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Comment by seattle_spring | Hacker News Reader

Seems kind of odd that the “party of small government” makes completely frivolous laws like this to prevent something that very likely will never happen. Should we also make sure “food with extra-terrestrial genetic material” is outlawed, just in case?

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They're responding to research and articles that are publicly presaging and promoting this technology along with the idea that blind mass medical interventions are somehow ethical as long as it's a vaccine.

Finally.. how hard do you think it's going to be to actually implement this law? Would it require a new cabinet position? A new department? A single new hire? Then how did the government "get larger" as a result?

Don't forget "food which will cause you to be susceptible to remote control via 5G networks"...

I don't see that in the article

It’s about as real and likely as “vaccines in the grocery store lettuce.”

Not only is it likely to happen, it is happening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_vaccine#Vaccines_in_dev...

I think there's a lot of people reacting to this article as if "vaccines in food" is a "baseless conspiracy theory" when in fact it's in the study phase. The world moves fast.

While the science and engineering of it is interesting and all, it's bad medicine to put things in the food supply, no matter how convenient it may seem superficially. There's always someone who is going to have a bad reaction, and the more it becomes normalized, the more stuff is going to become worrisome. The entire idea of dosing populations with effectively no ability to control doses is insane. What happens to people who pair these with grapefruit? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapefruit%E2%80%93drug_intera... (and I also highlight the "Mechanism" section)

Passing a pre-emptive law against just lobbing it into the food supply to see what happens is nowhere near as nonsensical as it sounds. It may not be a serious threat right this second, but the cost of a law of this sort is cheap too.

(The stealth mRNA vaccine concerns some people have are silly, though. Given how hard it is to even inject them, they're not about to be passing through the digestive system any time soon.)

Whatever the substantive merits, passing a law like this at the state level seems like a waste of everyone's time and legal fees: the food and vaccine supply chains are pretty much archetypal examples of interstate or foreign commerce, so it's really going to be the federal Congress and the federal executive branch that decide these policies. State policies running contrary to those federal decisions will get invalidated on constitutional grounds, no matter which level of government enacts its law first.

> I think there's a lot of people reacting to this article as if "vaccines in food" is a "baseless conspiracy theory" when in fact it's in the study phase.

Eggs are used to produce flu vaccines, but that doesn't mean those particular eggs can be sold as a food product. The same is going to be true for vaccine lettuce; as with any other vaccination, they'll fall under FDA regulation as drugs.

So they should wait until after the food supply becomes contaminated, then study the problem for a few years and only then pass a law to regulate it?

Such things are already highly likely to fall under the FDA’s purview.

It's the legislative branch that determines that, with legislation exactly like this...

Not the TN one, and the US legislative branch has already given the FDA authority to regulate vaccines.

States have a similar setup patterned off the federal government, with most things falling only in the purview of the states. In this case they're correctly making sure that vaccines delivered as food are correctly treated as such under the framework here https://unicourt.github.io/cic-code-tn/transforms/tn/octn/r7...

Considering the active development this is very forward thinking and timely

Again, under Federal law and regulation, these theoretical products are likely to already be deemed drugs (and this determination would almost certainly preempt any state decision in the opposite direction). The legislation is, at best, redundant.

States enforce state law, not federal

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