Comment by gonational | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gonational | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

For anybody else who stumbles across the above uninformed comment, here is some information for context (wrt "gene therapy", etc.):

https://www.nature.com/gt/journal-information

https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/gene-based-therape...

A certain degree of ignorance can be forgiven in this day and age, because everything is being constantly re-defined by the television, and most folks get their information from the television.

So don't attack people for not knowing things, but just be aware how many low information people are unintentionally misleading others. You can even see in the parent comment, the primary source of information for most of these people is some form of media company (Miami Herald, in this case). This is, unfortunately, the new normal.

Logging in with different accounts and downvoting this won't change the facts.

I was prepared to believe I was wrong about the technical definition of ‘gene therapy’, but your links are to a description of the journal called “Gene Therapy”, and an article about “Gene-Based Therapeutic Approaches” that mentions the term once.

A google search for “gene therapy” brings up many links to respectable organizations and publications, most of which state that ‘gene therapy’ involves altering the patient’s DNA. No vaccines do this. To call them ‘gene therapy’ to the public (or to ‘low information people’, if you insist) is misleading at best and scaremongering at worst.

As for the link to a Miami Herald article about the CDC’s wording change, how do you suggest I search for the likely source of the parent comment’s information?

It said (with no sourcing) “The United States CDC literally changed the definition of "vaccine" this year, so that these products could still be identified as vaccines” and I wanted to get a sense for the truth of that - and if true, if the legitimacy of the change. What I found did not concern me.

…and thinking about this a bit more, it seems unlikely to me that any sort of approval for medication that makes it less likely that a person would become infected with Covid (colloquially, a ‘vaccine’) would rely on the definition of the word “vaccine” on an informational CDC web site - which seems to be what you’re (perhaps unintentionally) _implying_ with your comments.

If this is what you believe, do you have a source for this?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com