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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

It's basically the new flu shot, and probably will be for a very long time yet. I'm not so concerned about that but I do wonder when the next disease (bird flu?) will come along and we'll get another annual shot... and another...

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It’s worth noting that companies are testing flu + COVID vaccines as an all in one shot. I think most people don’t want to come to their pharmacy for multiple jabs.

https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...

You can schedule two jabs at your pharmacy, so it isn't that inconvenient. It is much harder with a young child, who...you can get to take one jab but you really aren't going to get two jabs in one sitting. A combined jab would avoid an extra appointment and toy/cheeseburger bribe.

Also, the COVID jab is much harder to take than the flu jab for some reason. I barely notice the flu shot, but for a COVID shot, I actually feel my muscles contracting, and my arm is a bit sore for a week (although nothing beyond a minor annoyance). I wonder what this means for a combined shot.

You can get two or three vaccinations at once provided they don't have any issues with each other. I just got Shingrix and TDAP earlier this week, one in each arm. Pro tip, get the one more likely to cause injection site pain (Shingrix in my case) in your non-dominant arm.

and moderna: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02121-1

It is already possible to combine multiple vaccines into a single shot. This approach is used for other diseases, such as the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine.

In the hypothetical case you're describing, I would expect that consolidation of vaccine administration would happen before we reach a point where you need to get half a dozen separate jabs at your annual well visit.

Honestly though, that sounds... amazing.

I've spent some of my life working in undeveloped, tropical areas. Because of this, I'm vaccinated against a bunch of diseases the average Western citizen doesn't worry about- Yellow Fever, Japanese Encephalitis, Tuburculosis and have seen first-hand the afflictions of the local populations who weren't vaccinated.

Working in a clinic with sick and dying people, while being safe because I myself am vaccinated against the disease is kind of a surreal experience.

While obviously the ideal would be a single dose providing lifelong protection, an annual booster still would make me incredibly grateful that I get to live in this modern, almost futuristic world of preventative medicine superpowers.

When something works really well and is statistically beneficial, I am not sure why you would decline any of them.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not being anti-vaccine. I'm being anti-ever-growing-list-of-disease-to-worry-about.

I understand, but I think I read it as the diseases-we-have-good-interventions-for-list. We can work on more efficient distribution, but it seems like a relatively minor issue.

You could also put it in the "diseases-we-dont-need-interventions-for-in-most-cases-list". The vaccines aren't really effective for younger people. I still remember how it was pushed as 95% effective against *transmission* in the beginning.

We don't see this panic regarding the flu and they have similar mortality in the same demographics. Give it to the elderly and the sensitive and ignore it for the rest like we've always done.

There's really no need to exaggerate the risks, I only caught covid twice (first and delta variants) 2 years apart while many of my vaccinated friends seem to catch every single one only months apart. Why is that? Interestingly I've never been this healthy in my life, anecdata and probably more related to social distancing than being unvaccinated but interesting nonetheless.

I don't care if people choose to get vaccinated but it's seriously time to move on.

>It's basically the new flu shot

That says it all. There were some suckers getting the flu shot and then developing a severe flu. Reading the vaccine documentation turns out that it was developed using a variant at the other end of the world.

There is a push for restoring nature, so I think it will be less in 50 years.

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