Making Vaccine

Perhaps you are not one of the people running on the unexamined assumption. I still say it's clearly operative in many people.

I call it "unexamined" precisely because once pulled up the conscious level, it is obviously false. Nevertheless, pulling such things up to the conscious level is not easy and usually takes effort. Or, to put it another why, while I cringe every time I adopt this terminology, Kahneman's System 1 is pretty sloppy about such things. System 2, when presented with a problem directly, can often see quickly that System 1 is being irrational... but it first must be presented with the problem directly.

This must be a question with no good answer.

I guess I don't see an inherent problem with vaccine hacking. I'm reminded of the person who biohacked their lactose intolerance by doing gene modification on their gut. Even though it's not something I'd experiment on myself with, I was happy to learn from someone else's experience. And they're only endangering themselves; that experiment didn't pose a threat to anyone else or society.

There's perhaps an argument that these kinds of things do have an impact on others, because it might convince others to follow the author's footsteps. Well I highly doubt any joe or jane shmo is going to homebrew a vaccine. This is so niche that only a scarce few would even have the capability to do it. And again, if someone wants to do something stupid to themselves, who am I to stop them?

The only real danger is these homebrew vaxxed people mixing with herd immunity. But that's easily handled by only recognizing government approved vaccines. You're welcome to vax yourself, but if you want access to restricted public activities you'll need an official vaccine. Or if we mandate vaccination (for example the required immunizations at school), again you need an official vaccine.

But if you want to homebrew vaxx yourself against the yearly flu, or even want to homebrew vax COVID-19 and get the official one later when it's more available, I don't see the problem with any of that.

I'm mostly curious for rebuttals to this logic. Are there serious concerns about biohacking like this that I'm missing? Or is this one of the caveats where, even though it doesn't pose a danger to others, it's a serious enough danger to self that we should intervene?

P.S. As a side note, while reading this article I couldn't help but imagine a future where every hospital has a "vaccine machine" which gets fed raw materials and spits out the vaccine de jure on demand. That seems doable with this radvac protocol. It can download the latest approved peptide sequences, assemble and purify the peptides and mix up a vaccine. A vaccine 3D printer of sorts. Or maybe mRNA vaccines can be made this way? You come in once a year, the machine looks up your records and downloads a list of virus genomes from the past year that you hadn't been vaccinated against. Prints out the custom set of mRNA sequences, mixes it up, and you inject it. That's the future I'm far more interested in than a future where everyone biohacks themselves with instructions downloaded from vaccinebay.

That said, the interesting bits are:

#1) Vaccine design at home. This is an application of what is known colloquially as "bio-hacking" and as a topic group is no less impactful than "computer hacking."

#2) You can do something for Interesting stuff indeed.