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Comment by IncRnd | Hacker News Reader

If only they made vaccines that way.

Yeah if only but they do not.

Perhaps GP is not aware of how vaccines work. You should seriously answer the question.

But yes, that is how vaccines work more or less. Though I believe the virus in the vaccine is either dead or incapacitated in some way.

That is how vaccines can work. I think that saying "more or less" is disingenuous, when there are also toxoid, subunit, or conjugate. None of these broad classifications mention the adjuvants that are present. Look at the mRNA vaccines that are being tested for sars-cov2, such as by Moderna. Vaccines are not always attenuated or inactivated.

Vaccines are usually dead or mostly-dead or otherwise-modified things. It's not just low counts of live viruses.

The precursor to modern methods was to obtain a little bit of smallpox and inoculate yourself with it. It was vastly less deadly than being exposed in the normal course, though not really safe. It still demonstrated the principle, that a little bit of smallpox was quite a lot safer than being exposed to a lot of it. This is not a good idea generally, it worked on smallpox when there was no other option. Still, dose can absolutely make a difference in how deadly a virus is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation

The first real vaccine was to inoculate with cowpox instead, which was safe for humans but induced immunity to smallpox as well.

Modern methods are substantially safer, usually by entirely deactivating the virus before using it, but there are still some vaccines that use live virus (the oral polio vaccine is a live attenuated virus).

Your clarification was less correct than what you replied to.

Vaccines are not all attenuated. Often they are killed. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inactivated_vaccine for more on that.

It's interesting that the word used for inactivated viruses is "killed" rather than, for instance, "destroyed". Destroyed might not be a better word choice because it may imply that the structure is completely taken apart but point being: (not to throw semantics into the mix just for kicks) does modern science consider viruses to be alive?

> does modern science consider viruses to be alive?

This is a (bad) philisophical question for people who do not understand the concept of "spectrum", not a scientific question.

I don't believe there is such a thing as a bad philosophical question. Perhaps some questions aren't yet worth the time investment to think about. When we engineer self-replicating machinery (or rather, before then) this caveat is worth defining.

I disagree.

Deciding where on the spectrum between non-life and life we declare something to be alive is endlessly debatable and non-actionable. The fact that in time technology will add more points on that spectrum does not change this fact.

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