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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

Polio is not solved. You need to learn more about it if you think that.

There is currently an epidemic of vaccine derived polio (of which this is a case). We do not have a solution for this.

I could write several pages of how Polio eradication is failed because of subtype 2, but maybe you could just read for yourself.

Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_eradication#2022 and see how man countries are being infected with cVDPV which is caused by vaccination!

Then scroll up and see how it's page after page after page of vaccine derived Polio.

There's currently a huge problems: Subtype 2 doesn't exist in the wild, so normally you would not vaccinate for it. But if you don't vaccinate for it than vaccine derived subtype 2 takes hold - but if you do vaccinate for it, then you create cases of vaccine derived polio!

So how do you solve that?

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Because there is an XKCD for everything, here is an XKCD guest post on Bill Gates' web site that shows how it is totally solved by vaccinating against it https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/XKCD-Marks-the-Spot.

This was published in 2015, when they thought exactly that. It really seemed like it was almost over, I remember checking the stats every few months hoping for the end.

It failed.

See my post for why it failed (in short: cVDPV2), but this xkcd is no longer correct. And ironically the person we are supposed to be laughing at in the strip, actually turned out to be correct - we need a whole new strategy (which is called nOPV2 if you want to lookup info).

Isn't the vaccine derived polio simply because it's the cheap version? If that's correct then the direct answer to your somewhat rhetorical question is: subsidise the expensive version globally so that we don't have to later pay for the externalities caused by a riskier vaccine?

You can't eradicate polio (the virus, not the disease) by doing that though, IPV (Inactivated Polio Vaccine), even the enhanced version, can't produce gut immunity to the level required to stop transmission even with a 100% vaccination rate.

Are you saying the problem is that we can't stop vaccinating for polio even if this normal type polio is gone? Because if we do stop vaccinating there is a risk of subtype 2 spreading. This looks like not a big problem. And it can be solved by making a beter vaccine(?)

> This looks like not a big problem. And it can be solved by making a beter vaccine(?)

Yes, make a better vaccine, not a big problem, why didn't anyone else think of that?

For your information they are trying, and have been working on it for years, it's called nOPV2.

By "not a big problem" I mean it would be worse to still have pandemic of original polio and maybe with additional mutations.

I am a layman in this field so I could be wrong.

You solve it by vaccinating for it.

I’m getting downvoted but that is the answer. You vaccinate people against it even though it’s not a wild disease.

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