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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

That's good. But the lower lungs already get seepage of body serum/humoral igM and igG. If you really want to protect against infections then you have to induce mucosal immunity (and get tissue resident B and T cells) in the surface layer of the upper respiratory. Unfortunately intramuscular vaccinations do not do that, they only give serum/humoral immunity. So they're only the first step to protect against serious disease.

India has just released it's intranasal sars-cov-2 vaccine for use as of a month ago (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-64421961). I'm waiting anxiously on those large scale public results. Especially as a booster after intramuscular.

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I'm surprised we haven't gotten an intranasal vaccine before now. We've been talking about the issues with intramuscular vaccines in regards to mucosal immunity since the very beginning.

I believe that the technocratic culture of US medicine is standing in the way of research on intranasal vaccines.

What you consistently hear from medical professionals is, "we have this proven technology, it works, the objections to it are irrational, can we please just be sensible?" So far, so good… (I'm a bit of a technocrat myself)

But why are people so afraid of vaccines in particular? There are all sorts of arguments about autism and turning frogs gay or whatever, but people are still happy to take whatever pills the doctor prescribes and hormone-enriched fast food… what makes vaccines different? It seems pretty clear that people are just afraid of needles, and from an evolutionary biology perspective, that's not irrational at all!

But "maybe we should make vaccines that won't scare people" just won't get you anywhere in the US medical establishment. Frightened patients aren't Serious Medicine.

People are scared of needles is incredibly dismissive and likely intentionally insulting. People aren't afraid of the needles; they're concerned about the unknown impacts of what's being injected through the needles. While needle phobia exists, it's very small percentage of those who didn't want the mystery chemical cocktail pushed by those who openly told countless "noble" lies. The vast majority of these people have had hundreds of shots over the course of their lives, including many previously well tested and well understood vaccines (none of which required 1984 style rewriting of the dictionary).

Can't believe anyone is still pushing what's basically a shame tactic that is typically aimed at pre-adolescents. Do you feel smart or virtuous having posted that dismissive and insulting reductive view of people who don't blindly follow "THE SCIENCE" like you do? It's not the needles! It's the contents! How is that not incredibly obvious?

None of this address his main point of 'why the vaccines when pharma has does the same thing a bunch of times to other things yet people still take tylenol (which is demonstrably toxic and causes serious illness and death all the time)'?

The same people who refuse the vaccine take unknown substances in 'supplements' which have no regulation at all. It makes no sense. Explain it.

I refused the vaccine and I don't take supplements unless my doctor tells me to. I don't take tylenol either, or really anything else that I don't absolutely need (e.g. antibiotics for an infection that won't clear on its own).

Maybe these "same people" that you're describing exist, but they definitely aren't everyone in the set of people who refused the vaccine. They might just be the loud people.

Again, I am not asking for specific explanations. The grandparent comment gave a theory as to why vaccines in general have become fodder for public outrage, when those same arguments against them work for other things that are common, with the outlier being 'needles'.

The parent comment said 'it's not needles, don't insult me! it is because this specific vaccine is [same argument against other things which aren't outrage fodder and not addressing any of the other established vaccines which are subject to outrage]. '

It did nothing to explain away the needle aspect except 'needle phobia is uncommon', which explains nothing since a phobia is DSM classified as a 'disorder' and an 'aversion to needles' wouldn't count.

Thanks for telling me about yourself, though. It was interesting.

I can explain it. Tylenol has been around since 1955 and is only demonstrably toxic in overdoses. The mrna based vaccines have been only used for the past couple years, hence long term side effects are unknown.

Not everyone who refuses the vaccine takes supplements. Your comparison is like saying "why don't you take this research chemical ('molly'), you smoke cannabis already".

You didn't explain it, you explained around it.

I didn't ask why specifically about tylenol and supplements, I said explain why the outrage over vaccines and not other things.

You said "The same people who refuse the vaccine take unknown substances in 'supplements' which have no regulation at all. It makes no sense. Explain it." I replied to that point directly.

The "outrage over vaccines and not other things" is in part because the mrna vaccines are new technology. People are hesitant to try something totally new on themselves.

The MMR vaccines are not mRNA. You are completely missing the point. See my other comment in this thread if you want a specific breakdown.

>> "The same people who refuse the vaccine take unknown substances in 'supplements' which have no regulation at all. It makes no sense. Explain it."

>> The "outrage over vaccines and not other things" is in part because the mrna vaccines are new technology. People are hesitant to try something totally new on themselves.

> The MMR vaccines are not mRNA. You are completely missing the point.

Ironic, as you now choose to ignore the explanation.

If you failed to explain an implicit assumption, that's ok, as it's hard to communicate over forums. Introducing MMR (there is no reference to this in "another post") as if there was a misunderstanding on the poster's part is a non-sequitor at best and dishonest at worst.

You missing the entire context of the conversation and replying to a specific part of my response to another person is not a miscommunication, but OK.

I didn't 'introduce' anything. The grandparent post is about 'vaccines' in general. the mRNA vaccine is one of them.

> You missing the entire context of the conversation

The entire comment section of this article can be perused in a few minutes. Cntrl-f and I find all your comments. At this moment there are 5 (4 of which are this thread). There hasn't been some elaborate discussion that's hard to follow.

> replying to a specific part of my response to another person is not a miscommunication,

Plainly dishonest. Got it.

Apparently you have used my comments to 'prove' that I am dishonest for 'introducing' the fact that pluralization means 'more than one'.

Let's break this down with an example:

P1: What don't you like about milks?

P2: I don't like cows.

P1: Goats are not cows.

Is P1 dishonest? If you say yes, I would disagree with you and say that you are attributing to dishonesty what is for you reading comprehension problem. If you say no then I say you are grasping at straws in order to find flaws in my argument because you cannot find a real one.

Because people also get freaked out about vaccines that have been proven to be safe and effective for over a hundred years.

> safe and effective

Those people maybe not being specialist cannot differentiate those remedies which are "safe" as the poster writes (which equals to "no risks or some risk of mild impact") and those which can have catastrophic impact in the relatively small set of the unlucky.

I think it was perfectly reasonable to take the tact of waiting to see the safety of mRNA vaccines.

Now, however, they’re considerably less mysterious than you say they are. Several billion people have now received them, and any honest reading of the evidence from that would strongly support them being very very safe. If there were serious safety problems, we would have seen them undeniably by now.

Aside from multiple revisions to the list of risks, each adding multiple cardiac side effects.

> people are still happy to take whatever pills

Are you sure? Do you have numbers to show that (a critical number would be skeptical on one side and careless or trusting on the other)?

There's been a few attempts, but they haven't proven to be effective, e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41591-022-00106-z

There have been many attempts. And many of them have proven successful at the ~42 person trial level that failed in this particular study with a common adenovirus as the DNA delivery agent. The one I linked did work in large scale clinical trials which is why it is now being given to the public.

Plus intranasal influenza a vaccines have been around since the 1960s. I alternate getting intramuscular and intranasal influenza vaccines for best protection of myself and others.

I'm very hopeful for this full scale intranasal roll out of a proven intranasal vaccine for sars-cov-2. I am seriously considering a trip to India to get it as a booster to my 4x mRNA intramusculars from Moderna and BioNTech(Pfizer). I just wish they'd use nebulizers instead of a simple spray. Simple sprays work for the fluid dynamics scales involved in small animal models but as large humans we need nebulizers to get the most complete upper respiratory protection.

China has been rolling one out in addition to Sinovax.

I think the situation is a little more complex than this. I recommend reading https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(2...

In short, we have to consider that other viruses like OC43 and HKU1 either do not have durable mucosal responses, or the response of the immune system is to slow for the viral dynamics of some viruses.

Asking as a laymen, any concerns about intranasal vaccines bypassing the blood-brain barrier? Or is that a feature not a bug?

What he said.

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