Japanese scientists develop vaccine to eliminate cells behind aging

I didn't interpret the parent comment as arguing against mice models, just that there is a huge gap between finding something that works in mice and then applying it to humans (with tons and tons of false starts), that any pronouncements that imply that human treatments are on the horizon are premature.

You have antibodies that will bind to just about anything foreign, including viruses that your body has never seen before, M-type immunoglobulin (IgM). It's the kind of antibodies that responds in the first phases of an infection.

The problem is that IgMs are not very specific. They bind to a lot of things, but they bind poorly. In the library of Alexandria analogy, it's like a book that happens to mention a subject you care about, but only in passing.

Vaccines (and infections) result in your immune system developing IgG. That's the hyper-specific books for the pathogen you care about.

So it's not that the book wasn't at the front. Your immune system has to write the book on the fly, during the fight, using chopped up pieces of pathogen gathered by antigen-presenting cells.

Yes and this response has also become a trope. It’s generically universal to nearly any early result.

Definitely. We have a tremendous amount of risk aversion these days and a culture that has disdain for risk, even calculated abstract risks. What many don't realize is being too risk averse comes with its own risks, it also requires accurate risk assessment so you can make the correct decisions on when to take a risk and not. You could lockup in complete fear akin to analysis paralysis where non-zero risk keeps you from doing anything.

Just skimming the CDC list of common vaccines in use in the US, do most really need vaccines for everything: anthrax, Japanese encephalitis, polio, rabies, smallpox, tetanus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and yellow fever? If you're not traveling outside the US and living a fairly normal life, most likely not and some of these have potentially nasty yet rare side effects. If they were given/taken at the scale COVID vaccines were, many would die from such side effect who otherwise would have lived healthy lives, all because they took an unnecessary risk trying to prevent a very low risk. COVID is an exception because of exposure and transmissibiliy, the rare side effects are worth the risk for most people because the chance of getting it and having a life ending result is relatively high.

TB, tetanus, and rabies may be useful vaccines for some professions or life exposures in high risk cases, say veteranarians and healthcare workers, but for the most part, you probably don't need it. If you travel a lot to certain locations and say do missionary type work or whatever, perhaps some others make sense as well. Should every sexually active person take PrEP regularly since HIV is a potential risk to everyone? No, there are populations of risk exposure where it makes sense though. Your dentist only takes x-rays every so often because the x-ray exposure increases risk of various forms of cancer. You could get x-rays more frequently to detect issues that might not be obvious to your dentist but it's pretty low risk, there has been a lot of study into the rate of progression of disease and risk tradeoff to help your dentist determine a reasonable frequency for x-rays vs radiation exposure.

If you start looking at your regular risks, you take many risks across a lot of aspects of life every single day, even in a modestly safe life style, from hopping in a car to picking up takeout at a local resturaunt or even walking down a street. A massive unknown asteroid could be on a collision course with Earth right now that results in mass extinction ending the human race or a gamma ray burst from inside our galaxy could set the atmosphere on fire and radiate us all to death near instantly... they are all non-zero yet incredibly low risk to our understanding probabilisticly. They're so low and some even inactionable that we need to ignore them and/or treat them with low priority and continue on with life.

It's good to have a preventative mindset and take preventative action to try and control and manage risk, but in order to do this effectively, be sure you assess your risks, or have someone knowledgable (like a doctor when it comes to vaccines) lay it out for you so you can make a good decision about what you should or shouldn't do. If you truly can do the assessment yourself then by all means do it but it doesn't hurt to explain your assessment and rationale to someone knowledgeable to make sure you're not overlooking something. It certainly is possible to perform a better risk assessment for yourself than anyone else will be able to because you can know your behaviors and exposures better than anyone else but be careful playing this game.