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Comment by hooloovoo_zoo | Hacker News Reader

Would it be easier to cover more flu strains with an mRNA vaccine? Could we shove like 100 in there?

There is a Netflix documentary called Pandemic about couple that is trying to eradicate flu. They found vaccine that works on all flu viruses but it takes 6 shots to work. That’s not practical at all therefore it’s not on the market yet.

I'd totally take that, assuming reasonable convenience and cost.

Interesting. What are the required timing of the six shots, the percentage effectiveness, and the duration of protection?

There are a number of weird diseases that some suspect are side effects of flu infections. It may be that we have to prove a causal link to one or more of those before an elaborate flu vaccine is seen as worth the trouble.

There is very little scrutiny of people who have initial mild flu or no long term respiratory complications. Perhaps more light will be shed in the wake of the over zealous scrutiny that comes with covid 19

I have a debilitating fear of the flu and would ABSOLUTELY be up for a 6-shot regimen, if it gives me my winters back.

Seriously? Debilitating? Curious why?

I now have the same for covid, lol - but I'm overweight and 41, high risk as a result, and have two kids under 4 I'd like to see make it to graduation.

I have a constant nasal drip, that I don't think is flu related, I get the vaccine every year, but I do get bronchitis like every other year and it wipes me out for at least 2-4 weeks.

I dunno, plenty of people take an annual flu shot already.

Conspiracy glasses on, what if the annual flu vaccine manufacturers are actively preventing a universal vaccine from happening? It's a big recurring source of income for them after all.

Big reward for any defector and that it is hard is a pretty good explanation for not having one yet.

6 shots is not that bad. Many people get a shot every year, so as long as it protects you for 6+ years, it's better than the alternative.

There’s a (non-mRNA afaik) universal flu vaccine by the NIH in phase 1 since April 2019: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-begins-fir...

Not a virologist so I might butcher the explanation, but I think the strategy for universal flu is to target the “stalk” part of the virus since it’s similar across strains. We currently target the surface proteins since it’s easier to make a vaccine this way, but it differs more across the strains. Going after the stall would mean we don’t need to shove 100 different strains in there. I don’t know if this will be easier with mRNA technology.

Also, can we get a vaccine for most of the common colds??

Found this:

https://www.verywellhealth.com/why-there-will-never-be-a-vac...

> Vaccines target a specific virus or pathogen. One difficulty with developing a vaccine for the common cold is there are at least 200 different viruses that can cause cold symptoms, including rhinovirus, coronavirus, adenoviruses, and parainfluenza.1

> Rhinovirus makes up about 75% of colds. Still, there are more than 150 strains of it circulating at the same time.

> At this time, there is currently no way for one vaccine to protect against all possible strains that can cause the common cold.

It also goes on to say it self-resolves and only causes mild illness.

So they potentially could find a vaccine that covers most, but I'm guessing would be a waste of resources.

I'm ignorant, but could they put a tiny dose of all 175 variants into a single shot and yeet that into people in one go?

This could be done with the mRNA technology, where you basically "print out" the requested mRNA overnight. Encoding several proteins is possible.

How the organism would react to such a flurry of foreign proteins, that is another question. 175 unknown proteins is a lot, the immune system could be roused beyond safe levels. It is possible to kill a person (or a mouse) by overstimulating its immune system.

I'm pretty sure we have way more than 175 different antigens at any given time putting our immune system to work. Or we would, if we were still living in nature. In fact, I often think the issue with Covid is more than anything else our chronically debilitated immune systems.

This is a question that would need experiments to settle. AFAIK the original research around mRNA vaccines had to navigate the gap between "not stimulating enough" and "stimulating too much" very carefully.

The question is how many are novel though, not how many there are.

Is there a medical definition for “yeet”?

Rhinoviruses make up ~75%, but the other 25% are made up of only a handful (4 iirc) of coronaviruses. Definitely seems like you could at least make a vaccine for those, and eliminating 25% of colds would be nothing to sneeze at. (Pun very much intended...)

Sure, but who do you know that’s willing to get 100 flu shots in a year?

You can put more than one drug in a single shot. The MMR vaccine contains Mumpsvax, Attenuvax, and Meruvax to fight the mumps, measles, and rubella, respectively

I think OP means one shot with a lot of strains in it.

Not sure if this is a flippant response, but I believe the parent post meant 100 strains in one injection.

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