I wonder if the vaccine causes inflammatory and other unpleasant responses when administered. If so, I wonder if those responses go away after the last dose, when the three months of protection begin.
Here are the two paragraphs that I found interesting:
> The new vaccine, for now known as GLA-3M-052-LS+OVA, mimics the T cell signals that directly stimulate innate immune cells in the lungs. It also contains a harmless antigen, an egg protein called ovalbumin or OVA, which recruits T cells into the lungs to maintain the innate response for weeks to months.
> In the study, mice were given a drop of the vaccine in their noses. Some recieved multiple doses, given a week apart. Each mouse was then exposed to one type of respiratory virus. With three doses of the vaccine, mice were protected against SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses for at least three months.
Here's hoping the final product doesn't have a side-effect of inducing an allergy to the main component of egg-whites.
Although even if that happened... Would it only apply to the raw materials, as opposed to cooked products where the ovalbumin was denatured by heat?
Edit: No, wait! What about "safe to eat" cookie-dough, which uses heat-treated flour and pasteurized eggs as ingredients!? The might still have intact ovalbumin, and obviously I can't give it up.
My understanding (not a chemist nor doctor) is that it's specific bits of the protein that trigger the allergic reaction, so eve if the whole protein breaks down parts of it will survive and will cause trouble.
I suppose this is similar to how we use broken down bits of virus to trigger immune reactions with vaccines.
A new area of research has opened up. This approach may be more useful for treatment than prevention. It's not really a vaccine; it's more like an induced vaccine response. Keeping the immune system in that state full time might be a problem. But after an infection, that's what's wanted.
I do wonder if the kind of people who got vaccinated 10 times against Covid-19 will end up trying to get a sniff of this every month? Kind of like how we overuse antibiotics in cleaners. It seems like it would be best if saved for an "oh shoot" kind of situation.
That latter term (ectopic lymphoid structure) comes up in connection with persistent inflammation where the immune system sets up camp near the problem point. Is this good or bad? Do these go away once the infection clears up?
In general, it doesn't surprise me that when you prime the innate immune system, the adaptive immune system works well. The problem is that pathogens have an incredible suite of tools ready to evade these mechanisms. The doses of the pathogens are typically insanely high too, which I do not think model natural infections well. Anyways, this is intriguing, so I'll take a look at the original paper one of these days. Vaccine research generally is so boring. It's like, we vaccinated, and it worked, or didn't, no mechanism.
And bear in mind that most people don't have a problem surviving colds and the like long enough to reproduce even with no vaccines at all, and that was probably more true for much of our evolutionary history when we were living much more isolated lives, and not cohabiting with chickens and pigs.
While human evolution is not predictive, it has selected for a wide variety of survival-associated adaptations beyond the mere individual.
Humans had life expectancy even shorter than our fertility period until recently and they developed as social species hundreds of thousands years ago, for which living beyond fertility period is beneficial (grandparents were invented by evolution too).
> And bear in mind that most people don't have a problem surviving colds
That’s modern people with access to antibiotics etc.
> that was probably more true for much of our evolutionary history when we were living much more isolated lives, and not cohabiting with chickens and pigs
For much of our evolutionary history people were eating animals, getting viruses with them.
Antibiotics don't help against viruses like colds. And we live a life that is has a higher degree of social connectivity than our ancestors, allowing for faster spreading of disease, so we're arguably worse off.
Yes. But they help fighting secondary infections, which are common.
That's largely due to infant/child mortality. Once you reached reproductive age, life expectancy was roughly 50, plenty of time to have plenty of kids.
I don't think you understand evolution. Neither needs to be "better" for anything other than survival to reproduction. Evolution isn't min-maxing in a video game.
This doesn't mean anything.
> Chances for survival to reproduce of some individuals are greatly influenced by survival of their relatives in the same group. The traits that help whole group to survive will win in natural selection, including those that extend survival beyond what’s necessary to reproduce to what’s beneficial for the group.
Which, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with whether current traits are optimized for perfection, or simply sufficient for continued reproduction. Again, evolution isn't min-maxing your video game character. I'm not clear why you have such strident opinions on something you don't understand very well.
Inflamation uses up resources. When we were hunter-gatherers and had to survive ice ages - it wasn't a good idea to waste calories and vitamins just in case.
Better for 3 people out of 30 to die of flu than for all 30 to starve.
Nowadays the optimal trade-off might be completely different.
Well sure, but "not an improbable thing to develop" is doing a lot of work there. Again, everything complex is "improbable to develop," in the sense that evolution takes a lot of time and is very path dependent.
We could have paper shredders, blenders, toasters, water taps, and so on that just ran all the time, but our utility bills would be ginormous. Same thing for our bodies.
It might be worth it, at least during certain times of the year. For much of the winter, for instance, I already seem to have a lot of nasal drainage and other unpleasant symptoms for the whole time, along with the occasional actual infection which is much more unpleasant.
There's certain times when there's big flare-ups of infections such as flu, so maybe giving everyone an annoying vaccine during that time which gives them the sniffles would actually improve things overall.