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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

#381

Post by peteradio »

snovv_crash wrote: post #156
peteradio wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Car brake dust is an extremely potent carcinogen, take care when dealing with them.

At least they don't make them from asbestos anymore. My dad tells me about taking shop class in high school, and they'd be sanding down asbestos brake pads with an angle grinder to remove the high spots to prevent glazing. No masks of course.

OEM might not be asbestos but aftermarket asbestos containing pad can be bought. Who knows that the material does that's in them today?

I'm generally surprised by what I was exposed to at shop class, not necessarily asbestos but machines that could absolutely wreck a body let loose by a bunch of haphazard children. Blinding lights, kids sticking like 4 inches of iron into a hydraulic cutting machine and hitting go. A girl cut her finger off on a bandsaw.

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

#382

Post by selcuka »

tialaramex wrote: post #89
f6v wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think slowly will come the realization that mRNA vaccines aren’t as fast to develop as people thought. Sputnik/AstraZeneca vaccines were released almost at the same time as Moderna/Pfizer. Yes, the latter were first commercial mRNA vaccines, but the technology is nevertheless rather mature. I watched a lecture by the people credited with creating mRNA vaccines and it turns out people have been working on the techno…

Both the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and Sputnik are using a pretty similar trick that gives them the speed-up. They still get to pick an arbitrary sequence, but they're smuggling it inside a virus instead of as mRNA. That's why the codename for the AstraZeneca vaccine is ChAdOx1, it's a Chimp Adenovirus as host for the sequence. Take this mild uninteresting chimpanzee virus, but tweak it to tell human cells to produc…

> but the mRNA approach seems obviously more general and even perhaps more re-usable

We should also see how subunit protein vaccines such as Novavax will perform once they are widely available. From what it looks they should be equally effective and more anti-vaxxer friendly.

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

#383

Post by Retric »

mlyle wrote: post #379
Retric wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is because everyone dies relatively quickly that you can ignore ultra low risks. Suppose your lifespan was potentially 1 trillion years, how low would your risk tolerance need to be? Meanwhile doing some once a day with a 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance of possibility killing you in 40 years just isn’t worth considering.

> Suppose your lifespan was potentially 1 trillion years, how low would your risk tolerance need to be? Depends what your quality lifespan is. If I get sick of everything, that time isn't worth much. There's also a "time-value" of life. Cool stuff I can do today may be worth a lot more to me than things I can do 500B years from now. Especially since the person that would be doing them is someone I cannot identify wit…

I don’t think most peoples 25 year old self can really identify what their 85 year old self will be like. Yet saving for retirement isn’t just about them some time in the future it’s about making you feel better now.

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

#384

Post by selcuka »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #329
driverdan wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why the /s? I don't think there is a sure way to estimate what the number of total symptomatic infections would be if there weren't any vaccines, but the fact that unvaccinated are overrepresented in case statistics indicate that the vaccines are working as expected.

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

#385

Post by driverdan »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #329
driverdan wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are far fewer symptomatic infections and deaths than there would have been otherwise.

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

#386

Post by selcuka »

xienze wrote: post #129
spamizbad wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason is that mRNA vaccines can be developed much faster than traditional vaccines. So the idea is you have a better chance of "outrunning" a strain.

> One reason is that mRNA vaccines can be developed much faster than traditional vaccines. So the idea is you have a better chance of "outrunning" a strain. Is that why the response to Delta was "just take another dose of the original formulation" and the response to Omicron was "just take another dose of the original formulation until we have the new one made up in a few months"? And who doesn't see another strain t…

They have trialled variant specific vaccines for both Delta and Omicron. It turned out that the original vaccine is as effective for Delta, so that work was shelved. Omicron, on the other hand, seems to be evading the immunity created by the Alpha vaccine, so they are actually planning to start producing an Omicron specific booster (or more correctly Alpha+Omicron) after FDA approval.

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

#387

Post by mlyle »

Retric wrote: post #383
mlyle wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Suppose your lifespan was potentially 1 trillion years, how low would your risk tolerance need to be? Depends what your quality lifespan is. If I get sick of everything, that time isn't worth much. There's also a "time-value" of life. Cool stuff I can do today may be worth a lot more to me than things I can do 500B years from now. Especially since the person that would be doing them is someone I cannot identify wit…

I don’t think most peoples 25 year old self can really identify what their 85 year old self will be like. Yet saving for retirement isn’t just about them some time in the future it’s about making you feel better now.

> I don’t think most peoples 25 year old self can really identify what their 85 year old self will be like.

Yes, and I believe this is a reason why people make choices that adversely affect their 50 year old self. Who's that guy in the future going to be? Why should I care about making it better for him?

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

#388

Post by ifyoubuildit »

cthalupa wrote: post #358
ifyoubuildit wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Not for potential issues tens of years later, which is basically the concern people are raising about these vaccines.

I am concerned about tens of years later, but also about just ones of years later as well. We've done the best we can so far, and it seems like a clear win for some categories of people. For others, it's not so clear (like young healthy people with a previous infection living in the age of omicron for example. This is not medical advice, go to your doctor for that).

> This is more or less the same standard applied to just about any medical research for drugs, vaccines, other treatments, etc.

Sure, but I'm not chomping at the bit to take any more of those either (already had all the usual vaccines and then some, minus flu). And those other things have been around long enough that adverse effects eventually become unmissable. You see those occasionally in class action commercials.

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

#389

Post by selcuka »

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #313
snowwrestler wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing to understand about vaccines is that they trigger things that your body does all the time by itself. A vaccine is more like kicking off a job than deploying new source code.

> The thing to understand about vaccines is that they trigger things that your body does all the time by itself I'm not against vaccines at all for the record. But this doesn't seem like a strong argument for them. Cells multiply by themselves all the time. Triggering that effect is how you get cancer. Your heart beats constantly. Triggering that too much (or in the wrong rhythm) is not a good thing. There are probab…

> Cells multiply by themselves all the time. Triggering that effect is how you get cancer. Your heart beats constantly. Triggering that too much (or in the wrong rhythm) is not a good thing.

Those are wrong analogies though. Vaccines don't trigger something too much. They trigger the exact same mechanism that will be triggered anyway when you get infected with the actual virus, but in a safe way.

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

#390

Post by feupan »

vymague wrote: post #342
mikaeluman wrote: post #235

I remember growing up being terrified of HIV/AIDS. The idea of something being permanent and transmissible via sex, and literally dismounting your immune defense to all other diseases on the planet... To this day it still terrifies me, even though the treatments have become so good. Each year it seems there are new stories about HIV research, and progress keeps being made. I pray for positive results and am really am…

Honestly, the fact that 4 STDs are incurable still frightens me.

HIV, HPV, herpes, what’s the fourth one?

At least for HPV there’s a vaccine though.

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