mRNA Cancer Vaccine Reprograms Immune System to Tackle Glioblastoma in 48 Hours
insideprecisionmedicine.com
insideprecisionmedicine.com
https://www.facebook.com/ProfRScolyer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scolyer#Cancer_diagnos...
If we find a cure for glioblastoma the challenge would be detection before it's too late.
This stance came shortly after I just buried my mother-in-law. Had been doing home-based hospice care for 3 (now deceased) parents of mine. Took 19-years solidly out of my life.
So, yes. Quicker the better, at least for me.
With viruses and bacteria the immune system eventually catches up and vaccinating tends to be done before the host is infected (rabies vaccination is an outlier since it still works even after infection during the latent period). With cancer the immune system usually doesn’t recognize the threat which is why vaccinating after the fact is still effective.
The most common application is as a preventative measure to protect you from an infectious disease. But it can be used for other diseases (like cancer, which is not infectious) and it can be used after you're sick.
Fun fact: if an unvaccinated person is exposed to measles, they can get the MMR within 72 hours of exposure, and it will still reduce the severity of the disease. (Source: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html )
Often treatment focus is on quality of life issues, because they are often found due to physical deficits.
it seems odd but i guess its meant to aid the process?
BTW, that's also why so many tumor drugs work well in mice.
One big problem is the FDA's slowness regarding treatments for otherwise fatal diseases like GBM.
What do you mean by slowness? They can't skip all the safety stuff!
Do they not already?
The issue, as comes up incessantly in all manner of situations, is the way we regulate drugs as a whole. A lack of safety testing should mean a higher standard of informed consent should be used, not that it should be illegal for someone to get ahold of it
I see lots of benefit to regulatory agencies controlling what claims can be made about medications and holding people selling them to account for quality control failures. Agencies preventing consenting adults from making their own risk-reward calculations does badly on both principle and outcomes
Any system / regulator still needs to force companies to prove their treatment has the claimed effect, and block any that simply don't. On safety, I think there's more wiggle room, however. Treatment here can be based on likely ill effects vs the known effects of the illness of the patient.
An RCT, the gold standard by which medicines are often tested, can easily show a negligible effect size because of the vast confound space of individual differences. A medicine that works perfectly for many of a study's participants will be considered "ineffective" routinely
And hey, in cases like that I think the regulators should absolutely have the power to say "selling this without explaining these caveats is criminal fraud", but not that people can't try the drug anyway if informed of the risks and low likelihood of success as determined by the agency's analysis
In an effort to standardize process and appease large incumbent industry players (often, as here, by erecting enormous entry barriers in front of lucrative markets), we frequently create metrics that are too blunt and remedies that favor governments flexing disproportionate power over the lives and choices of individuals
Weak regulation that allows non-medical products to masquerade as medicine is not the same as “nothing can be done.” Things absolutely can be done.
This situation is made even worse by the Controlled Substances Act and the Analogue Act, which not only artificially restrict both supply and access to a ton of effective medications, but also create this onerous donuthole where a substance can be shown to be effective enough to warrant criminalization, but not pass the rigorous standards to be approved as medicine. It would be a lot better for everyone but enormous pharmaceutical monopolies and police states if we kept regulatory bodies' role to quality control, an official standard by which medical claims could be judged as a guide for laypeople, and fraud prevention.
This is a regulation failure because a good regulatory framework shouldn’t allow this at all. It’s not about whether “the FDA’s hands are clean,” it’s about what system should be in place that gets us to the outcome we want. In my mind, this would be a place where ineffective treatments aren’t allowed (because why should they be?), but safety/efficacy is then traded off against what the patient needs.
Coming from outside the USA, it sounds to me like the regulatory system isn’t achieving any of that? I think I agree with the broad thrust of what you’re putting forward, my issue only comes with the “guide” part. Medical experts need to be the ones leading the treatment because… well… they’re the experts.
Don’t get me wrong, I can see how Americans distrust government after having a president suggest drinking bleach during Covid might work live on TV.
In huge oversimplification some crazy or fraudulent people will claim it cures blindness or cold sores, some other people will believe them and will have to deal with the real danger-to-lethal consequences, with the rest of society paying for their medical care afterwards.
Pretty effective.
In Australia throwing a few diseased lungs on the packs and increasing public awareness has seen usage drop from 35% of the population in 1980 to 11% today.
Not all the drop is purely related to advertising, price increases and restricting sale to out of sight locked access in shops have also helped.
https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-1-prevalence/1...
On the books, totally worth it.
Are they not addictive? Then it seems a stretch to compare them to cigarettes.
Australia is a democracy with many small parties and several quasi independant larger party (three main large parties) members, there's been scope for almost anyone to campaign to repeal anti-smoking policy by either running directly or by lobbying their local of federal rep.
People have campaigned for hunting, for cannabis, for many things .. so far no one, to my knowledge, has campaigned to repeal the anti smoking policies.
That's exactly correct bart, it reduced smoking by over two thirds and kept it that way.
> still doesn't stop 11% of people from doing so.
Like seatbelts, vaccines, and all other health and safety procedures that also don't have a 100% total absolute success rate .. nor never claimed to.
Who wants to wrap people in bubble wrap and lock them away from the world? Are you advocating for that?
It's a cure for lyme disease, impotence, ALS, chronic fatigue, cancer and aging. Trials are pending but what are you waiting for, do you want to die for lack of trying? 10k/dose.
Nice name choice for your example; I was thinking of paracetamoxyfrusebendroneomycin myself, yours is better.
My mum bought into a lot of homeopathy and Bach flower remedies. Thought she was doing me and dad a favour by getting both, and even "secretly" gave dad doses of the latter (and I was a kid so didn't have much say), so I was fortunate both categories were basically nothing.
But her and dad?
One of the Bach flower remedies was "for memory"… she got Alzheimer's about 20 years younger than her mother.
When my dad was dying of cancer, there was some mineral he thought he was short of (magnesium?), and he didn't realise the homeopathic pills labelled "magnesium" didn't actually contain any magnesium.
IMO, prevent use of addictive ingredients, but beyond that inform, don't forbid.
That said, I think we would get most of the benefit of regulation if we just required an advisory consultation with your GP before you could buy a product whose safety wasn't established. A lot of the danger of overregulation rests on trivial inconvenience vs outlawing experimentation, and I think something like that could split both groups. "Yes, I want to enable experimental mode on my body."
https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory-overview/resea...
You should have a probability distribution over possibilities, based on your experience with similar drugs, expert hunches and animal trials. You then use that to estimate risks and benefits. Then compare this risk-reward profile with the risks of doing nothing -- in this case, near certain death from brain cancer.
This "can't presume to know" framework is just sophistry. And I think deep down you know that, if you had a death sentence from brain cancer you'd be begging them to let you in the trial even if they "couldn't presume to know".
It’s extremely challenging if not impossible to obtain informed consent in this situation.
We’ve been through this before where a fancy new treatment with promising early/lab results usurped conventional therapy only to later be found inferior.
Earlier TKIs and NSCLC are a recent example that comes to mind.
This is decision making under uncertainty. It's bad practice to say that uncertainty always means "don't do it".
In effect we regulated doing stuff so much in the name of safety that we ended up in an infinite "analysis paralysis" mode where the you have to absolutely prove zero harm from new products/services while completely ignoring the harm the current status quo does.
See current debates over AI, self-driving cars, and of course, meds.
The FDA (and EMA in Europe) are the only thing that protects desperate patients from fraudsters, charlatans and pharma-companies just looking for a return on their investment.
While Aduhelm reduces Aβ it has no clinically significant effect. Still, the FDA approved it. Mercifully it'll be discontinued in November.
The covid vaccine represented a huge policy failure by the FDA. While people in nursing homes died in droves we got small clinical trials. When you've got 90 year olds in a congregate setting facing a 50% chance of death, maybe it's time to stop pretending thalidomide may be lurking around every corner. The pediatric trials were just as bad. Due to their sizing it was statistically impossible to detect rare adverse effects. Yet, vaccination was delayed for children while these fruitless trials ran.
In my own experience I had a low cost, high throughput covid testing protocol ready to go in early April 2020. It took the FDA until August 2020 to provide templates and another month to grant emergency use authorization. We could've drastically ramped up testing when it was needed most of the FDA has treated an emergency like an emergency.
Throughout 2020, more than 9% of all people in nursing homes died of covid. Depending on age case fatality rates were upwards of 50%. The vaccine should've been offered to these people on a compassionate use basis. Even at the time it was obvious that actual harm posed by the virus vastly outweighed any hypothetical risk of adverse vaccine reaction. Drastically expanding the vaccinated population through compassionate use would have rapidly provided efficacy and safety data.
That's just about most difficult population to determine primary cause of death for. Most people in nursing homes have multiple comorbidities and a long list of medications. Its easy enough to know when someone died with Covid, its much more difficult (if not impossible) to know after the fact whether that's what caused their death or if the infection began after an existing condition worsened and weakened their immune system further.
> Drastically expanding the vaccinated population through compassionate use would have rapidly provided efficacy and safety data.
That wouldn't have helped get efficacy or safety data for the general public though. Vaccinating that population could absolutely have helped determine efficacy for that population and I agree it feels like a reasonable action given the potential risks for that population, but the data wouldn't be useful for the general public that are younger and/or in better health prior to infection.
Nursing home quality, COVID-19 deaths, and excess mortality https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8776351/
At the peak, excess nursing home mortality was nearly 6000 per week. Quibbling about "died with covid" versus "died of covid" isn't a useful exercise. Dead is dead and the excess mortality came from somewhere.
It isn't quibbling when the specific topic is whether or not to treat a population with an untested vaccine (assuming the trials were skipped for at risk populations as proposed above).
In a general sense, I totally agree the "with" versus "of" debate isn't useful. But when considering giving an at risk population an untested vaccine, how is that not important? Any intervention could have downsides, and more importantly an preventative intervention for a secondary infection may not be worth the risk depending on the risk profiles.
One tricky question that would have to be answered is whether the excess deaths were related to changes in nursing home treatment and general conditions. Nursing homes were effectively locked down in many areas, reducing human contact and potentially negatively impacting care. Vaccines would have no impact there, and if the untested vaccine has negative side effects we would have only made things worse.
Strokes, heart attacks, circulatory issues, etc are likely pretty common in that population and any increase there after treatment may go unnoticed as a change. If you do recognize it they'd have to stop treatments entirely as you wouldn't know whether its a risk to everyone or specific to some combination of age, comorbidities, and/or other medications.
In the UK, nursing homes were discovered to be sedating patients and not administering water and nutrition. I wouldn't be surprised to learn the same happened in the US.
The refusal rates were already too high with anti-vax people making up lies/distorting data. If they actually had real data things would've been much worse.
> Imagine if an early covid vaccine had killed thousands. That would have had a massive chilling effect on vaccine uptake. You're making it sound like the chilling effect would be a bad thing, when it would actually be the correct response. There are plenty of examples in the history of medicine of the cure being worse than the disease.
We had safer vaccines available though so switching to them is even better, which we did.
> You're making it sound like the chilling effect would be a bad thing, when it would actually be the correct response.
That chilling effect would still exist when the vaccine was safe, making it the incorrect response. Conversations like this make it very clear why we need to be very careful about vaccine safety and we should never release a vaccine that will kill thousands EVEN if that vaccine would save lives overall.
At the end of the day, in my opinion, there is no magic number for vaccine acceptance that is a metric to define beforehand. Refusal rates are a backward looking metric only and simply reflect the willingness to participate and trust in the general public.
Far more covid vaccines were given out to more people then almost all prescription medications have been. They were FDA approved officially in 2021, and at the end of the day all of the covid vaccines given an EUA were much safer than even mundane things like driving a car.
High vaccine uptake rates save lives. Pretending otherwise requires you to misrepresent the data.
The pharma industry has been consistently producing what would easily be called life saving miracles in any other context. Anyone unable to see that is the biased one.
But lets be real, you almost certainly already know that. So you very likely fall into the category of people who intentionally misrepresent the data so you can pretend that vaccines are a bad thing.
Of course it is possible that the highly political, near-religious atmosphere during the Covid-Circus biased the reporting for the mRNA vaccines in the other direction. But this has to be objectively studied. That never happened. One of the many things that make me deeply distrust the mRNA vaccines.
Your very general statement "so you can pretend that vaccines are a bad thing" shows your propaganda. I am vaccinated against several pathogens. But the topic "immune system" is really complicated, the knowledge up to date is not sufficient to force people. Especially vaccination of children has to be thoroughly justified. Search on Google Scholar for "Peter Aabye".
You mean before vaccines became extremely politicized? I think we can safely assume those numbers aren't useful anymore now that the well has been poisoned.
>But this has to be objectively studied.
There were plenty of double blind studies on the covid vaccines. Those are the gold standard. I'm not even sure what you are asking for here.
I asked for studies on the reliability of VAERS data about the Covid vaccines.
RCTs are just one brick of the science building. And of the plenty you think exist, I have encountered only a few good ones, yet. The Cleveland Clincs study is one of them, but they justctested for infection and didn't include the outcome all-cause mortality or hospitalization for some unknown reasons. The US veterans study seems to prove a lower mortality for vaccinated, but the cohort is for sure not representative. Btw, those two showed a clearly monotonic increasing probability of acquiring a Covid19 infection with number of vaccinations.
RCT fanatism is not helpful.
You could let the public make an actual decision based on actual information, rather than telling them little, projecting false certainty, and then trying to force them to do what you think is the best course. I mean, look, not everyone can be treated like adults. But I think the majority of people can. Tell them the truth, and let them decide.
That event will then be used in a way that is wildly out of context as fodder by all the anti-vaxxers out there to scare people into not getting vaccinated later when the vaccine is safer.
For the next 50 years anti-vaxxers and scammers will be using that event to scare people about vaccines.
It is not worth the risk because of the potential outcomes.
If a vaccine is rolled out and kills thousands, the example you gave, why shouldn't some people take notice of that and be concerned? Is there no level of risk that would also make you consider not taking a new and untested, or under tested, vaccine?
Anti-vaxxers simply don't care about truth vs. falsehoods. They don't care about the actual 3-phase clinical trial with tens of thousands of participants.
The FDA approved it via accelerated approval. The intent being "allow access to promising medicine while additional data is collected".
EMA has some people that were recruited from Big Pharma.
There's also the part where distribution was done in a way that deliberately killed people so that racial equality goals could be met. Perhaps the worst example of this kind of thinking were teachers in SF getting vaccinated but school not starting again.
One can be fast and safe, it's just that requires spending a lot of money.
It's analogous to cache prefetching and branch prediction in CPUs, except the cost of bad predictions is measured in millions of dollars rather than tens of CPU cycles, and also that the predictions are much harder.
The issue is that with some illnesses/stages, we do not have a good treatment, and a lot of people would like the calculus to be different. We do have compassionate drug rules, but they're a pain for many people.
I'm not in that situation, and not sure how I'd react; but I can see how, having an incurable illness, with tons of suffering or a few months left to live, I might want to try everything. Hydroxychloroquine, Chinese acupuncture, herbal remedies, and experimental treatments.
>> “Instead of us injecting single particles, we’re injecting clusters of particles that are wrapping around each other like onions, like a bag full of onions,” said Elias Sayour, MD, PhD, a UF Health pediatric oncologist who pioneered the new vaccine. “And the reason we’ve done that in the context of cancer is these clusters alert the immune system in a much more profound way than single particles would.” Results from the canine trial showed how the vaccine reprogrammed the tumor microenvironment (TME) within days, allowing the activated immune system cells to fight the tumor.
> It turns out that, unmodified, freestanding Spike proteins collapse into a different structure. If injected as a vaccine, this would indeed cause our bodies to develop immunity... but only against the collapsed spike protein.
> And the real SARS-CoV-2 shows up with the spiky Spike. The vaccine would not work very well in that case.
> So what to do? In 2017 it was described how putting a double Proline substitution in just the right place would make the SARS-CoV-1 and MERS S proteins take up their ‘pre-fusion’ configuration, even without being part of the whole virus. This works because Proline is a very rigid amino acid. It acts as a kind of splint, stabilising the protein in the state we need to show to the immune system.
> The people that discovered this should be walking around high-fiving themselves incessantly. Unbearable amounts of smugness should be emanating from them. And it would all be well deserved.
[0] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...
What covid did prove out is that there IS risk. https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/covid-19-vaccines/advice-...
Biologics (what vaccines are) are weird. The FDA should be stepping back from restricting the use of these on INFORMED patients who have limited other choices and mandating the long term study that we need for this class of treatments. IF were extending peoples lives and finding those secondary a tertiary risks in patents who would have otherwise died we will all benefit in the long run.
Between Pro and Anti vax camps it is dam near impossible to have a rational conversation about the topic. One more thing that has been polarized into the abyss... sigh!
Not an mRNA vaccine and vaccine risk regardless of vaccine type was known and acknowledged for many decades before COVID.
Especially during the pandemic every argument was had ad nauseam and a (similarity to) certain narrative wasn't perceived as coming from good faith anymore. People were tired of explaining the difference between DNA and RNA, between relative risks of the vaccines and infection, herd immunity, ... . At some point you never knew, if the person you are debating will go full conspiracy nut. Even genuinely skeptical people were often worried because of opportunistic clout chasers were spreading misinformation.
See the comment above where the AstraZeneca vaccine got conflated with mRNA vaccines. Bad start...
There were no vaccination mandates. However, "anti-vaxxers" were offended people decided to keep them out of their groups, shops, communities, ... by vaccination status. They want to have the cake and eat it too. Their idea of discrimination is overreaching and entitled.
"Get the vaccine or lose your job" absolutely is a mandate. This really was a thing.
Well, yes, that's what I was getting at: Freedom cuts both ways here. If you choose to not get vaccinated, others should be allowed to, at the very least, choose not to have you around. Immunity is not a private belief, but has severe, sometimes existential implications for other people.
I assume, it's pretty much the same with guns in the US. You are allowed to own them, carry them, but not allowed to bring them everywhere, if someone's ruling within private jurisdiction forbids it.
Only because it was struck down by courts. The US government did attempt it, and even told employers to abide by it while they appealed (before it was struck down again).
At least BioNTech was able to take the billions they made from pivoting into COVID vaccines and use the money to speed up their cancer-related pipelines. Running clinical studies is expensive and difficult to do if you have to beg for money for an unproven platform.
That's a real odd way to characterize a person's death.
OP even went another level, since it was their SO's career progression that was affected, thus affecting OP. Agreed, they're not wrong, but it was odd.
Similar to how anyone might reflect on how the death of a relative or friend ultimately led them to being the person they are now in some way.
Outcomes are already disparate.
” People in low- and middle-income counties in the United States are more likely to die of cancer than those who live in high-income counties. Eight factors, including lack of access to high-quality clinical care, food insecurity, smoking, and obesity may explain more than 80% of the relationship between poverty and disparities in cancer death rates at the county level, according to a new study.”
And
” In low-income counties, the average cancer death rate in 2014 was 230 per 100,000 people, compared with 205 per 100,000 in middle-income counties and 186 per 100,000 in high-income counties.”
—- https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2018...
It is still an SES game, because higher levels of education (correlated with income) allows individuals to see beyond “well the doctor told me, so that’s what I’ll do”. Higher SES also comes with the ability for a more flexible work schedule, and the ability to travel to larger city centres where the high-skill care is more likely to be.
I dont think that is a healthy or reasonable goal, in the US or anywhere. Some care is labor intensive and costly, and simply not scalable to everyone. It is possible that time helps reduce the burden.
The only way to have equal care is to eliminate high end care.
That's one way to think of it. But you also can just say: the only way to have equal care is to raise the standard of all care to the quality of high end care. That's worth trying to achieve even if it's not logically perfect. Most things in life aren't but trying to get there is still a "reasonable goal". It's just about priorities.
The elephant in the room is also access to preventative care. Many people wait until the last possible moment to seek medical care because they can't afford otherwise, or do not have access to local medical facilities. Improving access to preventative medicine and care, which is often cheaper and more simple than cutting-edge procedures, would lower the overall demand on last-minute medical infrastructure, like an ER or hospital, which is often what people think of when someone says "access to medicine". An excellent example of this is Costa Rica, where much more effort is spent on access to preventative medicine and all of the infrastructure required for that. As a result, Costa Rica's health care system rates higher than the US while also spending 1/10th per capita on healthcare.
A lot of the healthcare system in America is just what we've ended up with, often as a result of greed and a relatively recent extreme distrust of public options, rather than some sort of clear eyed logical end point of healthcare rationalization. Improving access to medicine and raising the over standard of universal care is still a goal worth trying to achieve.
I think it is counter-productive in addition to being logically irrational to focus on equal access to high end care. It isn't possible and it poisons the well for meaningful change. Not everyone should have access to 10 million dollar care on the social dime. There is no upper limit on possible costs, so actively seeking equality just means banning higher care for those who can afford it.
I dont think that the US outcome is the result of greed. companies are just as greedy in costa rica or eurpoe. Rather, US healthcare costs are the result of illogical and schizophrenic policy choices, with incompatible choices that dont work together. I could rant for hours about what those are, if you are interested. At the end, it is like a crowdsourced car that doesnt work. Someone picked a porche engine, and someone else picked bicycle tires, and someone else picked a tractor frame, so it doesnt work at all.
This is a good example of the common liberal fallacy of Utopianism.
Utopianism is the quest to attain or implement an ideal society.
At my first company, our VP of Sales, Luke Little, was one of my favorite people to hang with; I was still barely 20 and he was in his 40's but he had quite the mischievous twinkle in his eye and was willing to join us kids in tomfoolery and tell us about the world. We were acquired and got a great exit in July; he had a seizure driving the Cobra he bought to celebrate a few months later; he went downhill quickly and died within a couple of years. He had a young son, too.
so you might get an improvement in overall survival but not a cure for GBM
If the effect is linear, the boost to survival time in humans would be an additional 19 months. With the death sentence of GBM hanging over your future, an additional year-and-a-half is huge.
For a mother with a young child, getting another 1.5 years can be the difference between the child not knowing their mother and having some memory of her.
For someone with no or adult children, it can be a lot less significant. My dad passed away from cancer when I was 30 and while I certainly would have taken an extra year with him, it wouldn't have changed much.
I find it much easier to sympathize with people's desire for additional time with terminally-ill loved ones now.
It's still exciting news. They're ramping up through phase 1 to phase 2 in humans, and already have evidence of similar immune response in human patients.
But yes, I would expect it to be quite costly.
Sequencing and RNA synthesizing are widely available commercial services at this point, though not cheap.
There's a lot of magic to take mRNA and formulate it to last in the human body and go and do what you want, but it isn't likely to be the costly part of all of this if there's some small volume of people being treated this way.
I want someone that has already done comprehensive research to guide me on what I should be paying attention to.
is a good overview of the history of radical surgery and chemotherapy, and the emergence of modern treatment to 2010
The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Breakthrough:_Immunotherap...
My uncle died of a glioblastoma, and shortly after I read this book, I was myself diagnosed with cancer (treated conventionally, hopefully cured). Immunotherapies like mRNA vaccines seem to be our best hope for finding reliable, permanent cures for a lot of different cancers. I am sorry that for many of our loved ones, a cure will have come too late.
Well yeah, it has been known for a long time that cancer can do what it does because of the immune system's failure to eliminate the "defective" cells. Also, there are the rare "spontaneous remissions" where, for some reason, the immune system eventually catches up and manages to destroy the cancer. So there have been many attempts to harness the immune system in cancer treatment. Glad to see that all that work is finally bearing fruit (fingers crossed)...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFhYJRqz_xk and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoJwt9l-XhQ
Also while not about cancer specifically, the book Immune by the kurzgesagt founder Philipp Dettmer has a chapter on it and the relation to the immune system. Which is very relevant for these new immunotherapies.
Is there anything that works to replace the delivery system that's more reliable/predictable than the lipid-based carriers?
Testing is necessary anyway to get insurance companies to pay for something. They like to deny coverage, and if the treatment is not proved to work that's an easy excuse.
Wait!? It can be any tumor right or do they have to open my skull and take a sample of the actual tumor they want to get rid of.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine
Sounds like this is a vaccine given that criteria.
I once tried to find if there were any studies about incidence of cancer plotted against incidence of high fever in the same individuals but wasn't able to find anything. It may also point to the incidence of cancer actually rising due to suppression of other diseases.
This is plausible due the fact that diseases are a constant in nature and therefore evolution would take their presence as a given as much as the seasons or the sun. It would be very unfortunate if numerous anti-cancer adaptions simply haven't evolved because regular fevers took care of those cancer precursors.
By my estimation, the people who threatened and socially pressured others to get an unfinished, experimental gene therapy injection that was always socially enforced to be referred to in polite company as a "vaccine" are the ones liable for any damages that might occur. My son may be scared of random amnesia for the rest of his life. What does he get? What do I get?
What do the people get who believed themselves to be above moral reproach specifically because they were afraid? How do we make sure such people never get to make a decision on my or my sons' behalf ever again?
To say nothing of my cousin, a death of despair due to overblown lockdowns that did more damage than COVID.
What do we do to make sure this doesn't happen again? The answer cannot be "nothing."
I share some of your concerns about using mRNA technology as an annual preventative solution against COVID and flu. Even though I'm triple Pfizer mRNA vaccinated I'd probably go for a non-mRNA solution going forward (my employer finally dropped their COVID vaccine requirement but maintain an annual flu vaccine requirement).
But it seems to me that mRNA is a fantastic tool for fighting deadly cancers. Without treatment, the patient is absolutely going to die.
I know. My mom died of glioblastoma back in September 2019. The tumor was wrapped around her thalamus so we had very limited treatment options -- at the time the most advanced treatments needed access to the tumor which is hard to do when it's in the center of your brain.
Hang in there MisterDizzy and, since we are on Hacker News here, remember one of the principles of software development -- use the right tool for the right job. For me, right now, that looks like tried and true protein-based vaccines for those annual vaccinations and fancy mRNA platforms for those specialized treatments.
it was never about being afraid, it was about taking part in society and helping so that your son, young people, the elderly and immune compromised don't die.
as for "experimental gene therapy injection", mRNA vaccines are vaccines and the mRNA in the vaccine does not alter genes, that's actual misinformation about how mRNA vaccines work.