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Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

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Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#321

Post by collegeburner »

thebradbain wrote: post #154
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #10

As I understand it, the reason an HIV vaccine has been so difficult to create is that HIV mutates so easily. I understand the basics behind how mRNA vaccines are generated, but I don't understand why this approach would be expected to have any more success in evading the high mutation potential of HIV than other vaccine types. After all, it was even a concern with new coronavirus variants that the original Moderna va…

I’m not a doctor, but as a gay man: it’s my understanding HIV doesn’t mutate in the same way a disease like Covid does, at least not in the sense that there’s as many opportunities to spread (i.e. not airborne), so while HIV may actually mutate more in theory, it gets less chances to spread, so less completely-different variants become widespread. Also, as part of “stopping the spread” PrEP has existed for years. It’…

Because most straight people don't need it, risk is much lower. Truvada is nephrotoxic and that's bad in the long term, many drugs are bad if taken for long periods. Condoms have no such side effects.

Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#322

Post by silver-arrow »

rubyist5eva wrote: post #6

> We could be getting even closer to stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS. Not if it's anything like the Covid-19 vaccines that don't stop someone from contracting or spreading it.

Why did you get flagged when you are absolutely correct. Why would you think that mRNA vaccines, which failed for so many years in testing, would presto work this time. and they clearly didn’t work this time, unless you drone around mumbling how thank god your symptoms would have been worse without it.

As a matter of fact, the “trials’ during warp speed were so flawed to show efficacy it is pathetic. But these tech geeks here know better.

Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#323

Post by collegeburner »

thebradbain wrote: post #149
pokot0 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I'd like to blame them, the number of people who willingly refused the vaccine are irrelevant compared to those who do not have access to it.

HIV doesn’t mutate in the same way a disease like Covid does, at least not at the same speed— also, PrEP has existed for years. It’s still proven to be effective protection against contracting HIV even if directly exposed (though it’s a pill that must be taken every day rather than a vaccine). I honestly don’t know why everyone who is sexually active isn’t on PrEP (the federal government even mandates it be free to t…

It's nephrotoxic over long periods of time. Condoms arent.

Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#324

Post by joshuamorton »

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #310
tylerhou wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's suppose that your software currently has an incident where the service is degraded. For every day you don't push a fix, you lose 0.X% of revenue. Some engineer creates a fix by turning off some recently added experiment responsible for the service degradation. The rollback passes all unit tests and integration tests. You know this fix is low-risk (maybe because your service was healthy for the ~1 year prior to…

Yeah, I get your point, at the end of the day the net result is what we care about. But the assumptions that you use to calculate that net are where all of the disagreements stem from. In your example, you've constrained it to losing well defined revenue, and "you know this fix is low risk", so the answer is easy. Maybe (wrongly or rightly) you don't have faith in the revenue numbers, or in the test suite or the engi…

I think the place where the disagreement or misunderstanding lies is in how we're describing thinking about unknowns.

You seem to be taking this from the perspective that, because there are unknowns, literally anything could happen. And we don't think that's the case with my vaccines or code.

Pushing v2 of your webapp to master isn't going to cause rockets to launch. There are things that could happen and there are even very surprising things that are unlikely but could happen. But not everything is possible.

When we say "we understand how vaccines work pretty well", we mean that in the same was as "we know how our app works pretty well". That doesn't mean that we can't still be surprised, but it does mean that we have some things that we can be confident won't happen.

One such thing is sudden onset symptoms well after the thing has left your system, because there isn't a biological way for that to have an effect (to use the code analogy, you enable an experiment, it modifies database writes for a while, then you disable the experiment and delete the code. Once you've deleted the code, we know it can't do anything else, because it's not there anymore.

That's true with both vaccines and webapps.

Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#325

Post by collegeburner »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #260
moooo99 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This perpetuates the myth that HIV is mainly a problem for gay people. Can we change to another article, such as [1]? But how is that a myth? The US Gov site [0] that is linked in the engadget article literally states that > HIV continues to have a disproportionate impact on certain populations, particularly racial and ethnic minorities and gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men. Fruther down: > Gay, bi…

This number changes dramatically when you look globally. MSM is about 23% of new infections https://www.avert.org/global-hiv-and-aids-statistics#footnot...

Because it include subsaharan africa globally. Readership for this site is probably only in United States and here it is mostly gay men

Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#326

Post by silver-arrow »

gameswithgo wrote: post #9
rubyist5eva wrote: post #6

> We could be getting even closer to stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS. Not if it's anything like the Covid-19 vaccines that don't stop someone from contracting or spreading it.

The covid-19 vaccines were very effective at preventing disease and spread until the omicron mutation, which perhaps wouldn't have happened if not for vaccine hesitancy. (but that is an inevitable human nature thing, so you have to accept it and deal with) Fortunately the vaccines were still very effective at preventing death and hospitalization with omicron, I wonder how many lives were saved overall, so far? It is…

Please many countries like Israel were lit up with delta after being touted as the poster boy for “vaccinations” in June 21. Stop the nonsense. The data is clear, the effectiveness diminishes after 3 months. You can’t vaccinate your way out of a pandemic with pathetically leaky “vaccine”

Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#327

Post by biorach »

macilacilove wrote: post #281
bluGill wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This conspiracy theory missed something important: competition. There are other companies with their own treatments either one the market or in development trying to take away your customers. If you can find a better treatment and roll it out you get all that money, if you don't you risk someone else finding it first and taking away all your sales anyway.

The more effective treatment will shrink the market, therefore market forces incentivize competitors to cooperate. It is the same reason that the OPEC exists. It is called game theory, not conspiracy theory.

OPEC is not terribly effective and suffers from constant bickering behind closed doors. The same motives apply - even if there was a "HIV vaccine cartel" there would be a massive incentive to undercut it.

Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#328

Post by biorach »

suifbwish wrote: post #318
ImaCake wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to address this. There is no evidence anyone produced HIV in a lab and then released it, accidentally or not, out into the world. Scientists have established a pretty robust causal chain for where HIV came from. It is plausible that HIV was spreading between humans before we even really had the field of Molecular Biology that would have allowed us to “make” HIV.

I didn’t say it was not natural. I simply said it would not surprise me if it were not. It’s interesting how even asking a question about things can become taboo.

No one said it was taboo. You made a dumb comment, someone politely explained real science to you.

Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#329

Post by trompetenaccoun »

driverdan wrote: post #142
mpalczewski wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We get a new flu vaccine every year, is this much different?

Yes. It takes a long time to generate the flu vaccine. The strains need to be selected long before the season starts so it's a bit of guess work. That's why effectiveness varies from year to year. mRNA vaccines can be produced in high volumes much faster than traditional vaccines. It would allow the flu vaccine strains to be selected at a better time.

Works great with the sars-cov-2 vaccine so far. That's why there are fewer symptomatic infections since the vaccines are out. /s

Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#330

Post by silver-arrow »

luckydata wrote: post #15
thesis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted all much… well actually no it’s pretty obvious. I think you’re right though. The current Covid-19 vaccines are proven to lose efficacy over time. Will the same thing happen with this one as well? It’s a good question.

because the point he's making is wrong. Vaccines are doing a fantastic job at slowing down the progression of the virus which is key to keep mutations at bay. No vaccine is 100% effective, but even 80% effectiveness radically changes the dynamic of a pandemic, it's so easy to see that I don't understand what can lead someone to deny this fact besides bad faith.

My God you have it exactly backwards!
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