New Strategy Could Lead to Universal, Long-Lasting Flu Shot | Hacker News Reader

New Strategy Could Lead to Universal, Long-Lasting Flu Shot

today.duke.edu

25 pointsgumby36 comments

The novel discoveries and technology advances for medical countermeasures is impressive since the pandemic.

It is very feasible we will see this happen alongside similar developments for SCV2 and other pathogens due to the precision and potency these strategies provide for broad lineages by targeting more conserved domains of the proteins.

I am especially interested in the delivery vehicle developments(nasal, patches, etc) and platforms that have been created to adapt quickly.

Exciting times.

The reason your immune system develops immunity to the bulb is that this is the part that presents itself. The stem is by its nature tucked away. I don’t see any reason to think that an immunity to this part of the flu virus would be effective.

If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh... well, there it is.

Good quote, but also reminded me how much I hate Ian Malcom

Why?

The main reason is that he's so anti-science and can't be bothered to show a bit of excitement about the miracle hammond achieved. Also the obligatory "chaos theory has nothing to do with underpaying your IT staff and getting sabotaged".

I always felt bad that nobody ever stopped and said to hammond "wow what you've done is amazing". Everyone else with this tech wanted to make super soldiers and other messed up stuff, hammond just wanted to show people dinosaurs. Really my only beef with him was underpaying his IT staff

No expenses were spared!

Ok, so then we shouldn't even try to make vaccines? I don't know what your point is. We can't solve it completely, but there are still huge benefits.

Long lasting? How will everyone in the chain profit if it's only dispensed once?

Sounds great in theory. I just wonder whether when eventually catching a flu after not having one for a really long time the severity would be much worse.

I'd likely try this long lasting vaccine but I basically stopped taking the seasonal flu shots, they're hit and miss and too short lasting to bother.

"experimentally mutagenized the whole hemagglutinin"

Fuck, yeah, you did!

This would be awesome. I wonder if the shotgun approach works for COVID? I can get flu shots with no ill effects, but the COVID vax knocks me out for a day.

This on the news that the Astra Zeneca covid vaccine is being pulled due to Thrombosis deaths, i.e. blood clots.

I'm pro-vaccine and I'm waiting a long time before I try a new one. Let other people be the test subjects. I skip new to market pharmaceuticals for the same reason.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/07/astrazeneca-with...

From the article you linked:

> AstraZeneca said the vaccine was being removed from markets for commercial reasons. It said the vaccine was no longer being manufactured or supplied, having been superseded by updated vaccines that tackle new variants.

The article you linked said there are about 100 "suspected" fatalities out of multiple millions of people who got the their vaccine.

They're pulling it because of the Thrombosis deaths. This is just PR cope from AZ. If that were the real reason they'd quietly discontinue manufacture.

Talk about cope

> If that were the real reason they'd quietly discontinue manufacture.

> the vaccine was no longer being manufactured or supplied

Is the key word "quietly"?

Steve Albini, amazing producer, died at 61 of a heart attack. He was a vocal supporter of the covid jabs on Twitter/X. Was pretty critical of people who questioned it. He was a healthy, active, man.

"Yes, thrombosis can cause a heart attack. Thrombosis is a serious condition where blood clots form in blood vessels or the heart, blocking blood flow. If a blood clot blocks an artery leading to part of the heart muscle, it can cause a heart attack."

iirc the Astra Zeneca COVID vaccines were less effective than the others because they used an older and more established method which is also widely used in flu vaccines, and also used in the COVID vaccines made in China/Russia. I would assume the issue is in Astra Zeneca's manufacturing process. My friend who follows virology closely also avoids that brand now.

The irony about the whole covid vaccine debacle is that it's greatest negative impact, by a many orders of magnitude, is brain damage done to those who drank the anti-vax cool aid. Desperate for a win after pretty much none of their prophecies came true, we're now stuck with a huge population doubling down on "vaccines are bad".

I really don't think there was any way to avoid that.

This is a whole new set of antivaxxers. The previous antivaxxers are still out there, but they were a tiny crank minority.

This new set of antivaxxers is a purely political statement -- a politics that had already been increasingly divorced from science for decades. There is an enormous overlap with creationists and climate denialists. They had been primed to reject any science that they didn't want to believe. Even before the vaccine, they first denied that COVID was a genuine threat, and then touted various alternative "cures".

I suppose there is one real change, in that these new antivaxxers are also being influenced by the old antivaxxers into rejecting all kinds of vaccines. And that's sure gonna kill a buncha people. But zoomed out a bit, I believe that the real problem is a generalized paranoia, of which this is just a tiny new piece.

Natural selection should phase them out of their gene puddle after a while...

Using gene-editing, they created more than 80,000 variations of the hemagglutinin protein with changes in one portion right on the top of the head domain and then tested a vaccine filled with a mixture of these variations on mice and ferrets.

It seems this "new strategy" is basically the brute-force approach.

Maybe a decade or two ago I would've been more optimistic, but it's very much in their economic interests to not have long-lasting immunity.

Brute force is exactly how our immune system works.

Brute-forcing the brute-forcer, if you will

> it's very much in their economic interests to not have long-lasting immunity.

Whose interests? This is publicly funded (NIH) research from a lab at Duke, which is a university with a massive nonprofit medical center. Government is paying the cost of R&D and it is in the financial interests of the US government to fund development and testing of a long lasting vaccine. Think of the savings to Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA.

> Maybe a decade or two ago I would've been more optimistic, but it's very much in their economic interests to not have long-lasting immunity.

You know the government pretty much subsidizes vaccines because the risk/reward profile doesn't really work for companies.

Meanwhile there is no meaningful treatment for influenza, so there is no money to be made by not making a vaccine for it.

I don't know why this is downvoted; perhaps it was not clear that I am talking about the US federal government specifically, through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, set up by a 1986 law. Without it companies were giving up on making or developing vaccines due to liability.

Maybe im a cynic but queue winter 2024-25 and the bird flue pandemic. Luckily we have this new experimental vaccine.

Crossing my fingers im just a cynic and that im wrong.

wat

I think the word you’re looking for is paranoid, not cynic. And yes, you probably are paranoid

This 40 cycle SARS-CoV-2 PCR test would like a word with you...

You missed using PCR tests dialed up to way too many cycles to diagnose all of our livestock as "infected" with the bird flu, and using those bogus PCR tests to justify culling our beef supply. I also hope I'm wrong.

Source?

Are you kidding me?

"More than 9 in 10 people who are told they have Covid based on the PCR test do not."

https://www.brlax.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/PCR-Test.pd...

"The WHO confirmed after investigating that the tests were not being used in compliance with instructions provided by the manufacturers. Laboratories faced problems when they did not apply the recommended “positivity threshold”, which can result in false negative or false positive results."

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2A425C/

"Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin...

I think you meant to say Flu vaccine... wouldn't want you to be in trouble with the Ministry of Truth.

The CDC had to change the definition during the Covid pandemic to get people to take the shot.

New definition: Vaccine: A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases. Vaccines are usually administered through needle injections, but some can be administered by mouth or sprayed into the nose. (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/imz-basics.htm)

Out of interest, what do you think vaccines used to be defined as?

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