One of the things that'll come out of this is that mRNA vaccines as miracle wonder drugs that cure everything are going to get huge amounts of attention, and media will reflect that. Especially if the Lyme, Malaria, and HIV vaccines prove successful. We are going to see mRNA vaccines as plot devices and MacGuffins in media for decades to come. It's going to get the same treatment radiation got in the '60s and '70s and genetic engineering got in the '90s and '00s. For example, it wouldn't surprise me if, the next time Marvel decides to make a new adaptation of Spider-Man, the spider will have been treated with mRNA instead of radiation (the original story) or gene therapy ('90s cartoon, '00s movies, maybe others).
mRNA vaccine tech being discussed here is not gene therapy. It cannot (appreciably) alter host DNA the way radiation or gene therapy can. It simply causes the host cells to manufacture desired proteins for a limited amount of time.
but we actually won that war, which precipitated a rise to global hegemon status. covid has been a pathetic, fumbling showing, one that clearly reflects institutional decay and foreshadows future decline -- the reverse of the first situation
If you look back at history through rose-tinted glasses everything will appear better than it was.
I'm obviously not happy with the state of the world as a computer scientists.
I mention all of that because even that wobbly claim was still couched in terms like “did” or “could” while the comment I replied to described it as “likely prevailing truth”. We have no evidence and limited data supporting that hypothesis and a number of people pushing it for political reasons, which is rarely helpful to the scientific process.
1. https://nautil.us/issue/102/hidden-truths/when-a-good-scient...
Against a totally novel virus, we developed and widely deployed vaccines with efficacies beyond anyone’s wildest dreams using totally novel technology in the span of a year. Not sure that quite meets my definition of “pathetic.”
What was pathetic was the federal coordination - hesitation on travel restrictions, CDC response, recommendations against PPE… Lessons that could have been learned even from the 1918 pandemic were painfully ignored.
From a book on this subject: "Another problem in the country's preparation was the production of uniforms similar to those of the German Army. 'They even threw rocks at us in Naples thinking we were the invaders'.”
Public authorities largely claimed it wasn't happening and wasn't a big deal as hospitals overflowed and we dug mass graves.
They even cancelled public gatherings but pretended it was unrelated to a health crisis. Health responses in the us were completely scattershot, and no one trusted information coming out from the government.
Compared to that this response was actually far better and more organized.
I thought the rollout of the vaccines in the time it took, with the effectiveness it had, just went to show how the knowledge and technology of vaccines makes it one of the greatest human achievements, ever.
I'm actually a little worried about this. Of course, I'm happy it'll boost interest in vaccine development. But the terror and fear in reaction to AIDS led to a general biosecurity obsession that became biosecurity paranoia and then hysteria and then a renewal of persecution of homosexual men for a couple decades. Who says we'll be immune to the worse effects of fear, paranoia and panic this time around?
mRNA vaccines just get your body to produce a particular protein you want to induce an immune response to, instead of injecting the protein directly.
Is it really the slow uptake of mRNA techniques that's prevented an HIV vaccine? Or is it HIV's capacity for rapidly mutating into large numbers of disparate strains inside one person, let alone in the entire community?
I mean, look at the delta variant of Covid, the mRNA vaccines reduce the severity of infection, but do not prevent infection or spreading thereof.
mRNA vaccines will enable rapid iteration, which is good. But they're not a wonder drug at all.
I keep seeing that surface here. It is at odds with what I'm reading that says it /is/ effective at preventing infection[1] though not perfectly so. Are we looking at different metrics, or is my own ignorance of the field preventing me from fully understanding what I"m reading?
[1] most recently - https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e5.htm?s_cid=mm...
These requirements will have to be loosened for anti-Covid vaccines. They are tailored to other diseases, but SARS-CoV-2 mutates too fast. The flu vaccine has an exception, too, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to prepare the correct vaccine (against the expected dominant strain) on time.
I have no doubt that some kind of safety-related trials must be run on boosters and that they will be run, but they will likely only take weeks in the future, not months.
We need just one Jesse Gelsinger to shut the whole thing down.
We now have a few hundred million people who got mRNA vaccine and had no trouble. I don't think that even after a death, mRNA would be completely toast. It has already proven its merit.
J.G.'s death involved an experimental modified adenovirus (the same family of viruses used as the vector for several non-mRNA COVID vaccines: Johnson & Johnson/Janssen, Astrazenica/Oxford, and Sputnik V).
If a new vaccine is made by taking a gene sequence from a virus protein that's already in the wild, and packaging it into a delivery mechanism (LNP) that's already approved for another vaccine...
If there are any strange reactions to the new spike protein, that would also be caused by the wild virus spike protein, so it's an obvious competing harms situation where the vaccine should be approved, at least so long as the pandemic is ongoing.
I'm 1000% pro mRNA vaccines and pro covid vaccines, but they still need to be tested.
For fuck's sake, I'm not saying do no testing. I would assume they do basic checks, first in humanized animals, then using bioassays to try to detect all sorts of problems including antibody cross-reactivity with a wide variety of human cells. I'm also not against a preliminary limited human trial, with bloodwork checked after a few weeks to try to see if the assays missed anything obvious.
Short of that, what do you want them to do? We can't wait years to see if people develop symptomatic auto-immune problems. If we even wait 3-6 months for each new protein, the time advantage offered by mRNA or adenovirus vaccine tech is blown, or at least reduced to the point where there's no ability to react quickly to changing dominant viral strains in a pandemic, or new outbreaks of known diseases.
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about or why the GP comment mentioned an autoimmune disease specifically. mRNA vaccines express specific proteins whereas the virus expresses entire viral molecules. A novel protein expression could cause an autoimmune disease because the novel proteins couls cause the immune system to attack the cells producing the isolated proteins, a problem you wouldnt have with cells producing entire viral bodies.
The immune system doesn't generate antibodies to an entire virus. It generates antibodies to specific immunogenic proteins or parts of proteins.
If the spike protein resulting from a vaccine causes an immune response that generates antibodies to the spike protein and oops, also some endogenous human protein, that's autoimmune disease.
If you get infected by a virus with the same spike protein, your body will generate antibodies to the same spike protein and also cause autoimmune disease if the antibodies are cross-reactive.
If cells expressing exogenous immunogenic proteins triggered autoimmune disease[1], even the existing wild-type (alpha variant) vaccines would cause autoimmune disease. Presumably that's not happening. The immune system may attack those cells expressing the exogenous vaccine-coded spike proteins, but normal immune systems down-regulate it well enough that it doesn't cause major problems. It would be a sign of a broken immune system if it decided to initiate a long-term attack of human cells just because they once expressed an immunogenic protein. If it did that, any virus would cause autoimmune disease.
Please tell me you work in a field related to immunology and you have a subtler point that I'm missing, and that you didn't just create an account to criticize a point you misunderstood yourself.
[1] to an unacceptable degree. Obviously, things can go wrong with the immune system and almost anything could, if you're unlucky enough, trigger an immune reaction leading to autoimmune disease eventually.
Pushing out a vaccine that causes harm, even if it's substantially less than the virus it protects against, is asking for a lot of trouble.
Harm ratio = harm caused by vaccine / harm caused by virus
Exposure ratio = projected people who would be infected by the virus / projected people who would take the vaccine
In an airborne, high-R_0 pandemic situation, the exposure ratio is high enough that only one of two cases apply:
1) The potential health problems caused by small-scale exposure to the spike protein alone is relatively small compared to problems caused by infection, in which case vaccinate everyone. This is the current situation.
2) The potential health problems caused by small-scale exposure to the spike protein are significant (for example, hypothetical antibody cross-reactivity with a normal human protein, as mentioned in a parallel comment), in which case obviously don't vaccinate everyone, but lock down the world for a few weeks since having much of the world suffer autoimmune disease is untenable.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-probing-moderna-vaccine-...
The spike protein is not necessarily a problem, but both NLP and viral vectors have never been rolled at the current scale. TTS seems to be particular to viral vectors, Myocarditis/Pericarditis more so to NLP.
This is like comparing my house to the Willis Tower and saying, "they're literally changing nothing except the blueprints."
mRNA codes for proteins. Coding for a different protein will produce different effects in the body. Most will probably be harmless. If a vaccine codes for a protein too similar to proteins that already exist, that vaccine will produce autoimmune disease.
It's a cocktail of vaccines against the expected dominant strains based on data of strains in the opposite hemisphere because it mutates too quickly to produce a targeted vaccine against any specific strain before it arrives.
But I believe they can develop the vaccine fresh as new strains arrive, as well as reuse previous vaccine strains.
In practice, the efficacy is a fraction of what the trials stated it was. It didn't lose efficacy due to the delta variant, the manufacturers just lied about the efficacy by cherry picking the data.
The only option they have now is to blame people's immune systems for lack of response, thus the 'boosters' are needed.
IIRC these trials should last 3 months
Another is that recent studies are showing that natural infection provides much more comprehensive, long-lasting immunity against all variants than the vaccination does, while vaccination with the current vaccines offers much more immunity than individuals who have never been vaccinated or infected. So it would seem like the best course of action moving forward may be to vaccinate everyone possible initially to prime their immune systems and reduce the severity of the disease, and then allow Covid to run its course. Eventually vaccinated individuals will have break-through infections, gain the more durable natural immunity, and Covid will become a less serious, endemic virus more like the flu or cold.
In short, we don't yet have a need for a Delta variant vaccine. That may not be true eventually, especially for future variants.
Its all early enough that its still an open question, but there's definitely early evidence that natural immunity is more resilient than vaccination only.
And what would be an alternative?
Given how expensive those are to run, and how mRNA's primary benefit (speed of development) wasn't a competitive advantage in "normal" times, we had something that we thought was better, but no financial case to toss the gobs of money at it to get it certified.
If SARS-CoV-2 is remembered for one thing, it should be for finally breaking the logjam and "giving" us approved mRNA platforms.
Quit trying to sell either short - without both investments we would be in lockdown yet.
I'd be glad to see what Pfizer actually invested that wasn't backed by prepurchases.