So, one shot and no more flu? ever?
Hemagglutinin has 18 subtypes, this style of vaccines are targeting them all, but we don't have data on how complete coverage will be (and or how common a mutation exists that could allow partial of complete circumvention).
We also don't have data on how long before the immune system needs to be retrained (aka re-vaccinated).
This isn't to foo-foo this vaccine; this legitimately could create a "universal" vaccine that could last years with only some minor reformulation every so often to catch new sub-types of HA.
TL;DR: This thing could be great. We'll need more data to know.
ending up with a cough is very different ending up in a hospital, needing a ventilator.
people forget that flu vaccines are important: many people die from the flu every year. even if flu vaccines don't 'last' in the sense that they might not stop you from getting any sort of sick, they almost certainly are effective in preventing major illness.
That's much more about the virus than the vaccine type, no? The non-mRNA vaccines acted similarly.
Repeated doses of the vaccine broaden and increase the antibody response, so of course it makes sense to encourage them when infections are raging, and an annual booster will induce an antibody response, providing increased protection for a period of time, so of course it makes sense to encourage them, especially for more vulnerable people.
This inability to look at things in a sort of probabilistic sense, where things can be good without being perfect, is incredibly damaging.
The vaccines had two problems:
1. Spike protein is nasty. It causes clotting and organ damage. Doesn't matter how it gets in your body: virus, mrna, adenovirus, classical grow-it-in-eggs.
2. mRNA drugs specifically rely on special coatings which were as recently as 2017 unable to launch on the market due to toxicity that develops after multiple dosings. There's no evidence this problem was ever solved and Moderna pivoted from drugs to vaccines specifically because they couldn't solve it, the logic being that with vaccines you only have to take them once to get a lifetime of protection so the toxicity doesn't matter (doh).
https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/
mRNA is a tricky technology. Several major pharmaceutical companies have tried and abandoned the idea, struggling to get mRNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects
Three former employees and collaborators close to the process said Moderna was always toiling away on new delivery technologies in hopes of hitting on something safer than what it had. (Even Bancel has acknowledged, in an interview with Forbes, that the delivery method used in Moderna’s first vaccines “was not very good.”)
nanoparticles created a daunting challenge: Dose too little, and you don’t get enough enzyme to affect the disease; dose too much, and the drug is too toxic for patients.
Moderna could not make its therapy work, former employees and collaborators said. The safe dose was too weak, and repeat injections of a dose strong enough to be effective had troubling effects on the liver in animal studies.
The drugs it is pushing along now, by contrast, are more modest, relying on single administrations of mRNA.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciimmunol.adg7327
And also the quite disappointing efficacy that the CDC reports for repeated Covid boosters.
Whereas most current COVID vaccines target the spike, and disappointingly the spike is a lot more malleable then hoped.
It's a fairly solid indicator though that it must be tricky or that the body is making some tradeoff.
One of the big deals of mRNA is that because you get the proteins made in-vivo (in the body), you inherit all the body's machinery to do this naturally - after all, viral replication requires using that exact same machinery in order to replicate up the viral proteins in the first place.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/pdfs/mm7148e1-H.pdf Table 3
These are somewhat less unimpressive (IMO) numbers here:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/pdfs/mm7205e1-H.pdf
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2215471
I don’t think one can draw a conclusion as to what exactly is wrong. IMO it’s too bad that Novavax flubbed their vaccine rollout so badly — it would have given valuable comparison data.
The problem is the first round of vaccines caused immune fixation. The boosters failed because the body can't tell the difference between such similar proteins and made antibodies for the 2019 spike variant instead of the one the booster was targeting, thinking it already knew what to do.
This was covered up during approvals by redefining the success criteria as elevated levels of antibodies to "spike protein" without being specific about which one, and then ignoring actual effectiveness numbers (which were zero or negative).
There are two major strains of the flu, and one or the other becomes the dominant strain every year; it's difficult/impossible to predict which. And due to the way vaccines are made (injecting the inert virus into unfertilized chicken eggs for replication), the annual vaccine has to be made off of one strain or the other.
This "universal booster," instead of targeting one strain or the other, would be able to immunize against most/all. That doesn't mean that it's a one-and-done vaccine like measles; it could still require annual renewal. But it would be affective against all strains, so you wouldn't find yourself with the flu despite getting the shot (i.e. what happens to me literally every year).
But it doesn't make a lot of sense to me since influenza will be mutating to escape the immune response.
unless there is sufficient number of people that take it and it works well enough to eradicate it like say polio was.
It’s not like governments stated that the vaccines are both safe and effective and indirectly put pressure on people to get the vaccine, after all.
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[0]: https://www-geenstijl-nl.translate.goog/5170466/ja-ja/?_x_tr...
Not all mutations are equal; the flu has antigenic factors that rapidly change in response to evolutionary pressure that don't significantly affect the fitness of the virus. If you're able to target another element of the virus that is conserved, or target a large segment of the possible antigenic conformations in a single vaccine, you'd force immune evasion mutations to significantly lower the virus's fitness, which is a very big deal.
A couple years ago typing that would get accounts banned on most sites.
It's been crazy how much "always been at war with Eastasia/Eurasia" I've seen people around me engage in.
So I think the promise of a 'universal' vaccine means one that would target all/most strains.
Because of this scattershot approach it's also not clear how long it actually lasts.
This is also one of the main reasons mRNA is supposed to be such a huge boon to vaccinations: one of the major reasons so few are targeted each year is manufacturing costs.
I'm physically active, no big health issues, and my Dr. says I don't need it.
Why even take a shot? If results from 2020/2021 are to be believed, all it took was some half-hearted masking to practically eliminate the flu from the face of the earth.
It took a pandemic where people were basically a) scared for their lives and b) threatened with bylaw and legal ramifications, to actually get them to respond to civic health concerns and comply.
Visits to mine sites were glorious because MSHA didn't promote the OSHA theatrics. My child and I were invited to the yearly pig roast for workers and family at one mine, and it was awesome. We then drove back to big city and unfortunately went to grocery store seemingly in a different world of masked gloved stink-eye scared shoppers wiping down their soup cans.
On the other hand, I’ve managed to avoid getting HSV-1 even though it seems like everybody else in my age bracket (over 60) has it. Must be something genetic.
Like a single dose is less effective than multiple doses, especially if later doses are targeted at the circulating virus, but the first shot has an enormous protective effect, alerting the immune system to the type of virus.
Early in the pandemic, it was claimed that masks were not required. It was later admitted that this was to help the shortage, at the expense of the truth, and somewhat at the expense of the public [1].
President Biden went on national TV and bluntly stated, "If you get vaccinated, you won't get COVID." This was fiction, even at the time, with fact checks pointing it out the same day. [2]
Then later, "If you are fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask.", also fiction at the time, as the fact checks the same day pointed out [3]. There was no science to back this idea that vaccinations significantly reduced transmission, as it wasn't part of Pfizers tests [4].
Apparently related, some FDA officials resigned [5].
Things stated as fact that never should have been, and no attempt to correct it later, is what did it for me. There were many more small things that, appropriately, hurt my trust, and I feel a little crazy that people don't remember much of this.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-mask-advice-was-becaus...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-health-governm...
[3] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/22/joe-biden/...
[4] https://www.factcheck.org/2022/10/scicheck-its-not-news-nor-...
[5] https://docs.house.gov/meetings/VC/VC00/20220429/114682/HHRG...
Think of "influenza" like "dog", "strain" like "chihuahua" vs "golden retriever", and "variant" like "chihuahua with blue eyes" vs "chihuahua with brown eyes".
The distinction can get a bit muddied at the border* but I don't think we've reached that point yet.
*Like these dog breeds: https://www.countryliving.com/uk/wildlife/dog-breeds/a345060...
And probably a semantic misunderstanding.
I’ll take it.
Antivaxxers will of course find some other explanation for the reduction in flu cases or point to the people who still get it as proof the vaccine doesn’t work.