an attenuated (weakened) live virus vaccine. This means that after injection, the viruses cause a harmless infection in the vaccinated person with very few, if any, symptoms before they are eliminated from the body. The person’s immune system fights the infection caused by these weakened viruses, and immunity (the body’s protection from the virus) develops.
> by definition a vaccine should NOT be a treatment
Umm. You have never heard of rabies or tetnus vaccines?
This is not a change in definition.
>> by definition a vaccine should NOT be a treatment, a vaccine has to be preventative, and further personally I believe...
Hmm, I don't see the basis for this conclusion. This treatment is acting according to the common definition of a vaccine. Whether before or after disease activation is not part of the definition. As far as your personal belief, I understand that you may feel strongly, but I'm sorry to say that doesn't really enter into articulating an accepted scientific definition.
vaccine: any preventive preparation used to stimulate the body’s immune response against a specific disease, ...
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/vaccine https://www.dictionary.com/browse/vaccine
Could you be more specific about any particular legal shield? They all have to go through the same phased trials system. I don't see any reason to conclude this is a legal shenanigan. What they have created meets the well-known definition of a vaccine.
Not just antibodies, but it will stimulate a broad class of immune cells.
And yes, the name vaccine is misleading. They should use immunotherapy.
Oh, it’s very bad, hereabouts.
Long Island is known as a breast cancer hotspot (especially Nassau County), but I have seen many different types.
I moved here, when I was 28. Before coming here, I had never met anyone that had cancer.
Since moving here, I have known at least one person, every year, that has been battling cancer. This year, it has been 3 fairly close acquaintances.
They keep a lid on it, but it’s bad enough, that it’s pretty much an open secret.
The puke and diarrhea after every chemotherapy session might feel bad acutely, but the real killer is neuropathy. When it gets bad, it's impossible to operate zippers, pens, shoe laces, walking like made from wood, nails falling off due to nerve degeneration, teeth gums getting swollen. In cold climates (-10 below freezing) it is especially hard.
It beats being dead, surely.