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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

Brute force is exactly how our immune system works.

Brute-forcing the brute-forcer, if you will

> 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.

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