Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksd482 | Hacker News Reader

I was reading about the terms "vaccine" and "vaccination" and learned what a vaccine really is. I used to think of injections and syringes when I would hear of vaccination.

According to wikipedia, A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease. [1]

Does that mean a vaccine can also be administered in forms other than an injection such as an oral tablet?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine

View on HN

Yes, there's nasally administered flu vaccines, and Covid as well, I believe. For a long time jet injectors were used for vaccination, which is an injector, but not a needle (but have a risk of cross-contamination). Looks like there's an oral vaccine for rotavirus as well, which I just learned about. It makes sense because that's the route of infection for this virus.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/admin/administer-vaccines.h...

What an unbelievable bastion of information you are for information you just learned about!

Yes. A very prominent example is the Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV).

Oral, nasal, transdermal are all common delivery routes.

Or Typhoid.

Right because I'm an old man (although if I was a young person in a poor country with endemic Polio this could still be my story today) I actually went to school one day and they fed me a sugar lump with a dot of green syrup on it. The syrup is Oral Polio Vaccine, you are eating the literal working Polio virus, but the makers have deliberately grown it somewhere very cold, so it's adapted to run much too slowly so as to not die. In your body it's too slow and when it tries to escape from the digestive system into your body a normal healthy human immune systems says - "Hey, you're not food, you're a virus. Die die die" and your body learns specifically to kill Polio as a result, successful immunisation before the virus can grow and spread.

In a rich country like mine (or statistically, yours) today, the vaccine given to school kids is an injection and doesn't have a working virus in it. As a result, when things go wrong (and very rarely they do go wrong) it can't cause Polio. But, there are two costs. One, literally this is an expensive product. Poor countries can't afford to dose their kids with the expensive harder to store and use injection. Two though, maybe even more important. It doesn't work so well. If you live in a country with no Polio, "not as well" is good enough. But in countries with endemic Polio, you want the best option and that's arguably OPV at least for now.

Wasn't the origin of the small pox vaccine that people would rub the pustules from one person onto themselves?

There's a historical practice called variolation which involved inoculating healthy people with ground scabs/pus from people with smallpox. They'd make a small scrape on the skin and introduce the material. It was a reasonably protective practice, especially considering the options available at the time.

Iirc, Edward Jenner's smallpox vaccine was based on cowpox, a related but less serious disease.

Yes, which is how we ultimately get to the word vaccine. "vacca" is latin for cow.

From what I recall about 2% of people who got the procedure died. On the other hand actually catching smallpox had something like a 30% fatality rate, so the procedure became fairly popular.

Yes [1]:

> This consisted of transferring to healthy people small amounts of material from smallpox sores, resulting in milder forms of illness and much lower mortality than natural infection. Some sources suggest practices of variolation were taking place as early as 200 BCE.

[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/history-of-vaccinati...

It’s a bit disappointing your comment was disliked. It’s on topic and completely relevant.

You also might see different immune preparations, even. Immune cells in different locations make different types of antibodies and which type of antibody recognizes the antigen in the vaccine partly determines which type of resistant you build up.

IgG and IgM are common in the blood, while IgE is found in places like the intestines.

When I went to Namibia recently, which had some new cases of malaria, I was given "Malarone", an oral pill taken a couple days before, and each day during, and a couple days after. Luckily, I didn't see any mosquitos at all, the main vehicle for malaria.

Malarone is a prophylaxis rather than a vaccine, you're taking the drug to treat malaria preemptively to prevent an infection from taking hold. Unlike a vaccine it does not trigger your immune system into developing immunity that would work after you stop taking it.

Malarone (an antimalarial prophylaxis, not a vaccine) has been around for a couple of decades already. It is still new enough to be costly, however. In the overlanding-through-Africa community, those using Malarone are often seen as relatively posh compared to e.g. the skint backpackers that have to resort to the cheap standard doxycycline.

Anything to stay off Lariam. Even doxy is fancy by comparison.

Yes, there is an oral vaccine for typhoid fever that is more effective than the injected vaccine, but it can’t be taken by immunocompromised people because it contains live bacteria.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com