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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

#351

Post by epgui »

arcticbull wrote: post #93
epgui wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. I would rather take the "most unsafe" vaccine of the last 30 years than take an Advil. (I am a biochemist)

The one that really surprises me that people take like candy is Tylenol/Panadol/Paracetamol/Acetaminophen. It's the leading cause of acute liver failure in the US. Among common OTCs, its active dose is I believe the closest to its lethal dose. Just 2-3X the recommended daily upper limit can cause liver damage, and when taken around alcohol, the toxicity is dramatically higher. I strongly doubt that Acetaminophen woul…

I think they're safe enough, personally... But most people need some risk calibration.

Popping NSAIDs multiple times a week on a regular basis is definitely not good, and yet the same people who do that are often afraid of vaccines.

People are seriously clueless about relative risks.

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

#352

Post by ImaCake »

biorach wrote: post #328
suifbwish wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for this :) Probably the best thing about the culture of science is that ignorance is often answered with polite explanation. Many scientists I know expect their own ignorant comments to be answered the same way. It is much harder to argue against a polite and well argued scientific response!

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

#353

Post by miked85 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #255
voz_ wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how a fact is a myth? https://www.reuters.com/article/health-global-aids/men-with-... There is no shame in it, different diseases and viruses affect different people differently, because of different behaviors. It does not make Gay people worse, or better. It just means the actions they participate in, as a demographic cohort, is more likely to lead to an HIV infection when normalized for factors a…

Men who have sex with men are vastly more likely to get HIV, but account for a minority of the annual infections globally. [1] Sex workers and customers make up a larger percent of infections. Most HIV infections occur in women opposed to men. I don't find the language particularly offensive, but I cant imagine them replacing LGBTQ+ in the sentence with sex workers. Then again, this is a publication for lbtq audience…

The pie chart in your link seems a bit suspect, there is a lot of overlap with the groups included.

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

#354

Post by mensetmanusman »

baq wrote: post #172
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know this. Could you explain the reason?

No detectable virus means no transmissible virus.

It depends on if your body is able to detect it better than a machine…

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

#355

Post by space_fountain »

et2o wrote: post #336
space_fountain wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a biologist and this is based on general knowledge and some quick google searches but: We're quite good at detecting viruses if we really want to. PCR can amplify DNA so much that we can detect even 50 viruses per milliliter of blood. A milliliter seems like actually a lot of blood to get into someone else and your innate immune system is capable of finding and neutralizing small amounts of contagions relativ…

Well put. We can actually detect well below 50 copies/mL in the laboratory setting as well; we don’t go below this to maintain adequate test specificity and sensitivity in the clinical setting.

Not to put you on the spot but from my cellular bio lab I took it felt like PCR should be capable of detecting literally a single example of the targeted bit of DNA in the sample. Is the problem with detecting below 50 that the sample is too easily contaminated or is it that the primers can spontaneously bind to things they aren't supposed to at a high enough rate to invalidate the results?

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

#357

Post by hashimotonomora »

tomp wrote: post #297
hashimotonomora wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Risks like these are orthogonal and additive. There’s no reason to discard any risk but to hedge them.

Activity-based risks are not additive. Time spent driving is not time spent having sex (well, hopefully). So if risk(dying while driving) ~ risk(dying because of sex) ~ 0, you can easily ignore both of those.

Be careful. The infinite sum of epsilons over an infinite domain and over the time domain can and usually does converge to a finite value in real life.

Also, you can avoid having sex with a HIV-positive person. You can probably not avoid driving. So the fact that a risk may be low is not sufficient to take such risk if you can hedge against it.

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

#358

Post by cthalupa »

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #285
outworlder wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if I told someone that I don't need to know the effects of v7.1.3 before patching it because I can't think of a mechanism for it going wrong, and besides, we already released all those other versions and they were fine, I'd hopefully be fired. You are missing the point. If someone told you they are worried that your code is going to turn the CPU into strawberry jelly, you would be correct if you said 'there's n…

Analogies are always flawed, but in this one, the pharmaceutical is the code and the human population is the set of machines its going to run on. The adverse effect would be an error that happens during runtime. It's not quite strawberry jelly, but depending on the target you're writing for, you could destroy the actual hardware (think embedded devices). If you presuppose that adverse effects can't happen, then sure,…

>But pharmaceuticals having adverse effects isn't some unimaginable thing, it's expected and tested for.

Not for potential issues tens of years later, which is basically the concern people are raising about these vaccines. We instead look at known potential mechanisms that could cause harm and operate off of that.

We have studied the short term side effects of these vaccines, much we do anything else, and have looked at known potential mechanisms that could cause issues down the line, and have not identified any. This is more or less the same standard applied to just about any medical research for drugs, vaccines, other treatments, etc.

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

#359

Post by hashimotonomora »

et2o wrote: post #334
hashimotonomora wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False. Detectable is an experimental limitation of a given measurement system. Even one single virion can infect a host.

There is no data that supports this assertion whatsoever. There is a lot of evidence going against it. Theoretically it may be possible, but the probability of this is on the order of 0 and so close to 0 it will likely never happen. Think of it like chemistry. Sure, two covalently bonded hydrogen atoms at STP could have nuclei 1cm from each other due to random chance. However, the probability of this happening is so…

The assertion is still false then.

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

#360

Post by bluGill »

abeppu wrote: post #282
bluGill wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than nothing. Maybe not enough for me to stop whatever other practices I'm doing to reduce risk, but it seems like a good shield in case one of those others fail.

But the alternative isn't nothing. E.g. one class of alternatives is PrEP which is very effective, well-tolerated in many patients, and depending on country, pretty affordable. Oh, maybe for various reasons, regularly getting and taking pills is difficult for some populations, and a series of injections makes more sense? Subdermal injections for PrEP are also in the works and look like they would work for more than a…

Sort of. There are side effects, which might or.might not be bad for any individual. And of course you can forget to take daily medication. Can the vaccine be combined is an open question.
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