One of these is for the little known Nipah virus. This virus is really scary. Like the Coronavirus, it jumps to humans from bats. Unlike the Coronavirus, it is extremely lethal. In the last outbreak, in 2018 [1], the case fatality rate was 89%. Fortunately, there were only 19 cases (17 died).
That's my understanding as well. The problem, though, is that the virus doesn't completely peter out because it survives in the bats. There is a possibility a mutation makes the virus less lethal, in which case it could cause much more problems when it jumps again from bat to human. Maybe next year, maybe in a hundred years, maybe never.
Disclaimer: I'm absolutely no expert. The above is only my best guess.
It also depends on how long it stays asymptomatic (so that a host can go around and infect other people before dying) and how well it spreads from host to host, and probably other factors that I don't know about
It also matters how long it takes to kill - but yes. Assume it takes a month to a kill a person... that’s a lot of time to infect others, especially if say 10 days of that are asymptomatic.
I’d be a bit careful with those numbers. Who knows how many people really had it. Maybe a good number of cases showed no symptoms and thus were not detected?
They made a movie about it : Virus[1] on Amazon Prime.
Unfortunately due to flashbacks, which introduce non-linearity, it may be difficult for those who are not native speakers to follow through the movie. The problem is no obvious visual highlighting indicating that a scene was a flashback (like going black and white). Otherwise a really solid watch.
Bats get around (they can fly!) and they're mammals, so the viruses they carry are somewhat compatible with us. Not that birds aren't also virus spreaders (West Nile, etc.).
that actually makes transmission more likely. more culling means less comptition for food so more reproduction, which leads to a larger number of juvenile bats. Additionally, bats eat insects including mosquitos that cause maleria and they also pollinate fruit.
The announcement states that only the other 2 vaccines will start Phase 1 trials in 2021, and is silent on Phase 1 trials on the Nipah vaccine. There's development work before that though: in vitro trials and trials on animal models. Depending on the outcomes, they can move to Phase 1 trials, where, just like they did for the Covid vaccine, they'll look at the safety (i.e. if there are side-effects) and the immune response (how many antibodies, and what type of T-cell and B-cell response there is). If they do that, they would be in a position to quickly proceed to Phase 2/3 trials in case there's an outbreak anywhere in the world.
Lyme disease has a simple antibiotic treatment. The Lyme serology test has high false-positive rate. There might be many people who believe they have Lyme disease therefore sadly miss out on their actual diagnosis.
>Even if CLD lacks biological legitimacy, its importance as a phenomenon can be monumental to the individual patient. This is because many if not most patients who believe they have this condition are suffering, in many cases for years. Many have undergone frustrating, expensive, and ultimately fruitless medical evaluations, and many have become quite disaffected with a medical system that has failed to provide answers, let alone relief.
>Many patients referred for Lyme disease are ultimately found to have a rheumatologic or neurologic diagnosis. Rheumatologic diagnoses commonly misdiagnosed as Lyme disease include osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, degenerative diseases of the spine, and spondyloarthropathies. Some patients are found to have neurologic diseases, including multiple sclerosis, demyelinating diseases, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, neuropathies, and dementia. Some CLD advocates have argued that these various conditions are simply manifestations of Lyme disease, but these hypotheses are untenable.
This is incorrect. Your link is from 2016. In the last few years several studies have brought to light that persister Lyme is real and very hard to eradicate with standard antibiotics. Even the CDC is starting to change their tune as their website now mentions persister Lyme as a viable theory.
If you’re not an expert why would you link a manuscript to stir up a thread?
CLD is real and even if it’s over diagnosed, it still doesn’t take away the many real diagnoses that exist and a vaccine would eliminate its potential permanently.
If you are posting in good faith...more recent studies are centered around making the findings in the European strain viable in the American one.
This misses that many many people get Lyme disease without knowing it (asymptomatic), particularly children, and if treatment it not given early in infection, permanent neurological damage occurs.
This is common in north eastern state rural areas and has been getting steadily worse.
We are constantly doing tick checks on the kids after one of our friends related that she suffered lifelong issues after being bitten by a tick 40 years ago in our neighborhood.
We already have a Lyme disease vaccine. However, the manufacturer refuses to sell it for human use due to PR threats from conspiracy theorists. Unfortunately, creating vaccines is only half the battle.
I found that article very interesting, and think describing the pushback as PR threats from conspiracy theorists oversimplifies just a bit.
Aa mentioned in the article, it's very possible the vaccine triggers a rare, genetically associated autoimmune disorder normally caused by Lyme disease. It was also released roughly concurrently with at least one vaccine that was legitimately withdrawn for safety reasons.
Compared to, say, the covid-19 vaccines, or the MMR vaccines, I find the public hesitation more understandable. It's not like a disease with an especially high mortality rate or one that's spread person to person.
Not saying the push to shame it out of existence was right, since it sounds like the benefits outweighed the risks at least for some people, but there's a lot to unpack. Definitely worth a read.
This is misrepresenting the real limitation of the vaccine that dampened demand...
> First, the vaccine efficacy of <80% meant that 20% of fully vaccinated individuals could still get Lyme disease [20]. Second, achieving full protection required three vaccine doses given at the time of the initial dose and 1 month and 12 months after the initial dose. Third, the vaccine safety and efficacy database lacked tests in young children, a population at high risk of developing Lyme disease [3]. Also the vaccine was effective only against the predominant North American Borrelia strain without necessarily conferring protection against international subspecies [16, 22]. Finally, uncertainty about the length of vaccine-induced immunity implied that recipients might need booster vaccine doses as often as every year to prevent waning immunity.
The real underlying malicious behavior here was from the lawyers who actively recruited and fomented anti-vax culture...
> The final agreement included over 1 million dollars in legal fees for the prosecuting lawyers, but provided no financial compensation to the ‘vaccine victims’.
Isn't that exactly what the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program is supposed to prevent, by isolating vaccine makers from liability in exchange for a 75-cent tax that funds a no-fault compensation program?
I saw this right before I came here: "FANTASTIC NEWS—A potential vaccine for multiple sclerosis is now within sight on the horizon! And it’s an mRNA vaccine by BioNTech, maker of the Pfizer #COVID19 vaccine. Study in mice shows great promise for improving symptoms & stopping MS progression!"
Any effective HIV vaccine would presumably cause false-positives to the HIV antibody tests. Recently an Australian COVID-19 vaccine candidate trial was halted due to participants developing antibodies to proteins in the vaccine that were taken from HIV genome, causing false-positive on a HIV test. [1] Such false-positives could easily be co-opted by anti-vaxxers especially in light of the the famous Soviet Union disinformation campaign "Operation INFEKTION" [2] that falsely suggested the HIV/AIDS is a man-made virus created by the United States to cause genocide of Africans. In rural Pakistan, health workers have been killed by villages who see the polio vaccine as a Western conspiracy to sterilize Muslims.
Global mandatory inoculations using a safe and effective HIV vaccine that causes false-positive results on HIV antibody tests would be a field day for anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists everywhere.
Damn can you imagine? I never imagined that an HIV vaccine would be possible within my lifetime. Kind of reminds me of HepC. An older coworker told me how a friend killed himself back in the day for getting HepC from tainted blood (pretty much a death sentence at that time and it consumed him). But now it’s possible to CURE it and hopefully it’ll be the same for HIV soon. Fuck, science like this is amazing.
Also worth mentioning that while we don't have an exact "cure" for HIV, we do now have treatments that (if you or your country can and will pay for it) can make having HIV into something that not only doesn't ruin your live, but that even can't be spread from you to people you have sex with.
Getting to the parent comment though it's amazing how far we've come in that we already do have virtually 100% affective prevention from medicine. PrEP and the knowledge that non-detectible = non-transmissible.
I've been re-watching Queer as Folk which isn't that old and it's crazy how aged it feels because we've made so much progress over the last 10 years. BTW amazing show if anyone hasn't seen - wish you could get HD version with the original soundtrack.
That's what I'm curious about too (just an engineer with no medical degree). There are a lot of viruses that are simply undetectable by our immune system so it never triggers a response (similar to cancer). A good example is the herpes family. I was under the impression that you can't fully cure herpes because it hides in your nerve cells. I wonder if mRNA can force an immune response to cure this.
In the case of HIV, the problem is not that the body is unable to properly respond to the disease, the initial infection is usually benign and the immune system produce the antibodies necessary to fight it, that's what being HIV+ means.
Problem is, HIV mutates so quickly that the immune system is essentially playing whack-a-mole and cannot eradicate the virus completely.
A vaccine that imitates a real infection perfectly is mostly useless, because it will train the immune system on the wrong mutation.
The trick here is to focus the immune response on parts of the virus that don't change, by using mRNA that only produce these parts.
It is like telling the body what the weak point of the virus is. It is useful both before and during the attack.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, and I'm sure this is very positive news. But one question I didn't find an answer to in the press release: what's the value of using mRNA for flu vaccine? Will it result in a safer or more effective vaccine? Be cheaper and easier to produce? Something else?
I (mostly) understand the mRNA process, just curious about why it'd be superior.
Cheaper, well, it depends. (Vaccines are already cheap, especially because they are mass produced.)
But I'm guessing - but I'm a total layman - that Moderna is betting big on their mRNA platform. The "beauty" of it is that you really need to just copy-paste some part of the virus (pick protein from the viral genome), and literally just paste it into their vaccine deliver platform. (See the link.) And this means R&D costs could go waaaaay down.
Sure, clinical trials are still needed to make sure it's safe and effective, but now they have a very good choice of nailing it on the first try, every try. (Basically unless they pick a wrong protein, it will work "every time". And it's already possible to get antibodies from folks who have "seroconverted" - that is they have become immune to something, because they have the antibodies against that thing. So, they sample a lot of people, look at what the human immune system did, and just pick the most common/stable protein target.)
The flu virus is problematic because it evolves/mutates fast, so old antibodies might not fit the new proteins. Yeah, sounds crazy, but some (!) small mutations lead to still functioning but sufficiently different proteins. (Of course we don't really see all the mutations that led to non-functioning proteins.)
It's also possible - super total speculation here - that the scientists/professionals/experts have a better guess on what to target than our immune system. (Relevant buzzwords: immunodominant / conserved epitope; epitope is the part of the target protein that the antibody/T-cell/B-cell actually matches/binds-to , and if the virus changes that part, boom, new virus, "doesn't look like anything to me", for example in case of HIV: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21115730/ )
From what I understand, it gives more control over the immune trigger. Perhaps it's possible to sequence a small part that's common to many flu viruses and administer that?
Well, most flu vaccines today are made by infecting fertilized eggs, so an mRNA vaccine would have the advantage of being vegan. It may eventually become cheaper to manufacture.
Uninformed speculation: I would hypothesize the mRNA process could react faster to flu mutations, the current vaccines are kind of trying to guess which strains are going to be important in the next flu season. It is also possible the mRNA technology could cover a broader spectrum of flu antigens.
Clearly Flu, HIV, and Nipah are more pressing, but I found myself wondering last night what the odds are of a rhinovirus vaccine being in the cards thanks to rapid progress SARS-CoV-2 has pressed us to make w.r.t. RNA and protein-like vaccines.
Economics is the largest barrier in my mind. While my understanding is that these vaccines are less expensive to produce, it's hard to convince people to get the flu shot, let alone a common cold shot. What's more is that with hundreds of variants, it's efficacy would be hard to get right.
That said, I'd gladly pay a heft amount yearly if it meant I had a >60% chance of not catching a cold that year.
There is a Netflix documentary called Pandemic about couple that is trying to eradicate flu. They found vaccine that works on all flu viruses but it takes 6 shots to work. That’s not practical at all therefore it’s not on the market yet.
I dunno, plenty of people take an annual flu shot already.
Conspiracy glasses on, what if the annual flu vaccine manufacturers are actively preventing a universal vaccine from happening? It's a big recurring source of income for them after all.
There are a number of weird diseases that some suspect are side effects of flu infections. It may be that we have to prove a causal link to one or more of those before an elaborate flu vaccine is seen as worth the trouble.
Not a virologist so I might butcher the explanation, but I think the strategy for universal flu is to target the “stalk” part of the virus since it’s similar across strains. We currently target the surface proteins since it’s easier to make a vaccine this way, but it differs more across the strains. Going after the stall would mean we don’t need to shove 100 different strains in there. I don’t know if this will be easier with mRNA technology.
> Vaccines target a specific virus or pathogen. One difficulty with developing a vaccine for the common cold is there are at least 200 different viruses that can cause cold symptoms, including rhinovirus, coronavirus, adenoviruses, and parainfluenza.1
> Rhinovirus makes up about 75% of colds. Still, there are more than 150 strains of it circulating at the same time.
> At this time, there is currently no way for one vaccine to protect against all possible strains that can cause the common cold.
It also goes on to say it self-resolves and only causes mild illness.
So they potentially could find a vaccine that covers most, but I'm guessing would be a waste of resources.
You can put more than one drug in a single shot. The MMR vaccine contains Mumpsvax, Attenuvax, and Meruvax to fight the mumps, measles, and rubella, respectively
Readit News
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Nipah_virus_outbreak_in_K...
Disclaimer: I'm absolutely no expert. The above is only my best guess.
It spread pretty well. It doesn't kill you instantly, so you can walk around and spread it before you inevitably die.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchurian_plague
I just submitted about this:
* https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210106-nipah-virus-how-...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25741798
Unfortunately due to flashbacks, which introduce non-linearity, it may be difficult for those who are not native speakers to follow through the movie. The problem is no obvious visual highlighting indicating that a scene was a flashback (like going black and white). Otherwise a really solid watch.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8941440/
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/bats-immune-system-virus...
There's much more to it, of course.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/why-do-bats-have-so-m...
I am not an expert, but I think it would be amiss to omit the Lyme disease controversy with these statements. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4477530/
Lyme disease has a simple antibiotic treatment. The Lyme serology test has high false-positive rate. There might be many people who believe they have Lyme disease therefore sadly miss out on their actual diagnosis.
>Even if CLD lacks biological legitimacy, its importance as a phenomenon can be monumental to the individual patient. This is because many if not most patients who believe they have this condition are suffering, in many cases for years. Many have undergone frustrating, expensive, and ultimately fruitless medical evaluations, and many have become quite disaffected with a medical system that has failed to provide answers, let alone relief.
>Many patients referred for Lyme disease are ultimately found to have a rheumatologic or neurologic diagnosis. Rheumatologic diagnoses commonly misdiagnosed as Lyme disease include osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, degenerative diseases of the spine, and spondyloarthropathies. Some patients are found to have neurologic diseases, including multiple sclerosis, demyelinating diseases, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, neuropathies, and dementia. Some CLD advocates have argued that these various conditions are simply manifestations of Lyme disease, but these hypotheses are untenable.
An example: https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2019/three-antibiot...
CLD is real and even if it’s over diagnosed, it still doesn’t take away the many real diagnoses that exist and a vaccine would eliminate its potential permanently.
If you are posting in good faith...more recent studies are centered around making the findings in the European strain viable in the American one.
This is common in north eastern state rural areas and has been getting steadily worse.
We are constantly doing tick checks on the kids after one of our friends related that she suffered lifelong issues after being bitten by a tick 40 years ago in our neighborhood.
A vaccine would be a huge relief.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/
Aa mentioned in the article, it's very possible the vaccine triggers a rare, genetically associated autoimmune disorder normally caused by Lyme disease. It was also released roughly concurrently with at least one vaccine that was legitimately withdrawn for safety reasons.
Compared to, say, the covid-19 vaccines, or the MMR vaccines, I find the public hesitation more understandable. It's not like a disease with an especially high mortality rate or one that's spread person to person.
Not saying the push to shame it out of existence was right, since it sounds like the benefits outweighed the risks at least for some people, but there's a lot to unpack. Definitely worth a read.
> First, the vaccine efficacy of <80% meant that 20% of fully vaccinated individuals could still get Lyme disease [20]. Second, achieving full protection required three vaccine doses given at the time of the initial dose and 1 month and 12 months after the initial dose. Third, the vaccine safety and efficacy database lacked tests in young children, a population at high risk of developing Lyme disease [3]. Also the vaccine was effective only against the predominant North American Borrelia strain without necessarily conferring protection against international subspecies [16, 22]. Finally, uncertainty about the length of vaccine-induced immunity implied that recipients might need booster vaccine doses as often as every year to prevent waning immunity.
The real underlying malicious behavior here was from the lawyers who actively recruited and fomented anti-vax culture...
> The final agreement included over 1 million dollars in legal fees for the prosecuting lawyers, but provided no financial compensation to the ‘vaccine victims’.
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1348912741562667008
https://www.aidsmap.com/news/jul-2020/novel-vaccine-induces-...
Global mandatory inoculations using a safe and effective HIV vaccine that causes false-positive results on HIV antibody tests would be a field day for anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists everywhere.
[1] https://www.livescience.com/australia-covid-19-vaccine-false...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION
I've been re-watching Queer as Folk which isn't that old and it's crazy how aged it feels because we've made so much progress over the last 10 years. BTW amazing show if anyone hasn't seen - wish you could get HD version with the original soundtrack.
In the case of HIV, the problem is not that the body is unable to properly respond to the disease, the initial infection is usually benign and the immune system produce the antibodies necessary to fight it, that's what being HIV+ means.
Problem is, HIV mutates so quickly that the immune system is essentially playing whack-a-mole and cannot eradicate the virus completely.
A vaccine that imitates a real infection perfectly is mostly useless, because it will train the immune system on the wrong mutation.
The trick here is to focus the immune response on parts of the virus that don't change, by using mRNA that only produce these parts.
It is like telling the body what the weak point of the virus is. It is useful both before and during the attack.
I (mostly) understand the mRNA process, just curious about why it'd be superior.
Cheaper, well, it depends. (Vaccines are already cheap, especially because they are mass produced.)
But I'm guessing - but I'm a total layman - that Moderna is betting big on their mRNA platform. The "beauty" of it is that you really need to just copy-paste some part of the virus (pick protein from the viral genome), and literally just paste it into their vaccine deliver platform. (See the link.) And this means R&D costs could go waaaaay down.
Sure, clinical trials are still needed to make sure it's safe and effective, but now they have a very good choice of nailing it on the first try, every try. (Basically unless they pick a wrong protein, it will work "every time". And it's already possible to get antibodies from folks who have "seroconverted" - that is they have become immune to something, because they have the antibodies against that thing. So, they sample a lot of people, look at what the human immune system did, and just pick the most common/stable protein target.)
The flu virus is problematic because it evolves/mutates fast, so old antibodies might not fit the new proteins. Yeah, sounds crazy, but some (!) small mutations lead to still functioning but sufficiently different proteins. (Of course we don't really see all the mutations that led to non-functioning proteins.)
It's also possible - super total speculation here - that the scientists/professionals/experts have a better guess on what to target than our immune system. (Relevant buzzwords: immunodominant / conserved epitope; epitope is the part of the target protein that the antibody/T-cell/B-cell actually matches/binds-to , and if the virus changes that part, boom, new virus, "doesn't look like anything to me", for example in case of HIV: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21115730/ )
You don't have to mess around with proteins.
Producing a new protein and especially purifying it is a ton of work. mRNA is comparatively simple to produce
Influenza genetics are weird: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/viruses/change.htm
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature06945
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmp0904819
Economics is the largest barrier in my mind. While my understanding is that these vaccines are less expensive to produce, it's hard to convince people to get the flu shot, let alone a common cold shot. What's more is that with hundreds of variants, it's efficacy would be hard to get right.
That said, I'd gladly pay a heft amount yearly if it meant I had a >60% chance of not catching a cold that year.
Conspiracy glasses on, what if the annual flu vaccine manufacturers are actively preventing a universal vaccine from happening? It's a big recurring source of income for them after all.
https://www.verywellhealth.com/why-there-will-never-be-a-vac...
> Vaccines target a specific virus or pathogen. One difficulty with developing a vaccine for the common cold is there are at least 200 different viruses that can cause cold symptoms, including rhinovirus, coronavirus, adenoviruses, and parainfluenza.1
> Rhinovirus makes up about 75% of colds. Still, there are more than 150 strains of it circulating at the same time.
> At this time, there is currently no way for one vaccine to protect against all possible strains that can cause the common cold.
It also goes on to say it self-resolves and only causes mild illness.
So they potentially could find a vaccine that covers most, but I'm guessing would be a waste of resources.