Antiviral chewing gum to reduce influenza and herpes simplex virus transmission

I decided to get it and saw it listed as $160 per dose on the health provider's website. I decided to bite the bullet and get it. When I got the prescription filled at the pharmacy, it was $265 for the first round of three. I want the next two but it's crazy to think I'd be paying like $800 (Canada).

Medical ethics focus on the benefit to a specific individual - your patient.

This defuses the "Should I kill one to save ten?" moral dilemma - the individual is your patient, even if the other ten are also your patients, you must not harm the one. But for vaccines it also means that the wider societal implications are not ethically relevant

So, medics won't recommend that you give patient A an intervention which is of no benefit to A but is really helpful for everybody else. For example, that you vaccinate teenage boys in the expectation that this way they won't infect teenage girls (with whom statistically many of them will have sex) with an STI that harms those girls.

As a result, the guidance cared about proven benefits to you even though taken neutrally you might have been enthusiastic about a vaccine that might or might not protect you but is definitely a good idea for the wider population. The initial studies understandably focused on the numerically larger problem: If we vaccine young female patients does that prevent relevant HPV infections, and then, as a proxy we might assume they also won't get cancer. Such studies can't tell you whether it prevents men getting cancer because that wasn't measured.

So the recommendation to vaccinate boys was delayed because first somebody has to study what might seem obvious - does the vaccine also prevent HPV related cancers in males? It is, after all, possible that some subtle mechanism means the vaccine isn't effective for this purpose, and it would not be ethical to give schools full of boys a vaccine that they personally do not benefit from having - even if societally maybe that's a good choice.

Beyond the female/ male differential, for adults and older, it's basically a stats game. Most adults have sex. Having sex means you're likely to contract HPV, more sex, more exposure. Is it worth getting vaccinated when there's a 50% chance it's useless? How about 95%? 99.5%? Do you always wait for the crossing lights? Did you ever drink beer or eat bacon ?

> The ART-5 is a mastication simulator that mimics human chewing motions, adapts to food texture changes, and provides immediate, reproducible computerized feedback. FRIL release studies in the chewing simulator used PEB buffer that includes protease inhibitors and not human saliva.

It seems to just be a single line of each type of tooth.. but it does look dog like in profile.

https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.ymthe.2024.12.008/asset/b...

No it's not, it's not science working.

It is either A) underreporting risks or B) not acknowledging risk unknowns and plowing ahead with advice anyway.

This was the major problem and behavior that CAUSED anti-vax opinions. They made safety claims that they couldn't logically make, because they couldn't know. A new vaccine using a new vaccine technology vs a new virus. They did not correctly report the amount of uncertainty and they lost trust. Then folks who "knew better" did their best to manipulate the narriative.

And speaking of manipulating the narrative, you can't use google to find the bits of history that shows the CDC giving contradictory advice because the results aren't there any more. Nearly every result gives the same tone and they're almost all CDC links.

This kind of information control and lack of transparency isn't science, it's power dictating truth.

The actual truth is that the risk of cancers as a result of HPV have a pretty high chance of being prevented if young females get the vaccine, but as you get further away from that group the risk avoided by getting vaccinated gets progressively smaller and runs into the safety uncertainty of taking the vaccine. When you're doing population level risk management you also have to do things like comparing the risk of getting hit by a bus going to the clinic against whatever the clinic could do for you. It is often safer to do nothing than to avoid a very tiny risk because of the very mundane risks you face day to day.

You're not wrong about ethical considerations, but the CDC operates socially and politically as well.

Back when the vaccine was new, an objection from some parents was that the vaccine might be viewed as a license or permission for their daughters to be promiscuous. There was a substantial headwind.

The public wasn't yet generally aware that HPV could cause head, neck, and anal cancers in men. If a doctor approached a parent back in 2010 and said they wanted to vaccinate their son against head, neck, and anal cancer, that advice wouldn't have been heeded in many cases, and would have cost the CDC some amount of its standing with the public.

When you hear something from the CDC, there's a decent possibility that it's a blend of medical advice that's been compromised with some value judgements that haven't been expressed to the listener.