101–110 of 236 posts
I am curious how a trial for the HIV vaccine will proceed in a world where PrEP is available.
I didn't know about PrEP, but from what I've just read it has to be taken daily in order to be effective. A vaccine could be a safer method.
Would it be easier to cover more flu strains with an mRNA vaccine? Could we shove like 100 in there?
There is a Netflix documentary called Pandemic about couple that is trying to eradicate flu. They found vaccine that works on all flu viruses but it takes 6 shots to work. That’s not practical at all therefore it’s not on the market yet.
Conspiracy glasses on, what if the annual flu vaccine manufacturers are actively preventing a universal vaccine from happening? It's a big recurring source of income for them after all.
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Also, can we get a vaccine for most of the common colds??
Found this: https://www.verywellhealth.com/why-there-will-never-be-a-vac... > Vaccines target a specific virus or pathogen. One difficulty with developing a vaccine for the common cold is there are at least 200 different viruses that can cause cold symptoms, including rhinovirus, coronavirus, adenoviruses, and parainfluenza.1 > Rhinovirus makes up about 75% of colds. Still, there are more than 150 strains of it circu…
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I found that article very interesting, and think describing the pushback as PR threats from conspiracy theorists oversimplifies just a bit. Aa mentioned in the article, it's very possible the vaccine triggers a rare, genetically associated autoimmune disorder normally caused by Lyme disease. It was also released roughly concurrently with at least one vaccine that was legitimately withdrawn for safety reasons. Compare…
The argument I've always read is that it should be made available to people who live in areas with lots of ticks, not that it should be pushed on everyone.
But if you begin saying you need shots to go in Poland, it's maybe not going to be accepted as easily as for tropical countries...
BTW the side effects of the shots we give to go to French Guyane is something to behold. Roommate was literally covered with red dots and it itched like hell.
biontech also just published a paper on how they're trying to tackle MS. mrna therapeutics are exciting stuff!
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Found this: https://www.verywellhealth.com/why-there-will-never-be-a-vac... > Vaccines target a specific virus or pathogen. One difficulty with developing a vaccine for the common cold is there are at least 200 different viruses that can cause cold symptoms, including rhinovirus, coronavirus, adenoviruses, and parainfluenza.1 > Rhinovirus makes up about 75% of colds. Still, there are more than 150 strains of it circu…
I'm ignorant, but could they put a tiny dose of all 175 variants into a single shot and yeet that into people in one go?
How the organism would react to such a flurry of foreign proteins, that is another question. 175 unknown proteins is a lot, the immune system could be roused beyond safe levels. It is possible to kill a person (or a mouse) by overstimulating its immune system.
I am curious how a trial for the HIV vaccine will proceed in a world where PrEP is available.
There's a lot of places in the world that have not approved PrEP. And just like a birth control pill, it has to be taken daily -- and that is something that is hard for a lot of people to do consistently. Even in the West, isn't it really expensive?
(Apparently event driven PrEP is indeed not approved or recommended for women.)
> Even in the West, isn't it really expensive?
One datapoint: In Belgium the out of pocket cost is 5 euros per package of 30 pills.
Really good news! Hopefully these get approved relatively quickly. I'm most excited about the seasonal flu vaccine. That could be a major game changer.
I can't understand people who wants to get vaccinated yearly for just a flu. Please make me understand. I mean it's just a flu and we have Netflix. As a Moderna shareholder I think that is stupid. As a healthy eater I think that is really stupid. Now I can only think I must be really stupid.
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Don't they already have flu vaccines. I thought the issue was that they changed so rapidly the vaccines can't keep up?
Yeah, it's very difficult to predict which are going to be the dominant strains so they take a best guess, include the several candidates that they expect to be most virulent that season and ship that as the "flu vaccine" that season. The hope is that with a much faster time from approval -> production, in theory we could reassess in October / December / February and vaccinate against the most virulent strains that a…
This means the relatively mild flu load in Australia and especially New Zealand actually hurt this year's Northern Hemisphere guess - they were isolating because of COVID-19 and so they had far fewer than usual cases on which to base guesses.
Damn can you imagine? I never imagined that an HIV vaccine would be possible within my lifetime. Kind of reminds me of HepC. An older coworker told me how a friend killed himself back in the day for getting HepC from tainted blood (pretty much a death sentence at that time and it consumed him). But now it’s possible to CURE it and hopefully it’ll be the same for HIV soon. Fuck, science like this is amazing.
Just to be clear, a vaccine doesn't cure a disease. It prevents one from contracting it.
I've been re-watching Queer as Folk which isn't that old and it's crazy how aged it feels because we've made so much progress over the last 10 years. BTW amazing show if anyone hasn't seen - wish you could get HD version with the original soundtrack.