Universal flu vaccine against all known subtypes takes promising first steps
science.org
science.org
It’s pretty disheartening to see so many comments here questioning the flu vaccine. So much anecdotal fallacy happening here. I would expect numeracy of this audience to be relatively high…
On top of that there have been incidents where the risk was oversold (Swine Flu in the 1970#] and the vaccine is problematic.
Thanks to a perverse reaction (you tell me to do this so I will not do it) we are going to see uptake of all kinds of vaccine drop.
Myself I got the quadrivalent flu shot, my wife didn’t, she got the flu for thanksgiving and was off her feet for three days. I slept next to her the whole time and did not get it. If I had, watching her suffering, I would have called my doc for antivirals at the first sign.
Based on the descriptions I have read of influenza, I’m relatively certain I have either never had it or have had it maybe once in my adult life.
Most years I get a bad cold that lasts 5 days or so (plus some time for my sinuses to completely return to normal) and maybe a couple lesser colds. None of these are “the flu”.
I get the flu vaccine every year, but only started that around age 35 or so. I’m in my early 50’s now.
I've only had the flu once that I know of after an conference in Las Vegas about 12yrs ago, and it was the worst illness I've ever had. I went into work on day 1, immediately turned around went home, and nearly passed out going up the stairs. The next three days were a fugue of blinking and the shadows from the trees outside moving.
For anyone with unvaccinated proper influenza there should be no question of if you're going to work or not. You're not going to be capable of it. Trying to order groceries online should be highly mentally taxing.
I'd strongly recommend once someone sees a fever above 100F that they get antivirals as well and not try to suffer through it like a dumbass.
(Tangentially, compare to people who "got the worst sickness of their adult life" in late 2019 and swear they were patient zero of COVID in the US -- probably just influenza, 19/20 was a bad season before COVID hit).
“During seasonal epidemics, it is estimated that about 80% of otherwise healthy people who have a cough or sore throat have the flu.”
> During seasonal influenza epidemics, diagnosis on the basis of clinical presentation has reasonable accuracy in previously healthy young and middle-aged adults, in whom the presence of fever with either cough or sore throat is associated with influenza virus infection in ~80% of patients.
So Wikipedia doesn’t add that this statement is about the accuracy of diagnosis by a clinician, and completely ignores the important symptom of a fever.
Just prior to the statement referring to 80%, Wikipedia also states the following, with references:
> In a typical year, influenza viruses infect 5–15% of the global population
This is one of a class of problem I've identified as "stuff i learned in my childhood that is simply wrong".
For some reason, I grew up with the impression that vomiting and/or GI issues could be the flu, or the 24 hour flu. I'm not entirely sure how respiratory viruses with fevers became confused in such a manner.
Colloquially flu is often reserved for a non-specific viral infection that makes you very unwell, but that could be a “common cold virus”, while somebody with a “cold” might be suffering from influenza!
I’m surprised that this belief still holds despite the wide exposure to higher quality information on this topic during the pandemic.
Rhinovirus, common cold coronaviruses, metapneumovirus and even RSV don't commonly cause the high fever seen in typical symptomatic influenza cases--which is what the influenza vaccine is seeking to avoid.
And the whole point is that vaccination will help to prevent a symptomatic infection typically characterized by ~103F fever for up to 3 days with one of those asymptomatic infections that you mention.
And the problem is that most adults may go years or even decades between those severe enough flu infections. They're mostly likely just catching colds. Maybe they caught a flu strain and their adaptive or innate immune system fought it off so they really did have "24 hour flu". But the point is that those very mild respiratory infections are not characteristic of a typical symptomatic influenza presentation which can be prevented by the vaccine. People become complacent talking about those symptoms as being typical of influenza, while typical symptomatic presentation of influenza is much worse.
And even if you want to go down the rabbit hold of arguing PCR this or that and maybe there's a wild amount of asymptomatic influenza infections every year -- it doesn't really matter -- the point is the severity of the infection on the higher end of the distribution. And rhinoviruses really do lack that level of severity because they don't carry the same disease burden and don't kill as many people.
But once you arbitrarily declare somebody didn’t have flu if they weren’t sick for three or more days, or didn’t get a high enough fever, well then I don’t think that’s valid either in common usage or scientifically.
Since you brought up people misusing terms, I think that’s a pretty valid response.
> typically characterised by
What are you basing this on? I have only found estimates of asymptomatic infection, but do you have any studies that performed a random sample of the population looking at disease severity by positive PCR?
Covid was a much more severe illness with very little endemic immunity and we still saw dramatic variation in outcome. It seems to be estimated that a third of influenza infections are asymptomatic - do you propose that the distribution is entirely bimodal and that everyone else had severe symptoms? This seems implausible given the broad (and highly differentiated by prior variant) level of population immunity.
The only studies I could find (with an admittedly cursory search) look at people already suffering from ILI and testing the likelihood that the ILI is influenza, which does not tell you what proportion of people experience mild symptoms with influenza infection. It does however tell you that many of these people are not suffering from influenza, but would have likely said they had “flu” and met your criteria.
My point therefore is that “flu” doesn’t mean influenza, since there’s no common definition that is either sufficient or necessary to correctly identify an influenza infection, and we do not require a PCR test to use the term. It therefore means a severe non-specific viral illness, or perhaps an “influenza like illness”
It also means criticising people for using the term for a mild illness is probably fair, but not because it doesn’t meet the criteria of being influenza, and I really wish people would stop using this kind of argumentation about it, as though they have any idea what a specific influenza infection looks like.
Do you also not believe you need car insurance because you haven't gotten in an accident and gotten sued over it yet?
The framing of people who don't get every vaccine offered to them as "anti-vax" is ridiculous. Have you been vaccinated against rabies, on the off chance you run into a bat? No, I really doubt you have. The risk is small so you round it down to zero and stop worrying about it.
You said you don't want to 'subject' yourself to the injections, and I brought up the insurance comparison.
I think you may have an issue with abstract thinking. It is something you might want to look into improving. It seems that when you don't understand something, instead of asking for clarification, you get defensive and become kind of unreasonably difficult. You will probably end up happier if you don't come across as a jerk when the reality is that you just need help parsing what other people are saying because you have trouble thinking conceptually.
* http://www.projectlearnet.org/tutorials/concrete_vs_abstract...
If I can catch flu or Covid a couple fewer times over a lifetime because the healthier people around me were vaccinated, or masked, or installed better ventilation, that would likely improve my life quite a bit.
(I say this with no judgement, just to raise awareness of something I assume you haven’t considered, and I hadn’t much thought about myself before I was personally affected)
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm
More readable analysis by Johns Hopkins said, "vaccinated people infected with the delta variant can carry detectable viral loads similar to those of people who are unvaccinated".
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/new-data-on-covid-19-trans...
It’s becoming increasingly evident that vaccinating annually as has been the suggestion for decades may in fact cause vaccines to become less effective for you personally over time which can be bad if you develop another health condition that puts you at high risk or as you age generally. The theory is that it is due to negative interference:
“The idea is that the antibodies produced in year one may neutralize some of the vaccine in year two’s shot before it can trigger a full immune response, explained Dr. John Treanor, a vaccine expert at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York.”
Then we had a family member who got very sick a month or two ago because of the flu, he was sent to ER, ICU, and eventually didn't make it. That sent a shock wave to our family. He planned to get the flu vaccine a bit later but got sick right before.
Please get vaccinated, if it doesn't work well, it may give us the second chance to survive.
The "vaccine is not about preventing the infection" meme got really annoying since COVID, since the COVID vaccine while very useful turned out to not be as useful for infection prevention as we'd thought.
That does not change the fact that the role of a "vaccine" is mainly to prevent the infection, and the "getting less sick" fact is a second class effect.
You’re correct [1]. The vaccine mainly aims to reduce the frequency and intensity of illness.
More generally, vaccines are just a mechanism for acquiring immunity. Immunity doesn't mean "you don't feel sick," it means "your immune systems responds better and faster to the real thing."
I do not need to need to be educated about how vaccines work, I know that there is a secondary effect of vaccines that primes your immune system and makes the disease easier to fight. But it's a secondary effect, otherwise we would call more things "vaccines", as we know that for example "exercise helps with immune response".
The fact that people confuse the two is a legitimate public education problem. But it doesn't change what they actually are, or how medical professionals use the word.
> But it's a secondary effect, otherwise we would call more things "vaccines", as we know that for example "exercise helps with immune response".
It is the effect. I think everybody understands the difference between taking care of yourself and receiving a medical preparation that stimulates your immune system against a specific disease.
The CDC changed the definition of vaccine on Sept 2, 2021 and removed the reference to immunity.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210901163633/https://www.cdc.g...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210902194040/https://www.cdc.g...
And just to preempt your question, every news source reachable via Google says the change has nothing to do with COVID or the effectiveness of the COVID vaccine.
> every news source reachable via Google says the change has nothing to do with COVID or the effectiveness of the COVID vaccine.
Either way, it doesn't matter: the website in question is a public information page, not a medical reference. The CDC updated it because it was incorrect, and the timing of their update makes perfect sense given the public's confusion (and predation around that confusion).
At no point did I say that you should not get vaccinated, you are putting words in my mouth. I said that the original intention of vaccines was to prevent infection. It is still the main way that most people conceptualizes vaccines too.
This seems to be particularly true for fast-acting viral respiratory diseases. Our immune systems seem to have soft biological limits on how well they can prevent them.
I think that my employer really wants to avoid any downtime of his workforce and suggests a flu vaccination every year. I think that some downtime is good for my wellbeing and that I don't wan't to be more effective.
I do not see what is wrong with that motive. Companies have a duty to protect themselves do they not?
However it was definitely effectively in decreasing the number of employees who took sick time during flu season though. Just the convenience of running down to the break room to get it vs going to a clinic increased the number of employees who would get the seasonal shot.
Sure, most of the time you get the flu it sucks but it's not a big deal... but it can be pretty bad. It's well worth getting the vaccination, especially if your company or insurance provides it for free, just to avoid the possibility of severe issues.
I might change my mind when I get older but right now I don't mind this.
Also I don't understand the negative comments. I don't reject vaccines in general. I just don't think that flu vaccination is required for me. Yes, I know that flu might kill me one day, but so can so much else.
A lot of people assume they have the flu when it's really a bad cold
probably not.
I wonder if the technology will reach a point where we can print mRNA on demand. Could we build a database of bacteriophage viruses that target various strains of bacteria, and use custom-printed mRNA to produce the correct virus when someone has a bacterial infection?
https://www.scripps.edu/news-and-events/press-room/2019/2019...
The biggest issue is that circulating neutralizing antibodies take up a finite fraction of the blood. One of the reasons why neutralizing antibodies fade over time is to literally make more space for other antibodies. One of the reasons why you need a boost of a vaccine at least 6 months after the first dose is that somatic hypermutation takes time to develop high affinity neutralizing antibodies that are effective in much small fractions of the blood.
Even after that though neutralizing antibodies still tend to fade and what is left is just the memory T-cells and B-cells in lymph tissue. So the immune system naturally activates and deactivates. But this is more like a book on a bookshelf. It isn't really consuming "energy" and there's a massive amount of them that are available.
You also need to be much more worried about all the naturally occurring viruses and antigens that you're being exposed to--including the ones that don't actually get you sick at all. You're worrying about the sparring partners of a heavyweight prizefighter "sapping their energy" and ignoring the real opponents.
If you've read something about COVID and lympocytopenia ("T-cell exhaustion") then that only happens in severe COVID and shows up in autopsies and is studied as an indicator of how mild (unhospitalized) COVID turns into severe life-threatening COVID. The people who talk about that on social media are literally ignorant idiots who don't know what they're talking about.
Many things do not need any sort of boosting and you retain lifetime immunity or near-immunity.
What you are describing (bone marrow radiation) has been used to treat Multiple Sclerosis. But diets (which radically change gut bacteria) have also been used to treat MS. So it's complicated, and it's possible for what is currently considered a single disease to be a common symptomatology for different root causes.
Are there any experts here that can confirm that is a coincidence or explain why mRNA as a technology is more susceptible to issues like that?
In the last few years a slew of COVID vaccines were widely deployed without myocarditis as a complication. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines made headline news for their elevated risk of myocarditis, and resulted in changes in vaccine recommendations for certain demographics. Both were mRNA based. Do they have other things in common, dosage, proteins, preservatives, shelf lives? What else is similar between them and different from the other vaccines?
> It seems that mRNA vaccines are becoming like antivirus software updates
[0]: https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/flu-vaccination-ra...
I got flu shot three times and got sick with (not flu ordinary sickness) right after three times and it took two weeks to feel good after. I guess the issue is that I am rarely entirely healthy during cold season and flu shot pushes me over the line. Not really work it.
I would take it if I had reason to - like a relative with super weak immune system or had to go to hospital whatever. But other then that, it is not worth it.
But after the first two flu shots it was: known couple of days feeling sick plus very low chance of major complication vs unlikely several days of feeling sick plys low chance of major complication ... and there's a decent chance of getting the shot, feeling sick, and then getting the flu and feeling sick again.
Now that I've gotten the shot enough times that I don't have a strong response, it's easier to just get it. The very low chance of major complications with no family history of such isn't enough for me to worry about. But the US has different policies on this intervention than other countries, so reasonable people can differ, I guess.
Humans are not well equiped with intuition about objrctive risk assesment
Big claims require big evidence.
They made decisions and rewrote those decisions within 24 hours due to political blowback not just once, but multiple times. They might do good science, but they lost any trust I had in their ability to set and execute a coherent national policy.
Your tone suggests sarcasm, but this claim is literally true.
They couldn't spend the time to get the feedback before announcing the policy and then had to walk it back the next day.
That's hubris. The fact that it happened multiple times (masks, schools, full lockdown then "essential" workers) is a national embarrassment.
All what I see are citations of papers about this or that detail and then use it as "proof!".
There are hundreds of millions if not even more people who are fearful of vaccines and/or don't trust the government/elites involvement in the research.
All they have to do is to hire a very large number of scientists to do serious independent research.
Yet they “do research” which means just let confirmation bias run wild completely ungrounded. Let’s say they funded such a study and it came back with “the mainstream” answer which isn’t what they want.. you think they’d change their mind? I had read that flat earthers have tried to do similar things, each time getting the “wrong answer,” so they explain it away incorrectly.
It’s very sad because all of this “destroy institutions, destroy science, destroy XYZ” is rooted in extreme greed for one particular thing (eg less taxes for the Koch brothers) and it ends up taking all of society out with it. It’s very easy to be against something, particularly when you don’t understand it.
Vaccines are a subscription model business for pharma. Every time they get a new vaccine approved it's a potential market of 8 billion people that they don't have to wait for to get sick.
People argue that pharma would actually make more money not selling flu vaccines, for example, because people would have to pay for more expensive treatments that would benefit them more, but that's illogical because most flu is treated with cheap otc meds at home.
Vaccines are great, but people will lose faith in them if they get the impression that pharma is motivated by greed and not for doing good for humanity.
If everybody is wrong then it shouldn't be that hard to prove it. You don't need big pharma pockets.
If in principle you can't find 500M people willing to invest $10 in a crowd funding campaign it means that the vaccine skeptics are actually a minority and why are we having this conversation?
With 5 billion dollars you can find enough scientists to seriously research and rigorously destroy any bullshit that big pharma is selling to us!
But it's not like this research output in itself would prove the anti vax point. It's not a quantity versus quantity, my word against your word mechanism.
Once we have that body of well written papers, then we can have a next level discussion about it.
They can easily spend way more than 80eu on various natural pills.
Does it mean that the anti-vax movement is actually funded by the "Big Natura" complex?
Sure, you're pointing out one mechanism that nudges things the other way.
But there is also a strong psychological mechanism that makes people fearful of vaccines no matter what.
What if this mechanism may cause people to use exaggerate the effects of the various flaws/bad incentives you pointed out?
Reference?
Let's not pretend a flu shot stops the flu. It might. Or it might cause problems. Or, in most cases, it does nothing for better or worse.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/past-seasons-estimates...
It could happen, but you'd be a fool to worry about it. Rational people round small risks down to zero and go about their lives instead of aging themselves worrying about every possibility.
This is a rhetorical question, because statistically you have zero need to lock your doors at night. The odds of you getting robbed is so low that you would be a fool to worry about it, and should not be concerned with locking your door.
I always get my flu shot now.
There’s also the chance that you got a variant of that wasn’t protected, hence the value of this work.
This is nonsense - like you said in the second part - flu shots work on select strains - he could have a different one at which point the shot was useless.
This argument (and similar) really sound like religious beliefs ("believe science"). From what I've seen - if you're 18-50 it's not worth getting.
There are plenty of people for whom is VERY MUCH worth getting in those age categories. Don't generalize with health.
Vaccination isn't a guarantee that you wont get sick. Picture your body like Omaha beach on D-Day the more boats landing the better the chances that the invasion makes it past the beach no matter how well armed the defenders.
If you are 18-50 the risk of the flu isn't very high but the risk of the shot is comparatively microscopic. It's still worth it on net and it decreases the chances of infecting someone less healthy or older who as mentioned before is imperfectly protected by vaccination alone. You not spreading or as much is fewer invaders on their beach.
Anyway I highly recommend "In Defense of Self" https://www.amazon.com/Defense-Self-Immune-System-Really/dp/... its a little old but well written and comprehensible.
That's exactly what this attempt at a universal vaccine is trying to change.
Good odds the flu shot did nothing at all for you.
It will be interesting to see whether it also provides better than 50% efficacy.
That's their aspiration. Time will tell.
Having vaccination programs in workplaces and other places people visit often can probably help with that. Pharmacies have begun to offer flu vaccines in the past 10 years or so, which is great. Making all vaccines free to the recipient would also make the choice simpler.
So I get at least $500 for spending 30min to go to a doctor every year, which is all the incentive I need to remember to schedule it (as simple as putting a yearly reminder in my calendar).
They self-insure so it not only reduced time taken because of illness but reduced their insurance costs.
* Children between 6 months and 2 years
* People with more than 65 yea old
* Pregnant women
* Special cases, like other chronic illness
It's free for these groups. Other people can get it too paying a small fee.
Herd immunity is only a nice side effect when you have enough vaccinated people and the vaccine is good enough to stop the spread.
The word "subtypes" in the title is much broader than variants.
And it may not prevent infection but it could take some 1918-like novel influenza pandemic that would be 10x more lethal than the coronavirus pandemic we just suffered and turn it into the 2009 H1N1 pandemic (for everyone who bothered to get vaccinated anyway).
That is exactly what this attempt at a very broad coverage is attempting to change.
The second problem is that this process makes it hard to build up stockpiles to actually provide vaccines to everyone, and so there's little incentive for any broad pushes to increase update outside of specific groups of people.
If this attempt succeeds at getting coverage for a vaccine that can stay the same for longer periods, then expect to see attempts to distribute it more broadly and maybe even attempts to eradicate some of the strains.
If everyone takes the flu vaccine and wipes out that strain for the season, won't we just get a different strain of flu circulating for the year?
Note that there's a possibility that a couple of flu strains may have gone extinct due to reduced transmission during covid [1] [2] [3], so we have a chance at getting direct data on this over the next few years if those strains don't make a reappearance.
[1] https://www.livescience.com/flu-virus-types-extinct-covid-19...
That's it.
Never had a the flu that I am aware of.
I would definately be interested if a shot that covered all types, but not interested in taking something annually personally for a what seems a highly remote risk of infection so far never catching the flu (when even being around others with it).
Is there any stats of people who had a flu shot but still got the flu? I hear it's always the case of oh it's a different strain spreading this season than the shot... Or majority of people who say they have the flu it's really not
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/past-seasons-estimates...
Current flu vaccines target a whole strain (of which there are only a dozen or so and it's very rare for more to show up), not individual variants like the covid vaccines (just enough mutations to be called different).
If we're going back in time, which would you prefer first: measles, mumps, or rubella?
Polio's all natural too.