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Comment by reliablereason | Hacker News Reader

> It is given as a nasal spray and leaves white blood cells in our lungs – called macrophages – on "amber alert" and ready to jump into action no matter what infection tries to get in.

Right and if that is such a good thing why are those macrophages not always on alert. I smell longterm cancer or similar.

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> I smell longterm cancer or similar.

Or simply autoimmune reactions which can be devastating.

Indeed, I wonder whether the vaccine content matters at all in current vaccines. We could probably just inject people with the adjuvants and get the same result.

Why not just eat a handful of dirt?

> I wonder whether the vaccine content matters at all in current vaccines.

The target does matter, that is the basis for the whole technology, and the thing most predictive of efficacy. That's why the flu shots often don't work and the shots for smallpox and measles do, the flu is a more rapidly mutating target.

Going crazy with the adjuvants was popular during the pandemic when it became clear that the virus had mutated (the target protein), but no one wanted to do R&D for a new target. Counting white blood cells became a proxy for efficacy, and you can manipulate that stat with adjuvants.

There seem to be cases where the target really doesn’t matter, for example:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-vaccines-and-...

The content clearly matters, and efficacy is tracked (this year it was poor because the eventual pandemic flu strain was a H3N2 virus which mutate rapidly)[0]. This was despite WHO updating the recommendations at the last hour in April/May 2025.

But critically this isn't as important as people think. The primary goal of the flu vaccination is of course to temper spread of the main viruses that season. But it's also to build people's immune library of exposure to flu viruses.

Recall that the 1918 "Spanish" flu was so terrible not because it was intrinsically a worse virus but that it was one which many younger generations had not been previously exposed.

COVID has meant that many younger generations again has a much smaller library of past exposure.

[0] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/influenza-vaccines/estimated-effe...

Yeah this is more likely than cancer, and is a potential side effect of anything that stimulates the immune system, including real antigen-carrying vaccines.

I'm less certain, many if not most lung cancers seems to follow chronic inflammation in the lungs.

The classic example is asbestos related mesothelioma. "Frustrated phagocytosis" is the name for the way macrophages become locked in a never ending spiral of eat, die poison loops around the asbestos.

Do we really want macrophages to go into high gear? Will we make sure no one who has it has been exposed every to any asbestos?

What about other triggers of frustrated phagocytosis? People who commute by subway (tiny metal particles).

The point isn't to say that this is a bad idea necessarily but that I'm not sure this sounds so much safer than regular vaccination.

This reminds me of an episode in Star Trek: TNG's 2nd season, where Pulaski and Data visit a colony doing genetic engineering experiments on kids which created a super-virus.

It would be nice to have a dosage that lasts a couple of days for when you're flying or attending a conference.

That way, your immune system wouldn't be on continuous high alert, but you could give it an "Oy, wake up. Incoming pathogens." blast.

This. I don't think humans have evolved a brain - immune system pathway to prime the macrophage pump after you book a Ryanair.

If only Stanford University had asked you first!

If only you had read the article.

>There may also be consequences to dialling up the immune system beyond its normal state – raising questions of immune disorders.

> Jonathan Ball, professor of molecular virology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, said the work was undeniably "exciting" but cautioned "we have to ensure that keeping the body on 'high alert' doesn't lead to friendly fire, where a hyper-ready immune system accidentally triggers unwelcome side effects".

> The research team in the US does not think the immune system should be permanently dialled up and think such a vaccine should be used to compliment rather than replace current vaccines.

They are behind a paywall for Americans now.

Autoimmune disorders

The most likely, because it consumes energy and respiratory diseases take almost nobody from the gene pool.

What has no relation at all to what possible side effects this could have.

there are many, many things our bodies could do (or not do) to greatly improve our health at no cost whatsoever.

That we think have no cost. The massive failure rate of drug trials and some famous cases of issues discovered only after wide scale deployment indicates we're not that great at knowing ahead of time.

The body is like legacy spaghetti code written by hundreds of teams of outsourced engineers. It mostly works. Just never remove any commented out lines or it may break.

Our body was vibe coded

A billion years of kludges.

While possible, there are also many bodily processes that are finely tuned through eons of evolution, and destabilizing pressure leads to disorder. Sometimes it's difficult to know which are which (or at least I don't know).

Which things?

the most straightforward example off the top of my head would be that hair follicles have no conceivable reason to react to testosterone. removing DHT receptors from them would have no adverse effect whatsoever.

We can also live just fine without an appendix. Literally the only thing the organ can do is suddenly develop a severe infection and kill you without surgery which has only become reliably available in the past 100 years or so. (Blah blah bacterial reservoir or whatever: that's of evidently very low value compared to sudden and painful death)

There's also no reason we shouldn't be immune to funnel web poison: cats make an enzyme which deactivates it, whereas primates don't.

There is also no reason our eyes can’t see in the dark because cats can and no reason to not to lay eggs because that’s more practical and way less dangerous (and probably painful) than giving birth directly. Also too bad that we haven’t multiple hearts for redundancy.

Ok.

So what does that means ?

Means there's room for improvement.

have you read the story of dr. adrian thompson's ai generated fpga ? the story goes that removing seemingly redundant components caused the circuit to fail because of second order effects. for that reason, i try to avoid sweeping statements like 'no effect whatsoever' when it comes to playing god

It's important to note that evolution is not a designer, it's just a string of random mutations over millions of years that mostly work. The human body is remarkably shit at a lot of thing, like not getting heart disease. Most animals don't develop heart disease but we do... oops.

That would affect sexual selection, which can have consequences for the following generations, if there will be any.

Or antimicrobial resistance.

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