Comment by fpgaminer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fpgaminer | Hacker News Reader

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I recall a researcher talking about previous attempts at creating coronavirus vaccines. How they resulted not in immunity, but in training the immune system to _over_ respond when a real infection came along.

After a bit of digging I found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/

> An early concern for application of a SARS-CoV vaccine was the experience with other coronavirus infections which induced enhanced disease and immunopathology in animals when challenged with infectious virus

I didn't dig deep enough to see if any experimental vaccines caused similar issues, but it definitely appears to be a concern.

So yeah, I'd be _very_ cautious with any homebrew vaccine. You might accidentally train your immune system to self destruct when you get exposed to a real SARS-CoV-2.

That said, I have little to no experience with biology, so it's entirely possible that radvac based vaccinations have already been demonstrated not to have this particular problem.

A recent attempt at a dengue vaccine faced a similar problem. The most dangerous kind of dengue fever happens when you are infected a second time, by a different variant than you were infected the first time. It turns out that the vaccine ended up having a similar effect as catching dengue for the first time. People who never had dengue and got vaccinated had a lower chance of catching the disease in the future. But if they did catch it there was a higher risk of it being the more dangerous version. The end result is that the vaccine is now only recommended for people who already had dengue before.

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

This is specifically mentioned in the Radvac paper in the section titled "POSSIBLE MECHANISMS OF VACCINE-ENHANCED DISEASE, VACCINE-INDUCED AUTOIMMUNITY, AND MITIGATION STRATEGIES"

> train your immune system to self destruct

Might be a nitpick, but the immune system destroying itself would be a different, still possibly dangerous outcome of probably losing your defenses.

An over-sensitized response would be a hyper-sensitive trigger-happy paranoid all-hand-on-deck general-mobilization fight-or-die this-is-the-end immune response, of various scale, possibly similar to but not exactly the same as a bad case of covid.

Homebrew seems unfair: https://radvac.org/a-homepage-section/

Trying it is IMHO a risk calculation once you've jumped the "is this credible" bar.

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