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Comment by rusticpenn | Hacker News Reader

Correct me if I am wrong, Oxford uses traditional Vaccine design technique (using a weaker virus and adding spikes or something similar) while Biontech(Pfizer) and ModeRNA use MRNA which is completely new technique (messenger RNA).

This is awesome for more than just vaccinations. Traditionally the groups allocating govt funding to science and industries are very risk averse and this could be one more example where taking risks can payoff.

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I thought adenoviral vaccines were also relatively new. Not as new as mRNA which is bleeding edge, but still i think this would be the first time this technique would be approved for human use should it be approved.

If I remember correctly, the Ebola vaccine is the first approved vaccine to use another virus as a vector. The first one to be approved (by Merck) does not use an adenovirus, but the second approved one (by J&J) does.

Note that approvals of these were late 2019 and the summer of this year. So still very new from an "approved on humans" point of view (although not _as_ new as mRNA-based vaccines). The techniques have both been in development for years and years of course, including determining their safety profiles.

Would they be virus based vaccines or phage based ones as phage's are a form of virus as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy

The article says adenovirus vaccines have been "researched and used extensively for decades."

That statement is somewhat ambiguous, because there have been vaccines against adenovirus infection available since the 70s, but the use of adenovirus as a vaccine vector (which us different) is fairly new. The latter has not been the case for "decades".

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