Malaria vaccine delivered by a mosquito bite
nature.com
nature.com
As for eradicating host populations/mosquitoes, it's not the greatest idea. Ecosystems are complicated and don't generally benefit from that sort of interference. Maybe if it's a recently invasive species, sure, as long as other species don't get inadvertently by-caught. Drastically simplifying - birds need to eat too, and they tried to do this style of ecosystem management in the past and it has had brutally adverse effects for ecosystem stability.
I think that this is an incredible development, but also seems kind of destabilizing. It's hard to say without seeming or being callous, that it seems good now, but we need to try to predict outcomes far into the future. That is to say - people think they are smart to have done it, and yeah it's doable, but is it really such a great idea to throw such a series of proverbial monkey wrenches into our proverbial biological engines?
This is a false dichotomy. Malaria is transmitted by only specific and very small subset of mosquitoes. There would still be plenty of mosquitoes if you eliminate the ones that cause unimaginably massive population harm.
This is like saying nobody should ever take any medicine ever, even after years of study and analysis, because there might be some unknown harm that we haven't yet identified from it because we aren't looking in the right places. And yet we have collectively decided that taking medicine when we are sick is actually a good thing to do, because being sick in known catastrophic ways is objective and true while the unknown unknown is purely hypothetical and unfounded.
Well millions upon millions of people are dying, objectively and truly, and we can stop it. And what you have to say against a proposal that has had substantial risk analysis already done, where the harms have been determined to be nil, is something completely unfounded without a basis in any known mechanism in the real world.
It has been analyzed to death. At some point it becomes important to recognize that further objection on the same basis that has already been rebutted time and again is no longer clever and is just obstructionism with a willfully catastrophic cost.
Surely no-one would argue against the benefits of antibiotics, and yet after decades of successful use we're only now discovering that in using them, we're breeding resistant bacteria that we have no way to deal with. We're clever monkeys but we should remember that however hard we think, we can always miss something important, especially when we're talking about large complex biological systems.
If we can develop effective vaccines then I personally don't see the need to start deliberately exterminating species, even the truly loathesome ones.
People have been constantly arguing against all kinds of medicine, including antibiotics. And we have solutions to resistant bacteria. It's a social problem of developing expensive new antibiotics while restricting their market to the last line of defence. And finally, the analogy breaks down: we did develop and deploy antibiotics, and have been able to see the consequences and adapt as a result.
We're mindlessly eradicting species all the time. There might be a trolley problem in intentionally nuking one. But that's, again, socio-philosophical. If the first ecosystem we eradicate in collapses, against the predictions of practically every expert in the field, we can stop. In the meantime, we avoid a useless debate that costs millions their lives.
> If we can develop effective vaccines then I personally don't see the need to start deliberately exterminating species, even the truly loathesome ones
Again, a social problem. It's easier to get rid of the diseasse by taking out mosquitoes than it is to continuously convince populations to get vaccinated into perpetuity. (To say nothing of vaccines' adverse effects.)
Not sure what you mean here; I was replying to this:
> Certainly we must be missing some factor from this analysis
> ---
> This is like saying nobody should ever take any medicine ever, even after years of study and analysis, because there might be some unknown harm that we haven't yet identified from it because we aren't looking in the right places.
...my point being that we are now facing previously unknown harms despite the best research available at the time (maybe antibiotic resistance itself was foreseen, but did anybody warn about hospital run-off and agricultural usage creating reservoirs of resistance-breeding via competition and horizontal gene transfer inside sewage systems? This is the sort of unforeseen consequence I'm talking about).
> We're mindlessly eradicting species all the time. There might be a trolley problem in intentionally nuking one. But that's, again, socio-philosophical. If the first ecosystem we eradicate in collapses, against the predictions of practically every expert in the field, we can stop. In the meantime, we avoid a useless debate that costs millions their lives.
This is exactly the kind of hubris I'm arguing against.
The fact that we're doing it all the time anyway is not an argument to do more of it. It's a compelling reason to do less.
Ecosystems don't generally exist in total isolation from each other, and don't just collapse when we poke them. Far more likely is that we will cause a problem that takes years or more to manifest, by which time it's out of our control and much more difficult or impossible to fix.
The debate is not useless when we're meddling with things that we don't fully understand, with unknown consequences for the environment that we live in. This is the trolley problem - do we save people from malaria now at the cost of potentially worse problems in the future? Since we don't know for sure what effect our intervention will have on a grander scale, what can't know what if any damage we're doing further down the line. I think it's OK to consider that carefully; in the meantime, vaccines are still our best option, and social problems are generally easier to quantify and address; we're pretty good at human psychology these days.
> To say nothing of vaccines' adverse effects.
Every vaccine has some fraction of the population is affects adversely. We’re super strict about that hazard. But it exists. Eradicating a mosquito isn’t risk free, but it’s (a) one and done and (b) strikes me as less risky.
A better example would be something like tetraethyl lead, which poisoned (indeed continues to poison) huge numbers of people for relatively minor gain. Even then, the problems were known, the profit motive just won out over the don’t-poison-everyone motive.
There's a big difference between eliminating all mosquitoes and eliminating just malaria-carrying mosquito species. IIRC studies show that if you eliminate malaria-carrying mosquito species that other mosquito species very quickly take over this ecological niche.
Only a small number of species (single digit percentage) go after mammals. And even less than have been found to be vectors for disease.
The basic point is that yes, we can wipe out selected mosquito species via eradication programs (like sterile mate release) with zero consequence outside of healthier people, because human hazardous mosquitos aren’t unique to the ecological niche they fill.
I realize this is a dumb starting point, but ... Cows don't eat mosquitos, Feed corn is not pollinated by mosquitos, Orange groves do not require mosquitos. What, specifically, are we afraid of?
But "collapse" is not what I'm saying. If you were to remove mosquitos in a localized region and observe the effects on the region's ecology, you could witness the problems, reintroduce the bugs, and revitalize the region (probably it'd recover anyway).
Mosquitos are fairly localized. Their range upperbound is 7 miles. Some just fly 300 feet and breed around your house. There are plenty of ecological phenomena that are managed in "a few miles" ranges, like fish populations, forests, etc.
I haven't heard a compelling reason in any of these threads to believe that it's actually dangerous to remove them from a few sq mile area.
There's no reason to be absolutist about problems we can manage, just based on unobserved worst case solutions with no risk profile attached.
It's a risk, but it's not worse than the thousands of other risks we've already taken. Given the absolutely insane amount of death and suffering caused by mosquito-borne diseases, it's probably also a justifiable one.
*: e.g. heartworm in dogs
---
I guess the political turn is what seems it be off place, but if people were discussing how to make a program 0.5µs faster it'd be ok to discuss a way to shave 3s out of it, even if it was a completely different approach on a different part of the program. It'd mean that the effort is maybe being made in the wrong place.
and unfortunately we are in warming planet where Malaria's host vector range is going to increase as temperatures continue to rise, destroying Malaria is one of the greatest possible morale goods we could pursue.
Those are long dead already, aren't they? I guess the right question to be asked when thinking about taking action is which one is going to kill more in the near future.
> unfortunately we are in warming planet where Malaria's host vector range is going to increase as temperatures continue to rise.
This is a fair point and should be accounted when thinking about the impact on malaria
> Destroying Malaria is one of the greatest possible morale goods we could pursue
It's great for sure, maybe among the greatest ones around health, but I don't think it'd go over peace.
https://verily.com/solutions/public-health/debug
It's a Verily project that causes population collapse in mosquitoes like aedes aegypti by rendering the males infertile.
> Aedes aegypti mosquitoes carry dengue, chikungunya, Zika and yellow fever diseases which have a large and growing impact on human health. They live almost exclusively in close association with humans, don’t fly very far compared to some mosquito species and are particularly difficult to attack using traditional methods, such as pesticides and source reduction of breeding sites.They’re also extensively studied in many labs around the world. We hope what we learn with the Aedes aegypti in the field will be helpful in developing new ways of tackling other mosquitoes and the diseases they transmit.
Wow, the Wikipedia article on Wolbachia is absolutely fascinating, thanks. I guess now they will push Wolbachia into Anopheles and use it as another control against malaria.
And it turns out, you can!
When you were 7, did you yearn for modified parasites?
His example was a cat and a slug. He would absolutely love modified parasites.
It's much more ethical to do this with something tested for safety than with the newest flues, colds, and covids spreading. That's not to mention RSV, HSV, HPV, and all the others, as well as unknown diseases.
Unless you continue to mask and take similar precautions, you have no basis for this assertion. The things you spread have had no safety testing, and in many cases, lead to specific impacts like long covid, increased age-related mental decline, increased odds of cancer, and others.
Why does the consent need to be collected individually? We don't even require collective sign off for the factory fumes we each breathe daily. It seems reasonable for a government to consent on behalf of its governed for something like public health.
Does it? How can you guarantee that your government's interpretation of "public health" matches yours?
There are no guarantees in social systems. This is true for governing legitimacy as well as concepts like consent.
By precedent, it does. Your blood contains all kinds of artificial compounds, originally ingested or inhaled, that came out of regulated factories or government programmes. You have no say around whether you are exposed to these substances individually. In the case of inhalation, you have little to no control.
Nope, it doesn't. The fact that I have those things in my blood does not mean I consented to them.
But I'm surprised you'd give up your bodily integrity so easily. Do you trust the government that much? Or are you just resigned to it?
That’s the point. You didn’t. You didn’t have to. That’s the precedent.
> I'm surprised you'd give up your bodily integrity so easily
I actually don’t love it. But the argument that such measures are problematic because they sidestep an individual consent that we don’t bother getting in other analogous situations makes it moot. I’m not disagreeing, I’m saying the reasoning doesn’t hold.
Fair enough
> But the argument that such measures are problematic because they sidestep an individual consent that we don’t bother getting in other analogous situations makes it moot.
I guess this is where we don't agree. If I'm understanding correctly, your point is that existing contaminants in the food and air are analogous situations to these mosquito vaccines, and since we already don't give consent for the former, we shouldn't bother with the latter. I disagree: the fact that we have no control over these contaminants entering our body is not a reason to give carte blanche to the government to go even further.
Not quite. Contaminants as well as substances we intentionally introduce into our food and water for public health purposes. (Including biologics [1].)
And not that we shouldn't bother. But that the argument for individual consent in a case where we've ample history of not bothering with it, often for the best, isn't a great argument.
> not a reason to give carte blanche to the government to go even further
Sure. But it's not "going further." It's business as usual.
One could go full R. F. K. and argue against the whole enterprise. But that's a fringe position. A proven losing argument. To argue against this (and other specific wrongs at the far end of the spectrum) you need arguments as to why those cases are different. Because going from N = 10,000 to 10,001 isn't qualitatively "going further," it's doing the same thing.
The Nuremberg trials are about why governments and people cannot be trusted, period.
This isn't about trust. It's about what requires individual consent, and for what groups can consent collectively. When medicine is individually administered, best practice is informed consent. But when substances are collectively administered (or removed), and this ranges from water sanitation to fluoridation to mandated fortification to factory pollutants you get to breathe, we have deep precedents that say it's fine to ask the group together and skip individual consent.
That doesn't mean this is fine. (The risk-reward seems skewed to the left when eradication of malaria-carrying species is on the table.) The argument is simply flawed. We simply do not get individual consent every time an artificial substance is introduced into peoples' bodies.
It would likely turn into the status quo: a bastard disease spread by mosquitoes.
I just don't see how injecting people with genetically modified parasites without their consent is "great".
Right now you can consent to get a malaria vaccine, no covert parasite needed.
If the counter that it is for poorer populations, I'd still say you may want to ask them if they want to be injected with a genetically modified parasite. If one single person doesn't want to be in the area, you shouldn't do it. Would you support them dropping these in your neighborhood?
Oh, and this already happens with the attenuated polio vaccine. People can catch the vaccine from those who have been immunised, in a similar way to how they could catch the virus. Delivering the vaccine the same way the pathogen spreads also allows people to opt out by following the same techniques they would to avoid the actual disease. You can use mosquito nets, mosquito sprays, etc., to help avoid both malaria and the mosquito-delivered vaccine.
I'd much prefer we got rid of Mr. Mosquito, but if we won't (or can't) we can at least make sure that what's in that jerk's needle stops killing people every day.
You can modify them to not reproduce if you're modifying them already for this instance.
If it's a matter of "won't" then we should ask "why not", instead of allowing someone to do this.
Curious to know where I can find no mosquitoes, other than Iceland and Antarctica.
The US has also had great success in their eradication and mitigation programs.
The point is not to get rid of all mosquitos, just the disease-carrying ones.
Thailand has also done it with great success.
We're also not doing it from a position of "mosquitos couldn't be used to spread human selectable things to kill humans before and now people suddenly can spread genetically modified killer parasites".
The one thing this research does is add the ability to spread immunity to malaria through mosquito population it doesn't change anything else about what could be spread by mosquitos before. People have been using animals to spread disease as a weapon of war since medieval times this is not a new vector that will suddenly be exploited.
This can only be a good thing unless you view the vaccines as a danger worse than the disease (which with such a widespread and deadly disease would be rather unlikely in any objective sense) or to be simplistic you believe in the inalienable right to be a vector to spread diseases to those around you.
from https://www.cdc.gov/mosquitoes/about/about-mosquito-bites.ht...
- Female mosquitoes bite people and animals to get a blood meal.
- Most female mosquitoes cannot produce eggs without a blood meal.
- Male mosquitoes do not bite people and animals.From what I've been able to tell, conspiracy theorists are hosts unto themselves. If you have the chance to talk to one deep in the weeds in person, it's fascinating how you can throw out literally any assertion, back it up with negative evidence ("can't really go into that"), and see the pick up. (It's best to do this outside your own context. As an American, it's easier to see the nonsense abroad.)
If this were a virus created using gain of function research we would call it a biological weapon. But because the intent is different we're supposed to be excited and accepting of it?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
> But because the intent is different we're supposed to be excited and accepting of it?
One could say that it's the intent which varies between a heart transplant and an Azrec blood sacrifice.
I would say that consent is the key distinguishing factor and intent follows afterwards.
Heart transplants are from consenting donors that have recently diseased, not living victims murdered solely for their organs. Blood sacrifices do not involve taking the heart and saving a live either. So no intent is not the variance there.
Which is why I gave that exact example.
Except it's the literal opposite of gain of function: it's the subtraction of function from a pathogen which already exists in the environment and already infects people on a regular basis in the environment, turning it from a deadly killer into something that dies quickly and without reproducing when it meets the human immune system.
HN is having a real hard time here with the concept that mass death is actually bad and something that’s nice to prevent.
I am terrified of them but I'm fairly certain it's rationalized. The medical community decided it's more important to bully their patients into compliance than to listen to their concerns and work with them. The vaccine absolutely had side effects for some individuals and they were treated very poorly, in particular at the beginning of the pandemic, due to this attitude of "fighting misinformation." Our medical institutions were put to propaganda purposes rather than healthcare purposes and the results were absolutely horrific.
> to cause more death and suffering
This is predicated on the belief that "herd immunity" is valid and universal to all vaccines and that, again, bullying people who are afraid into choices they're not comfortable with is somehow justifiable due to it. As if letting a for profit institution inject random goop into me is a natural thing to _not_ be generally wary or afraid of.
Just because you think you have "the science" doesn't mean you get a free pass on "patient rights."
I’m really not looking forward to the return of measles and polio as common first-world diseases, but that seems to be the trajectory we’re on.
Which is all bad enough, but for people with your sort of "rational" to then decide that vaccines are _all_ uncritically "good," and any questions or any sort of reservations that I've just covered were thus uncritically "bad" and those having them deserved to have their civil rights stripped from them, is what made this a horror.
Finally, we have sanitized water and sewers and we live in first world conditions, the precursors to the diseases you mention are almost entirely absent from our living conditions, and those vaccinations use time tested and proven technologies which haven't ever been in question. Perhaps some of the popular adjuvants are worthy of concern, but in your version of rationality, this is apparently an evil thing to even consider out loud in the presence of the vaunted "technophiles."
You completely fail to maintain rationality in the face of a very narrow and specific critique.
Complete horseshit.
This sort of nonsense is what I’m talking about. It’s not that you’re not allowed to criticize. It’s that the critics are full of shit and we’re expected to take it seriously.
Wonderful brand of rationality you have on display here.
> This sort of nonsense is what I’m talking about.
https://www.newsweek.com/science-fact-check-definition-vacci...
> and we’re expected to take it seriously
You have refused to take any of this seriously. You have a preconceived idea of the world and you are absolutely unwilling to accept any debate or challenge over it. You are acting as a bully and not as a scientist. No wonder you constantly appeal to authority.
Definitions are always imprecise anyway. The CDC’s pre-2015 definition of a vaccine wouldn’t have covered the tetanus vaccine, even though it’s a century old and there’s no dispute over whether or not it should qualify as a “vaccine” or not.
I’ve seen two somewhat different complaints around this definition nonsense.
First, there’s the complaint that the original definition used to require that a vaccine contain a dead or inactivated infectious organism, and it was changed because mRNA stuff is the first time something didn’t work that way, and thus it’s not really a vaccine. This is of course completely false. Tetanus doesn’t work this way and there are others from well before the mRNA era.
The other is that the definition used to require a “vaccine” to provide total immunity from infection and now it doesn’t, and this is because the covid vaccines don’t provide total immunity. This is obviously wrong because no vaccine provides total immunity. There are vaccines that provide a lot better immunity than the covid vaccines do, but none that are 100%.
So yes, horseshit. This doesn’t come from preconceived notions of the world, it comes from knowing basic facts about the world. When you read that “they” changed “the” definition in order to push something, your first thought should be to look up what the old one said and see if it was actually an accurate definition. And you should have the basic knowledge to be able to understand when it was clearly deficient.
Yes.
> Definitions are always imprecise anyway.
That's the same conclusion the article arrives at in order to claim it as false, when in fact, it has to admit, the definition _was_ actually changed. You're happy they're waving their hands the same as you happen to be. "Complete horseshit" is really absurd thing to say in the face of this reduction of yours, isn't it?
> and it was changed because mRNA stuff is the first time something didn’t work that way
It was the first time something didn't work that way and was additionally being mandated. The concern was raised that mandating something which fails to meet the previous definition of vaccine was a flaw in policy and so the definition was, in fact, changed. You ironically seem to notice that it was changed as a result of public policy and not due to any other obvious reason.
> This is obviously wrong because no vaccine provides total immunity.
Most vaccines provide total immunity. That's because the disease they target is not a flu that has rapid genetic mutations and where the introduction of a leaky "vaccine" does not create evolutionary pressure on the target disease.
You can move the goalposts to debating weather a Tetanus "vaccine" meets the definition, but Tetanus is caused by a bacteria, so almost no definition of "vaccine" will apply to it anyways. Other than this oddity do you have even one other example?
> your first thought should be to look up what the old one said and see if it was actually an accurate definition
So it changed, but it was to make it "more accurate," so my claim that it was changed is somehow actually wrong? You've fallen into a tautological trap. You see why I consider you to be ideologically possessed?
> And you should have the basic knowledge to be able to understand when it was clearly deficient.
Yet they felt the need to change at the same time they introduced an entirely new vaccine and also decided that people needed to take this new vaccine or have their civil rights removed. That seems to be the "deficiency" they were trying to correct and were not at all suddenly concerned with improving accuracy at just a really unfortunate time.
So are there any other goal post distractions you'd like to hyper focus on in an effort to ignore the original point?
There’s also a serious problem with the phrase “the definition.” There are many definitions. There isn’t a single authority which decides what a word means.
“It was the first time something didn't work that way and was additionally being mandated.”
Come on, seriously? The tetanus vaccine is required for school in many places. Why are you saying something so obviously incorrect, and with an example that disproves it already being part of the conversation? You accuse me of not accepting debate and you do this kind of thing? I can’t even.
No, it isn't. You're describing the _combined_ Tdap vaccine. Why are you saying something so obviously incorrect, and even worse, _intentionally_ misleading?
Tetanus is not communicable. You see the problem with your focus on this one point? You're clinging to it as a defense when it's _entirely_ invalid to do so.
> I can’t even.
Then why try? All you've done is inject emotion and falsehoods into this discussion in order to defend your ego and ideology. Just stop. It's okay that people have a different opinion than you. Running around like a psychopath and labeling things as "complete horseshit" is an absurd response. You are doing this to yourself.
I'm minimizing and ignoring this thread now. Have a nice Thanksgiving!
“Vaccines” have such good standing because the general idea of improving immunity by exposing the immune system to non-infectious material that closely matches some part of the infectious agent works really well. There’s not much room for things to go wrong unless the material actually turns out to be infectious, as was the case with the dangerous vaccine I mentioned above.
If they were detected as unsafe during testing they wouldn't be available. That's the point. You only know of vaccines that passed the tests, not those that didn't.
> “Vaccines” have such good standing because the general idea of improving immunity by exposing the immune system to non-infectious material that closely matches some part of the infectious agent works really well. There’s not much room for things to go wrong unless the material actually turns out to be infectious, as was the case with the dangerous vaccine I mentioned above.
Infectiousness is not the only risk. Look at polio vaccines causing polio.
The countries they live in are malaria free because they eradicated the disease-carrying mosquitos and developed their healthcare system.
Developing the healthcare system of a country helps with more diseases and keeps consent. It also doesn't open you up for a potential biological weapon if some entity decided to misuse it (Russia, CIA, etc.)
There's a few types of malaria, not all are deadly, but none are fun.
But in the Climate Change Sweepstakes, Malaria has the winning ticket...
Not to worry: the scientists at lab promised the two events were totally unrelated.
As he explained it, the big problem is the field's dependence on funding from the Gates Foundation. Philanthropic funding isn't bad per se but the issue is that Gates specifically wants a legacy. That means he's not really interested in funding mitigation, he's only interested in eradication. A lot of researchers in the field think eradication isn't practical, but they keep their views private because you have to be gung-ho about eradication if you want access to the BMG Foundation funding stream. He said the result is a lot of grant proposals that are deliberately either vague or deceptive so money intended for eradication efforts can get spent on more useful stuff.
Beyond creating a culture where researchers routinely misrepresent their work and views, he told me the bigger problem was that it caused them to take extreme risks. Prototypical example: blanket spray an area with anti-malarial drugs. If it works then hooray, you eradicated malaria from that area. Until it returns, that is. But if it doesn't work then you just bred a new strain of malaria that's resistant to all known medications. It's the same problem as over-use of antibiotics.
A malaria vaccine delivered by mosquito sounds like the exact problem he was talking about, except times a million. One problem that can occur with vaccines - that gets drowned out and censored by the public health lobby and its allies - is that they can cause displacement rather than eradication. In other words you successfully vaccinate against one strain of the pathogen, but then it mutates under selection pressure to dodge immune systems that are "overfitted" to the prior strain. When invaded by the new strain the body doesn't recognize quickly enough that its antibodies no longer dock correctly, and so it spends a lot of time creating those when it should be trying to find new antibodies instead.
This problem is sometimes called immune imprinting, OAS or some other names and it's especially nasty because it misleads researchers doing drug trials. They develop a very targeted test against a pathogen (PCR or so), they make a vaccine against it, they vaccinate a trial population, the test drops to zero so they roll it out to the wider population. Success! Except then some years later some assholes point out that mortality didn't actually drop in that targeted population. All that happened is the pathogen mutated to the point neither the test nor the immune system recognize it, and so people are just getting sick with the variant instead. Unfortunately, awareness of this problem is very low because anyone who points it out is immediately targeted for cancellation and censorship for being an "anti-vaxxer" (they aren't anti-vaccine, they just want vaccines that are broad spectrum enough to actually achieve mortality reductions). Also public health institutions, having rolled out a vaccine, are loathe to admit in public it was all for nothing as they fear that it would lower compliance in future campaigns.
All this is a long way of saying THIS IS BAD DON'T DO IT. The risk is real that it backfires in ways that break existing anti-malarial drugs, the funding situation creates strong incentives to ignore this risk, and there's a history of it happening and then being swept under the rug.
His description of funding theatre is also fitting what I've seen in academia. Your question is a cheap way to try to devaluate the credibility of the post (probably on an ideological background), but what is written is hundred percent credible for anyone with experience in research. I've a friend working on pathogens for her PhD, funded by the Gates foundation and when I asked a question about it the answer wasn't exactly positive.
Flu vaccines are notorious for not reducing the mortality of the elderly whilst being reported as highly effective. They can even increase mortality from the flu due to late response caused by overfitting. The problem is twofold here: the vaccines cause displacement so they look good in trials, but then they also look good in observational data because the sort of people who sign up voluntarily for flu shots are just paying much more attention to their health in general so there's a selection bias effect. This paper tried to fix the selection bias and:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2728831/
"We found that flu shots reduced all-cause mortality among elderly Kaiser Permanente members by 4.6% during 9 laboratory-defined flu seasons in Northern California. Other researchers have reported that flu shots reduce mortality by much greater amounts."
Overfitting can exacerbate the problem by causing displacement to a variant that's worse. Here's an example from 2009 where Canadian authorities investigated the effectiveness of the trivalent influenza vaccine on swine flu:
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/51/9/1017/292207?login=...
"An outbreak investigation in British Columbia during the late spring of 2009 provided the first indication of an unexpected association between receipt of TIV and pH1N1 illness. This led to 5 additional studies through the summer 2009 in Canada, each of which corroborated these initial findings."
The reason there's so much controversy around vaccines in general is that the techniques used can easily look as if they're working well whilst they actually don't. Mistakes are understandable, but the incentive is then to cover things up because public health officials and researchers are terrified of doing anything that might support "anti vaxx" narratives (e.g. admitting to mistakes).
> In children who have not already had dengue, the dengue vaccine increases the risk of hospitalization and severe illness if the child gets dengue after vaccination.
The mechanism is most likely that wild-type dengue has optimized itself a bit to infect better when covered with vaccinal antibodies (antibody-dependent enhancement)
While dengue is certainly not unique (e.g. HIV also targets the immune system), but it is in the extreme minority of diseases. For the vast majority of diseases, this kind of response to vaccines or prior infections is simply not a thing.
Sounds like a major downside of a philathropic monopsony, which is a something I hadn't previously considered.
I'm not being skeptic, rather saying it's actually impressive.
Can you provide some reliable sources for this?
I'm aware of it, I didn't have to go hunt it down or anything, if you just read on any basic vaccine info or news website they will teach you about vaccine imprinting, it was like all over the place during Covid vaccination.
I'd argue, if there's anything that hurts being able to talk about those nuances more openly, it's the anti-vaxxers that jump at anything to shout demon. There's a ton of challenges, and issues with vaccines, or with making a car for that matter, there's a million ways to do it where it is harmful, deadly, dangerous, etc. That's almost the case for every single invention ever made. But the anti-vaxx just latch on, like we can't make anything that has risks into something that ends up justifying it's use because you can minimize the risks enough to warrant it being a net positive. Again, same as cars.
What you are talking about in terms of the methodology and the current environment for research is not great, but in all honesty, it's always like this, any field of research or engineering, and yet somehow inventions and innovations to come out of them ever so often, and progress is made. If you peek under the cover of everything we ever invented from the past, it'll seem just as dirty and broken.
Seems the incentives are such that you would want to make a virus PCR test using a narrow range of epitopes that you were targeting with the vaccine. That way, if/when you get breakthrough infections you can just say "well I don't see any virus!"
See bug, create unit test, fix unit test, no more bug. User complains bug still happens, you ignore because your unit tests still pass.
Right? Everyone has been kindly asking malaria to stay out of our bodies for ages now! Malaria has no respect at all for our rights!
If this was a trolly problem, one side would have several million deaths, there's a lot of switches we can activate at any time, and we're not entirely sure how many people are on each of the other tracks just that there's not many before the bend in the line that takes it through a thick dark jungle of our ignorance.
But I get your general sentiment. It's a scary thought, not just this, but the idea that we are now in a place where someone could use mosquitos to deliver chemical weapons, kind of scary.
Also, I'm no expert, but I'm not sure that is a right, if I understand Roe vs Wade reversal, it means the constitution is no longer interpreted to assume bodily autonomy as a constitutional right. And even if it was, that's just in the US, there's many countries where this wouldn't be the case.
It also begs the question, many things enter our bodies, all pollutants for example, radiation, and so on, and we tend to have no or very little say into that as well, what makes it into our waters and air and food, and so on.
Anyways, I think it's an interesting topic, and a good one to discuss.
Now if it's possible to do then obviously some government somewhere will do it (eventually), and no one will notice anything, say it's something that gives you a heart attack, and say we see a spike in heart attacks in 2050, it won't even be that significant since contrarian individuals are few, and just like that after a year the population will be a lot more docile.
It's still a sci-fi scenario now but it's scary to think about what the future will hold.
The main obstacle to your sci-fi scenario is that, to date, no such "contrarian gene" has been identified. In fact, most traits you'd want to genocide away seem tenuously related to particular alleles, at best. Unless we start seeing fanatical HERC2 purists, or the people making bioweapons decide they don't care about collateral in the War Against Redheads, we're probably safe from genetically-selective mosquito-induced heart attacks.
The next step is there.
What could go wrong with nonconsensual, covert, forced mass injections.
Today it's used for malaria, tomorrow?
When releasing these mosquitos, will they be getting consent of everyone in the area?
Just because nature does something, doesn't mean it's okay to allow humans to do it.
Imagine the following: we found the part of the brain that's making you love everything done by the authority. We developed a genetic vaccine against it and we are deploying it via mosquitos.
You wouldn't say the same thing.
And you know the extent of this on the whole eco-system?
And yes, many places have eradicated mosquitos with no shift in the ecosystem.
It's pretty much the one creature that all animals would love to have eradicated or at the very least mitigated.
I read that the tropical rain forests are unlivable by humans because of mosquitos and that limits the amount of deforestation that occurs.
Whether that's really true or worthwhile I'll leave it to others to argue over.
Deforestation is an issue, as those 280 million people do need to be fed. Mosquitoes don't really get in the way of deforestation. Insect repellents and pesticides do work. And when an area is deforested and either converted to urban or agricultural land, mosquitoes don't really linger in that area anymore.
Mosquitos are an important part of the ecosystem, they (especially their larva) are important food sources for other creatures.
However, most species of mosquitoes do not bite humans and not all of those are capable of spreading disease. What you are probably referencing is experiments in extermining specific disease carrying species. I don't think those studies have claimed "no shift in the ecosystem."
CRISPR for example has been hailed as surgical tool for slicing DNA, and works well in controlled environments because we set up methodology and environment to guarantee it.
This has lead many outside the related fields to believe that the tool alone has more control than it does. In reality, any changes with these tools must be formally verified through plasmid sequencing. This is Plasmidsaurus business model, and they are quite good at it.
Even afterwards though, outside very specific conditions (which are often involved in keeping it cold and below certain safety thresholds), unstable changes can occur, the effects of which we will never know beforehand. A shift by 1 base (3 bases per codon) may alter an entire sequence, but the molecular machinery would continue running until it is stopped.
It may result in death of the mosquito, and/or provide material (shedding/ingestion) that may be taken in by other unrelated species with unknown consequence.
Who is to say what impacts that might have, and with each additional node (mosquito), the chance of such outcomes increase greatly. To my knowledge, there have been very few studies that cover the topic of genomic stability with regards to CRISPR and its related tools. This is an area with extremely low visibility to potential consequences.
The very last outcome we want is for animals to attain a defiant pupil, along the plot line of Zoo.
For all x and y.
Just the top of my head - Unit 731 plague-infested fleas and "Operation Cherry Blossoms" in Japan, Operation Big Buzz" (1955) and "Operation Drop Kick" (1956), "Биопрепарат" (1974) in the USSR, and history of chucking plague-infected corpses (flying dead cows anyone?) in siege warfare.