Can mRNA Vaccines Defeat Herpes?
precisionvaccinations.com
precisionvaccinations.com
Pretty amazing. I hope this ends up passing clinical trials soon.
It may not be a cure for HIV but it’s also the sort of thing that would be nice to eliminate from the variables at play in “healthy” that affect basically everything to do with medical science. Taking a few more variables out of the equations will hopefully make other things easier to study.
CRISPR is most likely the cure for HIV as it can be used to modify embryonic DNA to create permanent immunity. That is actually what the first CRISPR embryo experiment tried to achieve a few years back in China.
But I don't know how CRISPR is delivered to edit DNA in live cells.
I somehow doubt it given that the mechanisms to protect against STDs are much better than before, the treatments when you do get them are much better than before, and even with all of this Millennials and Gen Z are having much less sex than older generations.
Consider scale. There are plenty of people who would love to take part in giant group orgies, at least once in a while, if there were no risk of communicable disease.
Everyone has their own idea of what a utopia might look like, I suppose.
Show me that at scale people are happier if they have lots of anonymous sex and giant group orgies.
But fair enough, if your primary impediment to having sex is that you want to engage in group orgies and just do not feel this is safe enough without better STD vaccines, then the mRNA vaccine revolution may be the silver bullet you have been looking for, hope it delivers for you.
But of course, if you just can't get off unless you are having unprotected sex with people you can't trust to not have STDs, then yes, I'm sure the mRNA revolution holds some promise. Hope it works out for you.
It doesn't need to be a primary impediment. Look at it in an economics sense: fear of and precautions over STDs impose an additional, unnecessary cost on sexual interaction. Like a tax, that imposes a deadweight loss where some sex doesn't happen that otherwise would occur.
Back in the real world, sex is certainly not a commodity, but someone who is particularly interested in sex with non-fully-vetted partners (particularly in casual or near-anonymous settings) would be more strongly affected by the STD deadweight loss.
I also look forward to having the serious ones cured. Chlamydia and gonorrhoea are easy to test for and not too bad if caught early. In Sweden we can just log in to a government health care web site, click a button and get a free test kit sent home. Having herpes out of the way would be great. HIV/AIDS doesn't seem to be that big of a thing anymore, at least not in my awareness. Not sure what is then left to be afraid of, except unwanted pregnancies and hurt feelings.
(1) A progressive moral counterpart to the conservative moral prudishness behind the mid-20th century sexual revolution. It's strange. In some ways, sex positive feminism has prevailed. And yet, sex in general seems more loaded and viewed with suspicion than it was back in the 1990's when I entered my late teens and early 20's.
(2) Internet-driven pornography addiction, social anxiety, and an all-around trend toward increased isolation and atrophied social skills.
TL;DR - Sex is down because too many young women are patriarchy-triggered by sexual advances, and because too many incel dudes have no game and get their needs met through OnlyFans. I don't think it's because people fear the clap.
https://denovo.substack.com/p/cytomegalovirus-the-worst-herp...
It says need to know for biosecurity/policymaking, so I'm guessing it's something about weaponization.
Combined with effect being limited in time (say, for half a year) this would create a steady revenue stream.
It's not possible for everyone to get the best of everything. After all, markets are about distributing scarce resources, not abundant ones.
that doesn't mean that the issue isn't real or isn't happening, because capitalism very much incites this kind of behaviour. That doesn't mean that abandoning capitalism is the right approach either, because that also solved other issues that would come back without it. Its just not an easy situation, but its nonetheless a reality that we have to admit that this kind of behaviour is highly rewarded with our current system and expect corporations to do whatever they can get away with, because most of the people that reach the highest position are amoral, simply because you cannot get to this kind of position without having that character trait
> While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.
> the success of [the cure] has gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...
There is thus absolutely no shortage of people who are willing to burn perfectly profitable companies for big enough short term gain. In this case they would wind up eating an entire submarket. I think orders of magnitude more qualifies as a temptation.
The situation is also inherently a prisoner's dilemma - pharmaceutical companies know that they are not special and that anything they let sit quietly buried may be discovered by another company who may benefit from the short term cash.
This is before getting into how immensely valueable the "ashes" are for any company who goes the cure route successfully. They have a reputational premium and have a collective team whose appraised value has risen. Given the choice between your average team of X years of experience and a disease curing team with X years of experience guess which one would appraise higher in share prices by a considerable margin?
> if someone else finds a permanent protection, then people will stop using your product and start using his
> if someone else finds a permanent protection, then people will stop using your product and start using hisI expect there would be a balance point for those who can afford and those who cannot.
At the less extreme end, you have FDA authority to approve a product. At the more extreme end, you have the entire corporate media establishment lined up against you and doctors threatened with disbarment for prescribing (or even just advising) off-label.
you can be sure they will design it like that or select the right versions that have such properties. Thats what you end up with MBAs leading businesses everywhere.
Why would the effect be limited? I mean it could be, but it could also cause people to turn green, not sure why we would consider either of those to be likely though without more info.
If you are assuming the effect will be limited because the effect of the covid vaccine is limited, this may be more related to covid than to mRNA vaccines, especially since the non mRNA covid vaccines seems to be less effective than the mRNA vaccines, and not more so. And after all, the mechanism of action for mRNA vaccines and non mRNA vaccines are not fundamentally different, both induce an immune response to a pathogen without giving you a disease.
Not saying I agree/am quite that suspicious/pessimistic necessarily, but that's how I read it.
I mean they could make one that turns you green and then mark up the one that does not also, that has not been the case, and generally vaccines produced by private companies without government involvement have significantly outperformed every vaccine made with government involvement, and every government action in US and most of the west in relation to these covid vaccines has been to favor pharmaceutical companies that make them over it's own citizenry, so basically it seems that the pharmaceutical companies that made these vaccines are much more deserving of public trust than many governments.
I mean if the pharmacutical companies abducted your children in the middle of the night and ransomed them back to you that would also create a steady revenue stream, not sure why it would be something to consider.
Is it? We had immunosuppressors for decades, we know about about AIDS and gene therapy. Doesn't sound like such an extreme feat to me.
On the other hand turning people green or any other such random proposition makes no sense. This is a weak analogy fallacy, dismissing a strong argument that has been observed in practice again and again by attacking an "analogous" but worthless pseudo-argument like "of course they're not turning people green". And I don't even want to get into the whole "if the pharmacutical companies abducted your children in the middle of the night and ransomed them back to you" nonsense. It's not making the point you think it's making, it just makes it look like you don't understand the discussion.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/curing-disease-n...
If you have to back your argument up by some analyist saying companies woudl make more money if they did something other than they were doing, then that does not make your argument strong.
> that has been observed in practice again and again by attacking an "analogous" but worthless pseudo-argument like "of course they're not turning people green".
And yet instead of citing an actual case of this, you cite an analyst that says companies would make more money by not curing diseases. Companies would also make more money if they kidnapped people's children and ransomed them back than if they did not do that, ignoring pesky things like legality and all that of course, but who knows, I'm sure politicans that would allow them to do this would be a dime a dozen anyway.
- the green people "argument" - yes, they could turn people green. But what sells is turning people white, something many black celebrities actually do (skin whitening, look it up).
- the even more ridiculous "kidnap your kids" idea - they could but the kidnapping model triggers a response that grows exponentially towards life threatening for the kidnappers, making it particularly risky, expensive, and difficult to implement. Not a good business proposition, hence it only happens in some countries where victims have few protections, and the response from authorities can be "mitigated" cheaply.
- it's "just a report" - but one with uncontested premise and conclusion, and even confirmed in practice. Pharma companies routinely jack up prices by orders of magnitude even for drugs that are cheaper to make than ever, because they are needed in ongoing treatment (basic things like insulin, 70 years old anti-parasitic drugs, or epi-pens).
Planned obsolescence cartels have been doing the same thing a century ago [0], after not seeing much value in kidnapping kids or turning people green (presumably with green light bulbs).
You made for some really low quality conversation. I wouldn't regret I spent my time on this if I knew it got you past the "green people" and "child abduction" level of argumentation. Alas.
When you work on hard problems like this you’re thankful it works at all.
The mRNA vaccines aren't a conspiracy to milk and control the population, some people are trying their very best to do good. ALSO, there are people that have a sole "job" of milking every cent possible and others that use this as an opportunity to gain influence and advance whatever political/business career they pursuit.
This happens everywhere and every time.
Yes, this "they are in this to get us" get's tiring but let's not put the "scientists" in a pedestal, because they are people e many of them aren't even scientists.
That aside, it certainly possible to have infinite respect for the scientific method, but at the same time be mindful that method meets reality via (often very flawed) humans. Questioning the human element in this equation doesn't make you anti-science (because there's a difference between the two).
If you think you scientists have multiple options in front of them and can pick the most financially opportunistic one, you have no idea what R&D is like
I’ve been in the lab, have you?
Not to be alarmist, but this does happen. There are many classes of drugs that both offer temporary and permanent treatments. Often times, these have different tradeoffs.
Garbage in, garbage out.
If you don't see the problem with that, it's already too late for you.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Also loving this typical cop-out argument of "If you don't see the problem then there's no hope". Either explain your weird stance further or stop getting fussy when people decide they don't want to listen to you. We're not lemmings, we're capable of analyzing situations with a critical eye.
2. It gets tiring having the same discussion over and over again. Often it is better for the community to just downvote and move on.
mRNA technology is so promising I bought some biotech ETFs early in the year (they're all underwater at the moment, but I'm looking for a 10-20 year payoff, so that's no problem).
It's not like that someone will go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexually_transmitted_infection make a list, prepare a vaccine combos for all of them and release it in a big announcement.
Parallelizing calls without synchronicity problems
Those are likely the most tested vaccines in history.
We're suppose to be able to do things like this in order to save ourselves. Imagine if COVID was deadlier, had a higher R-naught, etc. Would you still be advocating for "taking it slow"? If hundreds of thousands were dying per day should we still be waiting years for a vaccine?
You can also laud the mrna vaccines and be critical of the obscene profits being made.
In fact, you can also promote vaccinating as widely as possible, and at the same time harshly condemn the politicization of medicine, the creation of second class citizens, and the nonsense power games being fought that seem to exclusively benefit massive corporations that fund political campaigns.
I think even with a 10% CFR, there'd be droves of vaccine skeptics, unless the virus hits people with more or less uniform symptoms.
...or maybe it even has nothing to do with lethality at all, look at the ebola vaccine rollouts in Africa.
They were also handled with an abundance of caution, which is why many countries suspended the Oxford vaccine after initial reports of adverse effects in young women despite the extremely low frequency hinting at sampling bias rather than genuine side-effects.
lol.
This is crazy to be honest. If there was some malfeasance during the development of the vaccines, the people responsible will be long dead by then and cannot be punished. In that case Pfizer would just pay some fine and continue business as usual.
The vaccine could be developed very quickly, I don't understand why there is the needs to wait so long to release the data - the data itself (emails, scientific documents and such) should be quite limited. I believe Pfizer claimed it's too much data to process and they need many years, but I find this quite unbelievable.
"Just give me all of it" is easy to request, but hard to implement.
Gathering this data would be a breeze.
> The FDA proposes releasing 500 pages per month on a rolling basis, noting that the branch that would handle the review has only 10 employees and is currently processing about 400 other FOIA requests.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/wait-what-fda-wants...