4 ms·

Can you give a tangible example of a vaccine that was evaded to the extent that there was no improvement in mortality from that disease?

tokinonagare 2y ago
He's speaking of research programs, not commercialized products. It's totally believable that some researchers would deploy a prototype somewhere, collect and tweak data to show it's effective then never check again. I worked in a field far from medicine and it was the same exact way of doing. His description of funding theatre is also fitting what I've seen in academia. Your question is a cheap way to try to devaluate the credibility of the post (probably on an ideological background), but what is written is hundred percent credible for anyone with experience in research. I've a friend working on pathogens for her PhD, funded by the Gates foundation and when I asked a question about it the answer wasn't exactly positive.
- snowwrestler 2y ago
  I’m not trying to “devaluate” anything, I’m asking for more information as someone who is fairly familiar with public health research. Thankfully Mike was kind enough to provide a substantive answer.
mike_hearn 2y ago
Respiratory virus vaccines can suffer this issue because of how quickly those kinds of viruses mutate. Flu vaccines are notorious for not reducing the mortality of the elderly whilst being reported as highly effective. They can even increase mortality from the flu due to late response caused by overfitting. The problem is twofold here: the vaccines cause displacement so they look good in trials, but then they also look good in observational data because the sort of people who sign up voluntarily for flu shots are just paying much more attention to their health in general so there's a selection bias effect. This paper tried to fix the selection bias and: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2728831/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2728831/ "We found that flu shots reduced all-cause mortality among elderly Kaiser Permanente members by 4.6% during 9 laboratory-defined flu seasons in Northern California. Other researchers have reported that flu shots reduce mortality by much greater amounts." Overfitting can exacerbate the problem by causing displacement to a variant that's worse. Here's an example from 2009 where Canadian authorities investigated the effectiveness of the trivalent influenza vaccine on swine flu: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/51/9/1017/292207?login=false https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/51/9/1017/292207?login=... "An outbreak investigation in British Columbia during the late spring of 2009 provided the first indication of an unexpected association between receipt of TIV and pH1N1 illness. This led to 5 additional studies through the summer 2009 in Canada, each of which corroborated these initial findings." The reason there's so much controversy around vaccines in general is that the techniques used can easily look as if they're working well whilst they actually don't. Mistakes are understandable, but the incentive is then to cover things up because public health officials and researchers are terrified of doing anything that might support "anti vaxx" narratives (e.g. admitting to mistakes).
- snowwrestler 2y ago
  Thanks for the answer!
dudeofea 2y ago
https://www.cdc.gov/dengue/vaccine/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/dengue/vaccine/index.html > In children who have not already had dengue, the dengue vaccine increases the risk of hospitalization and severe illness if the child gets dengue after vaccination. The mechanism is most likely that wild-type dengue has optimized itself a bit to infect better when covered with vaccinal antibodies (antibody-dependent enhancement)
- blagie 2y ago
  Dengue is one of the few diseases that it explicitly targets immune cells. It hits Langerhans cells, which are skin-resident monocytes (a type of immune cells), spreads through the lymphatic system (part of the immune system), and then to white blood cells. While dengue is certainly not unique (e.g. HIV also targets the immune system), but it is in the extreme minority of diseases. For the vast majority of diseases, this kind of response to vaccines or prior infections is simply not a thing.

tokinonagare 2y ago

He's speaking of research programs, not commercialized products. It's totally believable that some researchers would deploy a prototype somewhere, collect and tweak data to show it's effective then never check again. I worked in a field far from medicine and it was the same exact way of doing. His description of funding theatre is also fitting what I've seen in academia. Your question is a cheap way to try to devaluate the credibility of the post (probably on an ideological background), but what is written is hundred percent credible for anyone with experience in research. I've a friend working on pathogens for her PhD, funded by the Gates foundation and when I asked a question about it the answer wasn't exactly positive.

snowwrestler 2y ago
I’m not trying to “devaluate” anything, I’m asking for more information as someone who is fairly familiar with public health research. Thankfully Mike was kind enough to provide a substantive answer.

mike_hearn 2y ago

Respiratory virus vaccines can suffer this issue because of how quickly those kinds of viruses mutate. Flu vaccines are notorious for not reducing the mortality of the elderly whilst being reported as highly effective. They can even increase mortality from the flu due to late response caused by overfitting. The problem is twofold here: the vaccines cause displacement so they look good in trials, but then they also look good in observational data because the sort of people who sign up voluntarily for flu shots are just paying much more attention to their health in general so there's a selection bias effect. This paper tried to fix the selection bias and: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2728831/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2728831/ "We found that flu shots reduced all-cause mortality among elderly Kaiser Permanente members by 4.6% during 9 laboratory-defined flu seasons in Northern California. Other researchers have reported that flu shots reduce mortality by much greater amounts." Overfitting can exacerbate the problem by causing displacement to a variant that's worse. Here's an example from 2009 where Canadian authorities investigated the effectiveness of the trivalent influenza vaccine on swine flu: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/51/9/1017/292207?login=false https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/51/9/1017/292207?login=... "An outbreak investigation in British Columbia during the late spring of 2009 provided the first indication of an unexpected association between receipt of TIV and pH1N1 illness. This led to 5 additional studies through the summer 2009 in Canada, each of which corroborated these initial findings." The reason there's so much controversy around vaccines in general is that the techniques used can easily look as if they're working well whilst they actually don't. Mistakes are understandable, but the incentive is then to cover things up because public health officials and researchers are terrified of doing anything that might support "anti vaxx" narratives (e.g. admitting to mistakes).

snowwrestler 2y ago
Thanks for the answer!

dudeofea 2y ago

https://www.cdc.gov/dengue/vaccine/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/dengue/vaccine/index.html > In children who have not already had dengue, the dengue vaccine increases the risk of hospitalization and severe illness if the child gets dengue after vaccination. The mechanism is most likely that wild-type dengue has optimized itself a bit to infect better when covered with vaccinal antibodies (antibody-dependent enhancement)

blagie 2y ago
Dengue is one of the few diseases that it explicitly targets immune cells. It hits Langerhans cells, which are skin-resident monocytes (a type of immune cells), spreads through the lymphatic system (part of the immune system), and then to white blood cells. While dengue is certainly not unique (e.g. HIV also targets the immune system), but it is in the extreme minority of diseases. For the vast majority of diseases, this kind of response to vaccines or prior infections is simply not a thing.