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Comment by spraak | Hacker News Reader

Could it be - in part - due to the virus changing? Other vaccines with high coverage are known to have lost effect due to mutation, such as pertussis. There is also the example of the best-guess flu vaccine of the season. The article mentions it is in highly vaccinated populations, which contradicts the heard immunity idea, as well as would equate to a high selective pressure on the virus to change. Also looking into this I've learned about how prior to the vaccine, mothers would pass on a temporary immunity to their children but that this is lost with the vaccine - could that also be at play here?

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No. This disaster is really exclusively due to extraordinary stupidity. The vaccines you compare are very different. The measles vaccine is a live one (which is part of the reason why it worries people) and is very efficient. Pertussis has always been only 60% efficient due to the complexity of the germ which is a bacteria, not a virus. The flu virus is a very special case due to its rapid mutation and seasonal activity, which is the main reason why it's a challenge. This does not contradict the herd immunity principle, because the problem is precisely that the herd immunity threshold is not achieved in a reliable manner in the population, plus some stochastic failure risk depending on the particular case.

>The flu virus is a very special case due to its rapid mutation and seasonal activity, which is the main reason why it's a challenge.

Exactly. The flu and the common cold viruses are different from most others, which is why we don't have a cold vaccine and our flu vaccine is only good for that season's flu (maybe). The flu and cold mutate very rapidly and constantly, whereas those other viruses don't.

This may be valid. After both the last 2 measles outbreaks that hit the news in the US it was discovered in many of the kids tested that the strain of measles was actually from the vaccine itself. Not sure if that's classified as a mutation but I don't think thats supposed to be able to happen and spread that way. Will follow up with sources after I'm off mobile

Edit: Here are a couple of sources. The first claims to have proven that someone on the vaccine schedule spread measles in 2011. However I will correct that I thought the disney case was similar but I think that one may have been wild measles and only a few vaccinated were infected. These are just food for thoughts

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/58/9/1205/2895266

This one is more scientific and dry but is from the CDC I believe and showed among other things an increase in sporadic measles outbreaks among vaccinated

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC228449/

The whooping cough is more interesting. You can find multiple cases of outbreaks among highly vaccinated people but the symptoms are allegedly milder so the vaccine is possibly doing something positive about it. The CDC is warning the vaccine is losing effectiveness.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/allthemoms/2019/03/14/wh... https://www.livescience.com/53359-whooping-cough-outbreak-ra...

Anyway interested in any takes on that. I'm not wildly anti-vax but even these mild questions on it were immediately downvoted. I think its a complicated and fascinating thing to talk about when people aren't crybabies about it

That's very interesting, I didn't know that. Looking forward to the sources, thank you

I'm interested as well, as I did some searching and found nothing like those claims.

Yes, because it's wrong. The measles is a live attenuated vaccine, meaning that in some extremely rare cases it could be transmitted and can cause minor symptoms. This is of course tested for and monitored, and current vaccine technology allows vaccines with a good safety profile.

That's my understanding as well, but as someone who tries their best to be a rational skeptic, I'm more than willing to reconsider my understanding given sufficient evidence (the key there being "sufficient"), so if such evidence exists I'd like to see it.

That first and last articles are pointing out evidence that maybe some people aren't 100% immune after vaccination - it doesn't point towards the immune and vaccinated as carriers. The CDC article is saying they found viral RNA in urine. The part I found most interesting:

"Since a single cycle of viral replication would be expected to take 17 to 24 h, it is unlikely that the RT-PCR detected the progeny of virus replicating in the urinary tract. Rather, this observation suggests that shortly after vaccination the input virus or viral antigen, in the form of nucleocapsids, is deposited directly into the bladder via interstitial fluid."

Looks like we're just peeing out the vaccine. I'm not educated enough to know if that's "live" RNA or not, but it makes sense it would be there, as it was introduced in the vaccine itself.

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