A recent attempt at a dengue vaccine faced a similar problem. The most dangerous kind of dengue fever happens when you are infected a second time, by a different variant than you were infected the first time. It turns out that the vaccine ended up having a similar effect as catching dengue for the first time. People who never had dengue and got vaccinated had a lower chance of catching the disease in the future. But if they did catch it there was a higher risk of it being the more dangerous version. The end result is that the vaccine is now only recommended for people who already had dengue before.
This is specifically mentioned in the Radvac paper in the section titled "POSSIBLE MECHANISMS OF VACCINE-ENHANCED DISEASE,
VACCINE-INDUCED AUTOIMMUNITY, AND MITIGATION STRATEGIES"
> train your immune system to self destruct
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.
Re:Making Vaccine
by buildstatements on Saturday February 06, 2021 @02:14AM
(#26044778)
Homebrew seems unfair: https://radvac.org/a-homepage-section/
Trying it is IMHO a risk calculation once you've jumped the "is this credible" bar.
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.