Strep A kills half a million per year; why don't we have a vaccine?
wellcome.org
wellcome.org
Think this is the problem they should be solving before trying to immunize people against bacteria that lives literally everywhere
Plenty of wealthy people are taking horse deworming medicine for political purposes.
That people in the US choose to be ignorant despite having an education happens, but it's rarer than where there is no education.
My sister was in town once years later and my younger brother was in such bad shape she took him to a doctor. She swears to this day he would have died. Again strep.
Misinformation is a big problem. People who buy into it put their kids at risk. When we allow purveyors of nonsense to thrive because “freedoms” we do everyone a disservice.
Don’t understand this
Though that was a bit 2020. Not sure it still goes on.
Think of the folks who think RFK Jr is some sort of breath of fresh air. Or the people into Gwyneth Paltrow faux “wellness” nonsense and homeopathy.
On the more reactionary side, you have people who idolize the cowboy myth, the 1950s, or interpret freedom as meaning “I don’t pay taxes”.
It’s the same psychological feature, realized through different perceptions.
I'm not american and found it all a bit odd. I mean you'd think with medication you'd follow the scientific evidence for what works rather than political stuff. Maybe social media is to blame?
They estimate about 319,000 more people died in the US that would have happened if everyone just got vaccinated when it was recommended (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071...)
But vaccines are very effective.
None is preferable to partial treatments, since a partial treatment will create resistant strains and not much else.
The inappropriate use of antibiotics is too high, and simultaneously there are very real issues of access.
Has there been a vaccine like that?
It was the single worst experience of my life. I was in a hotel, a fever crept in. Then my throat was so swollen I could barely talk. I was sweating so much that my delirious brain decided it would be a good idea to lay out all the clothes in my suitcase onto the bed. I had a fever dream that my brother had called an ambulance to save me.
I then woke up to realise I was still actually in hell. I managed to muster up the strength to go down to the hotel lobby and ask the hotel receptionist to direct me to the nearest pharmacy. I almost couldn't speak because my throat was almost swollen shut. Sweat was literally pouring down my face and I sounded, let's say, incompetent.
I eventually arrived at the pharmacy and I honestly credit the lovely lady there for saving my life. She gave me fever reducers and a concentrated iodine-based throat gargle.
It took around five days to recover from this, I had missed my flight and had to book a new one back. When I arrived back home, the first comment I received was "there is no colour in your face, you're white as a sheet".
I've had many of the nasty viruses several times (covid, you-name-it flu, measles even, please do not ask).
This was by far the worst illness I can remember.
Reminds me of this, people imagining a helping person or spirit in a dire situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_man_factor
Walking home, with pills in hand, I somehow got really sick very fast. That's when I realized this might have easily killed me 70 years ago, and the antibiotics I was holding were a small miracle. All that grumbling was first world problems.
Did they not poll anyone on this? I struggle greatly to believe the greater public wouldn’t sprint to their nearest pharmacy for such a vaccine. I wanted to fund it before the article was over - I simply never knew such a thing was on the table.
(1) TotallyGenuine drug company realizes that they can still get paid giving out fake shots.
(2) NotEvil drug company buys up it's smaller competitors and stops improving vaccines.
(3) KeyboardScientist makes a viral post that the government is sterilizing people of a particular ethnicity.
With a bit of googling, you can find events very close to all these three.
Second, it’s almost tautological. If there was enough profit to justify the development time and cost, drug companies would pursue a vaccine. Since they’re not pursuing a vaccine, you can assume there’s not enough estimated profit compared to other research ventures.
The second point includes considerations of difficulty. There are many strep strains. Strep can trigger autoimmune diseases. Will the costs of surmounting these challenges be rewarded above other pursuits?
The GP didn't say that.
As for which informal fallacy the GGP's argument contained, I would say it was more like a false dilemma. And the GGP did say "almost tautological", which implicitly recognizes that there might be other possibilities.
> people often express this criticism by saying "your argument is tautological,"
I have never seen this (nonsensical) way of expressing the criticism that an argument is false by saying that it is tautological (and therefore true).
If you wish to see usages like I described, have a look here.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Those aren't logical fallacies; they're just not very useful.
No, that's not "almost tautological". In fact, it is a form of the appeal to tradition fallacy. (LIt is tautological -- as are many applications of that fallacy -- if you take the assumptions underpinning rational choice theory as axioms, but it stops being such once you drop the perfect information assumption.)
Your reframing of it in the next sentence subtly acknowledges this, when you shift from "if there was enough profit" to "there’s not enough estimated profit", despite that you are responding to a post that explicitly is arguing that the estimate made of the profit is dubious.
One dose and very little strep for the rest of your life is different than an annual regimine.
But you can't know how it will do before a lot of spending.
Strep A is technically solved due to being easily treatable with common antibiotics.
At least with vaccinations, it's usually one shot every $DECENTLY_NOT_SHORT_INTERVAL, and that's it.
Granted, crazy stupid antivax sentiment is on the rise...
"Cancer" isn't one disease though, it's hundreds, and many of them require completely different approaches to treat.
> Tuberculosis kills nearly 1.5 million people per year, or 3x
So in other words, yes, it would be "worth it" to develop a vaccine for strep A. It would also be worth it to develop a vaccine for tuberculosis. Let's do both.
> Over 9 million people die from hunger related causes, which while not a disease is 18x strep A
Not really relevant. The people who have expertise in developing vaccines and the people who have expertise in "fixing hunger" are not the same people.
> the scale and the fact that it can be treated with common antibiotics means that we can put the effort and resources that would be spent on a vaccine to better use elsewhere
That's not a good way to evaluate where to put resources. To borrow your example, maybe it will take 10x more time and 5x the cost to develop a vaccine for tuberculosis vs. strep A. Then working on strep A sounds like a good allocation of resources.
Just offering that as an example; I of course don't know the relative resource requirements here. But things are not so simple. (Though going back to your cancer example: I feel pretty safe in guessing it would take way more than 18x the resources and effort to cure all forms of cancer than to develop a strep A vaccine.)
And regardless, resources are usually not allocated in the most simple, efficient way. People work on things because they want to, and can find someone to fund them. Funders might want to fund something because they have a personal connection to the thing they're funding. Certainly government grants are given with a bit more rigor than that, but there's a lot of disease-fighting out there that comes from a variety of sources. And that's ok.
You could argue that vaccines would be hampered by the same environmental issues, but the window of stability necessary to vaccinate a person for life is much smaller and easier than the repeated stability moments required to gain access to antibiotics in a timely fashion for those infected with Strep A.
The question of prioritization of resources is not merely dependent upon the number of those affected, the creation of an effective vaccine is unpredictable. You're better off taking a broad approach in order to maximize the likelihood of success.
The world would get massively overpopulated very quickly.
Diseases maintain the balance of us with nature, if we eliminate them we are going to run out of food fast.
The limit is ultimately set by thermodynamics and the need to dissipate waste heat to space. This limit is around 1 trillion people, but this likely requires food be artificially synthesized. Using conventional agriculture, a global limit of 150 billion was set (in a 1979 study referenced in the 1985 book "The Global Possible", page 217), or 47 billion with a US-like diet. Nitrous oxide emission from agriculture is likely to be a long term concern, as this powerful greenhouse gas accumulates.
As always, please do not interpret these statements as advocacy of these outcomes.
This is where ai currently falls down. It can’t do new analysis.
Antibiotics come up here a lot and other places in discussion due to their (possibly) bad side effects or immunity with excessive use.
I think someone else here pointed out that it's tricky to make an immune response have the desired outcome and no undesired ones so a vaccine may not be the right hammer for this nail.