After a bit of digging I found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/
> An early concern for application of a SARS-CoV vaccine was the experience with other coronavirus infections which induced enhanced disease and immunopathology in animals when challenged with infectious virus
I didn't dig deep enough to see if any experimental vaccines caused similar issues, but it definitely appears to be a concern.
So yeah, I'd be _very_ cautious with any homebrew vaccine. You might accidentally train your immune system to self destruct when you get exposed to a real SARS-CoV-2.
That said, I have little to no experience with biology, so it's entirely possible that radvac based vaccinations have already been demonstrated not to have this particular problem.
Might be a nitpick, but the immune system destroying itself would be a different, still possibly dangerous outcome of probably losing your defenses.
An over-sensitized response would be a hyper-sensitive trigger-happy paranoid all-hand-on-deck general-mobilization fight-or-die this-is-the-end immune response, of various scale, possibly similar to but not exactly the same as a bad case of covid.
Trying it is IMHO a risk calculation once you've jumped the "is this credible" bar.
A well known example of how dangerous the immune system can be is the following phase I trial:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa063842
That drug caused a cytokine storm in the participants in the phase I trial.
Allergies are another example of how dangerous the immune system can be if it is triggered against the wrong targets.
This is false.
Put another way, the very fact that we run such massive tests on them before deploying them is itself evidence that the wrong ones can be very dangerous. (Mostly, as I understand it, "very dangerous" to a small set of people who will have very large reactions, even if most people are fine. The ones that are very dangerous to everyone never gets past the initial phases at all, of course.) We're not doing that because vaccines are all perfectly safe under all conditions, but we just want to hold them back for a year for no reason. We're doing it because we need to be very careful with them.
Though I'd also observe a non-trivial component of that danger is also because we're injecting them. Bypassing the body's co-evolved with the environment's defenses is not to be done lightly. This sort of inhaled vaccine is likely to be much less dangerous. I won't say "safe", but less dangerous; the body already has to deal with essentially arbitrary small amino acid sequences being inhaled all the time. I'd still be a bit worried about sythesizing things that we haven't co-evolved with.
(If you don't know what co-evolution is, I'd suggesting taking a moment to learn about it: https://www.britannica.com/science/coevolution It's a very important part of understanding the disease landscape holistically.)
Covid is very deadly right now, it is the leading cause of death in several countries, including the US. If you catch covid, it roughly doubles your chances of dying for the year, and without a vaccine, it will happen eventually.
It means that even an "unsafe" vaccine, you are better off taking a shot.
On the other hand, a flu shot has to be extremely safe, because the flu is much less deadly, and the flu vaccine seems to be less effective than the covid vaccine. So most vaccines are pretty close to perfectly safe, the covid one, maybe a bit less so, but it is still worth it.
The thing is that we are biased. We will focus on the one person the vaccine has killed, but not the ten others the vaccine has saved. Just like with the trolley problem, will you throw someone under a bus if it can save five people?
One good thing about living in this time is that facts are trivial to look up. All the stastistical data is publicly available.
The leading cause of death in the US is still heart disease, then cancer.
> If you catch covid, it roughly doubles your chances of dying for the year
Not according to the CDC statistics, unless you mean some specific group, such as those aged 85+.
How many people even knows what chance it is they will die this year?
Right now, covid is the leading cause of death. It wasn't the case in 2020, but now, it is.
For the "roughly doubles", it is, as I said a rough idea in a high income country, something I forgot to mention. It is probably less overall but not by a huge amount. It is relatively consistent with a 1% IFR. It is age dependent but surprisingly not by that much, simply because older people are more likely to die of any cause.
> How many people even knows what chance it is they will die this year?
That question is meaningless. The nature of probabilities is that you don't know. For example, if you are playing Russian roulette, just before you press the trigger, you can estimate your chances of death quite accurately to be 1/6. But there is no intrinsic value to that number. To someone who can see the bullet in front of the hammer, it is closer to 100%, and to someone who knows the gun is jammed, it is closer to 0%.
Are you implying you think covid will kill more americans than heart disease in 2021 based on this incomplete data set?
>>How many people even knows what chance it is they will die this year?
>That question is meaningless.
It is not meaningless for people who care to take personal responsibility for their own health, and who want to make informed decisions based on a data driven risk analysis.
However, most Americans do not care to take personal responsibility for their health, so you're right that such people are not concerned with such information.
This is misinformation.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US, killing around 650,000 americans each year[1]. Also note that heart disease and obesity are extreme risk factors for negative health outcomes from covid, leading to potentially 3x the risk of hospitalization.[2]
Populations suffering from prexisting obesity epidemics, such as America and Europe, have had far worse health outcomes from covid than Asia and Africa, which have no obesity epidemic.[3][4]
>If you catch covid, it roughly doubles your chances of dying for the year
Do you have a source for this? I'm assuming this is not true for young and/or healthy people.
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm
[2]https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/obesity-and-covid-19.html
[3]https://ncdrisc.org/obesity-prevalence-map.html
[4]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#Mor...
In Africa, the population is much younger than in the US and life expectancy is lower. People die from other causes like malaria, malnutrition, violence, etc... much more often than in the US, so mechanically, the relative risk of dying from covid is lower.
In rich Asian countries like Japan, I haven't heard of a significant difference in infection fatality rate compared to western countries. They have less deaths overall because they have less cases, certainly because they manage the pandemic better. In poor Asian countries, it is essentially like Africa.
As for obesity, it is actually worse in northern Africa than in Europe, and closer to the US. And southeast Asia is getting close to Europe as these countries develop.
Exactly my point. Covid is a negligible risk to young healthy people compared to elderly, sick, obese people. This will have an effect on their risk calculations determining if they should take a vaccine which was rushed through safety trials or to take on a virus naturally which their immune systems can easily defeat, according to the data.
>In rich Asian countries like Japan, I haven't heard of a significant difference in infection fatality rate compared to western countries.
If you look at the data, you'll see the significant difference.
The US has 139.30 deaths per 100,000 people from covid.
Japan has 4.88 deaths per 100,000.[1]
>As for obesity, it is actually worse in northern Africa than in Europe, and closer to the US. And southeast Asia is getting close to Europe as these countries develop.
Indeed, if you look at the obesity map and the covid map of the world, you'll see the same correlation of obesity and larger relative covid risk in northern Africa.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rate...
(In places where polio isn't endemic, you get administered a totally inactivated vaccine by injection instead. They don't give everyone that one because it's more complicated to distribute, the oral one needs much less infrastructure)
The relationship between “crazy” antivax people and the actual attributes of a vaccine are not correlated. Antivax is a con game. Bad actors take advantage of natural instincts (ie protect your children), project false qualification and leverage ignorance to push their narrative, and usually product.
Perhaps you are not one of the people running on the unexamined assumption. I still say it's clearly operative in many people.
I call it "unexamined" precisely because once pulled up the conscious level, it is obviously false. Nevertheless, pulling such things up to the conscious level is not easy and usually takes effort. Or, to put it another why, while I cringe every time I adopt this terminology, Kahneman's System 1 is pretty sloppy about such things. System 2, when presented with a problem directly, can often see quickly that System 1 is being irrational... but it first must be presented with the problem directly.
If i can quibble though, i think "all" can be a bit of a loaded word in this context, because people often use it to mean, all well known ones or something along those lines and not all potential ones including random stuff people make in their backyards.
Imagine trusting a "rocket scientist" to even weigh in on medical topics because they are "very intelligent" in their totally unrelated field. This is an unfortunate misconception that plagues conspiracy theory extremists who reference PhD graduates in their arguments against things like 5G brain control.... pointing to people with doctoral degrees in Music or something.
However, as the saying goes, science advances one funeral at a time.
> The MHRA has received 101 UK spontaneous adverse reactions associated with anaphylaxis or anaphylactoid reactions with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccination. All patients have recovered from the anaphylaxis episode. 13 reports of anaphylaxis have been received for the COVID-19 Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine to date.
> As of 24 January, an estimated 5.4 million first doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and 1.5 million doses of the Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine had been administered, and around 0.5 million second doses, mostly the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, had been administered.
For a rare disease, this would be pushing the rate of side effects and risk that is acceptable. But you've got a huge risk of catching COVID, and COVID is many orders of magnitude more dangerous than the vaccine. At least for now: if COVID vaccination is required in the long term, vaccines may have to get better.
An issue here is that no one could risk the vaccine failing, with the limited time we had and the massive trial. In a normal process, it's likely that smaller doses would have been selected. But here it looks like both Pfizer and Moderna "rounded up" a bit from what phase 2 trials pointed to as doses. If I were in charge, I'd have funded a non-inferiority trial in December for 1/3rd dose, which would put us in a position in February-March to massively stretch supplies and reduce side effects.
Vaccines that go through proper testing have a very high bar for safety but nothing is 100%.
This is simply not true. I've talked to a psychologist who treated kids with autism about this. Autism is usually diagnosed at a young age when children develop and also get vaccinated. This leads to bias in some of their parents who are looking for someone or something to blame for their misfortune. Combine this with the fact that in the last two decades diagnostic for autism was extended to other less severe disorders such as Asperger's. If adults would develop autism after getting vaccinated, then it would support this crackpot theory, but they don't.
This must be a question with no good answer.
My understanding is that being too immunocompromised for a vaccine happens in two different ways:
1) the vaccine contains live virus and so there's danger that the weak immune system couldn't fight this off
2) the vaccine isn't live, so it's not dangerous on its own, but the immune system is too weak to recognize it, so it doesn't build any immunity to the real thing. (One doctor I was talking to said the mRNA ones should be good here, because your own body produces so much of the lookalikes that even a weak immune system should notice it - and then you're much better prepared to fight the real thing off faster.)
Only the first is immediately dangerous, so the standard seems to be to just stay away from those.
I'm not sure if much is commonly done for the second, in terms of looking for response, but you can get tests for measles antibodies and such, so that would probably be how?
That's not even getting into the issues that may arise from skipping all the GMP/GLP guidelines. They can be tedious but exist for a reason.
If I may - perhaps one alternative question is "Can an unapproved vaccine product cause harm?". With that re-wording, the answers become a bit more clear. Yes, chemicals used in the formulation maybe toxic, or the final vaccine might give rise to an auto-immune response, or could induce anaphylaxis in certain people. There could be cell debris/endotoxins that a purification process doesn't remove properly and causes problems. Maybe the vaccine contains an attenuated pathogen that can "revert", etc, etc.
I imagine for this article the biggest risk is you make something other than you expect and poision yourself, or you just make something that does nothing. (IANAexpert)
Now the real virus shows up, your body goes "Aha! I've seen this before let me make those antibodies." But it wasn't trained on the real virus, so the antibodies it makes aren't actually effective against the real thing. The virus replicates and your body makes more and more antibodies but they do nothing to stop it. Meanwhile the the antibodies are running rampant in your body causing inflammation and blood clots.
This has happened before with vaccine candidates, and is analogous to what goes in on severe covid. The body tries to respond to the invading virus but does so ineffectively and causes potential deadly damage.
Maybe the explanations are simplified but I don't quite understand how the immune system could fail to recognise permutations of proteins or any other differentiating factor between COVID-19, its variants and mRNA vaccines; nor what makes this specific example of vaccination riskier.
The reason the second infection is so bad is exactly as outlined above: your immune system 'recognises' the second variant and produces antibodies that it learnt when fighting off the first variant you recovered from. Unfortunately, these antibodies are useless against the second variant, and you have a bad time.
This exact same issue happens with the current vaccine for dengue, which is why it is only given to people who have already had dengue of some kind, or in populations where most people have had it before. For a situation where this did not happen see the section titled 'Phillipines controversy' in the wikipedia article.
There is currently a lot of work being done to produce vaccines that protect against all 4 variants at the same time, with some promise for the years ahead as trial results come in!
Good thing that's not what the article author has done, ey?
If your experiment is not falsifiable, you are not doing science.
Both parts of the great grandparent's sentence are false. I don't think saying false things for rhetorical effect is good for the health of hackernews discourse.
I do think context and implication do need to be taken into account when evaluating the authors statements. The authors present this article as if they were making an actual vaccine. They talk about how you too can make one. With strong implication that its likely to do something. Admittedly, they do talk about follow up, but its follow up that by their own admission is not likely to show anything, and that's after having an incredibly rosy view of it, to the point where i don't believe anyone could reasonably call it a follow up.
As far as healthy discussions go, i would say that assuming the people you disagree with are arguing in good faith and while they might be mistaken, ultumately believe their premises and not simply intentionally making false statements to further their rhetorical point, is important too :)
A vaccine is designed to produce an immune response of the right magnitude. Too low and it doesn't work, too high and it'll cause damage. At least one of the vaccine candidates in development was put back to the drawing board because the immune response wasn't strong enough. So this is not an area that is entirely predictable, you have to carefully test this to know if it works.
I'd also be very careful about the inhalation route. Inhalable insulin is a well-known failure, in part because of side effects due to the inhalation. And that is a protein that isn't designed to activate your immune system.
I also hope the synthesized peptides were carefully purified, you really don't want to inhale e.g. residual trifluoracetic acid.