This is cool but I’m sorry, that’s not a vaccine - it’s a prophylactic.
A vaccine or inoculation is named because it creates a sustained adaptation to a targeted antigen. Something that boosts immune response is not an acquired adaptation! This would need to be re-upped every month or so.
Good for travel and brief encounters. Not an actual immunization.
Not too mention boosting cell growth factors can have unintended side effects like cancer! There are immune system cancers and I would be concerned about risks there.
I would also mention, just general auto-immune diseases. I would be very worried this could trigger those in people who wouldn't have gotten one otherwise.
What's interesting to me is that one of the biggest booms in pharma over the last ~10 years has been biologics / monoclonal antibodies that treat auto-immune diseases by SUPRESSING cytokines. Examples include TNF inhibitors like Remicade/Humira/Enbrel; or specific IL-XX inhibitors like Dupixent/Cosentyx/Skyrizi/Tremfya/etc; or interferon therapies for MS. These are increasingly used for a broad (unlimited?) set of autoimmune or inflammatory diseases and work by blocking specific cytokines to reduce immune overactivity.
What this treatment does is the opposite side of that coin, it mimics cytokines in order to PROMOTE an immune response.
Immune regulation is an area that deserves a lot more research, and there is going to be learning (harm) along the way. An increasing body of science is pointing to autoimmune diseases being triggered by traditional vaccines, which are then treated by the biologics above that increase the likelihood of other disease due to immunosuppression, which can now be treated(?) by a new immunobooster AKA universal vaccine?
I would like to see the "increasing" body of evidence pointing towards traditional vaccines.
My wife has an autoimmune disease. Most all the evidence points towards gut biome but that shit is super complicated. We have very little research into what our gut biome needs to be.
If you want to continue to believe that vaccines come with no issues, you will find more than enough evidence to support that belief. I'm not here to dissuade you of that. If you are open to considering other possibilities, look into molecular mimicry and immune crossreaction, adjuvants and ASIA syndrome, bystander activation and epitope spreading, MMR and ITP, and the Guillain Barre syndrome studies
> This particular treatment seems like it would stimulate immune response all the time which doesn’t strike me as a good thing. I may stick to a multivitamin for now.
They're going to say it's "safe", and only the crackpot wingnuts who believe in ancient aliens will complain, and then in 30 years when we realize it actually wasn't as safe as claimed, the next generation of The Powers that Be will make a big show of banning them and tout it as a big win for public health.
It will be when everyone starts leaking from the big players. Age verification will make software development impossible or be impossible to implement without huge investment.
Just because it's not openly shared does not mean that there aren't large databases of everything from working refresh keys to entire profiles indexed out there for the large services. Most data leaks and breaches don't get reported, or acknowledged, or are downplayed in their potential effect (but weirdly, also given more weight than they deserve since it becomes pointless to have so much data that doesn't add anything new to, say, a profile of a person)
Good thing RFK pushed out the official overseeing this financing and the current administration is actively defunding the organizations that produced this.
Better to have more disabled or dead babies instead of science.
The current administration doesn't care about kids. They only want you to not terminate a new kid from being born. That they care lots about. What happens after birth is not their concern. Also, I think when they say they want more babies, they want a specific subset of babies to increase.
> The current administration doesn't care about kids.
Of course they do. But untold amounts spent on very few kids could be spent elsewhere on many more. Federal budgets are a zero-sum game.
> Also, I think when they say they want more babies, they want a specific subset of babies to increase.
I've seen quite a few conservative commentators celebrate that the massively disproportionate levels of African-American abortion have been reduced, resulting in more African-American people being born, and zero bemoaning it. So maybe you're right.
RFK runs HHS which oversees multiple grant, research, and review organizations in the federal government. This includes the NIH, which has been gutted of experts that don’t share the political ideology of the political arm of the executive and / or aren’t willing to say untruths in service of their political agenda. The news is replete with stories of experts being purged leaving entire areas of research unstaffed; from various cancers to HIV to genetic engineering. Of course the same is true in other areas, such as NOAA, EPA, FEMA, etc that will cause more acute harm. The research harms will play out over decades.
From a purely utilitarian perspective, funding research like this is not an effective use of dollars at the margin. How many people could we save if an equivalent amount was put into reducing obesity, smoking, and drinking? How many people could we save if we stopped spending money we don't have to do things that the government isn't competent at allocating anyways?
That's not to say the research itself is not impressive nor important, but think critically about the fact that this money doesn't exist in a vacuum.
I think you may be operating under the assumption that the extremely expensive price tag will need to be repeated for each patient.
In reality, as this process becomes more mature it is going to become inexpensive.
The reduction in cost will almost certainly be similar to reduction in cost needed to sequence an individual's genome, which has fallen from tens of millions to hundreds of dollars.
The only catch is that we have to spend money to get there.
Another catch is that the nations who underwrite this research will turn millions in investments into trillions in dividends and the stingy or poor will be left in the cold.
Seeing that private enterprise is only good at taking publicly-funded work and patenting it, and that in the absence of public funding nothing ever gets invented, we should be all-in on this.
edit: it's apropos that you mentioned obesity because GLP-1 drugs are the direct, irrefutable, product of spending at government labs.
edit2: specifically, a single government scientist playing around with lizard saliva in the 1970s because he thought it was interesting.
I'm of accord with the Utopians of Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning:
When a Utopian dies, of anything, the cause is marked and not forgotten until solved. A fall? They rebuild the site to make it safe. A criminal? They do not rest until he is rendered harmless. An illness? It is researched until cured, regardless of the time, the cost, over generations if need be. A car crash? They create their separate system, slower, less efficient, costing hours, but which has never cost a single life. Even for suicide they track the cause, and so, patiently, blade by blade, disarm Death. Death, of course, has many weapons, and, if they have deprived him of a hundred million, he still has enough at hand to keep them mortal. For now.
>There's no evidence to support that gene therapy will ever be inexpensive.
My prediction is based on the number of efforts, too numerous to list here, being undertaken to develop lab equipment to automate the extremely labor-intensive workflow and the accumulation of vast libraries of CRISPR-Cas9 screens and dependency maps, the creation of which are also expensive and labor-intensive.
> How many people could we save if an equivalent amount was put into reducing obesity, smoking, and drinking?
How confident are you the answer isn't very close to zero? We've already curtailed smoking quite a bit in the past 30 years. At the level of an individual, it isn't any particular mystery how to stop obesity or to simply not drink, but population-level interventions attempting to get people to voluntarily behave differently for their own health historically haven't worked well in these specific domains. Throwing more money at the problem doesn't seem like it would obviously change that.
Also keep in mind that overeating and alcohol addiction have significant genetic components. Research into gene editing has the eventual potential to cure damn near any disease, including whatever pet causes you personally think are worth defeating.
>population-level interventions attempting to get people to voluntarily behave differently for their own health historically haven't worked well in these specific domains
Said like that it paints things like there are not far more resources spent on propagating the bad habits (as some ROI is expected from this by some actors), and any attempt to put a social health program in history always ended in major catastrophes.
There are known DNA changes that would probably help all people with chronic diseases, but it's ethically more accepted to go for the more fatal diseases and cleaner cases first, like a rare mutation with a high fix rate.
Yes, but the cures here aren't general. They're highly specific, and the rare conditions have a long tail- large numbers of different conditions, each with a very small population of affected individuals, and likely, the treatments will be somewhat customized for each type of disease.
See my comment above. Getting approval for rare diseases and expanding the indication to the common form of the disease is a well established strategy in pharma.
Also rare genetic diseases give insight into the underlying mechanisms and pathology of common sporadic diseases, which can be leveraged to develop new and better therapies.
Getting a new drug or therapy approved for a rare form of a disease and then expanding the indication to the common disease patient population is a well established strategy.
How do you know it's not effective? The cost per life saved is extremely high now, but this stuff gets better over time. How much did penicillin cost to produce originally?
And yet, the first patient treated with mass-produced penicillin used half the total supply, and the stuff was so rare that it was extracted from patients' urine for reuse.
Given the admin’s propensity for cutting spending on research like this and other domestic interests while ratcheting up military spending I think that poster’s point stands.
I’ve thought about this recently as well and I don’t know if I have a fully developed view. What is the moral responsibility of all people to pay for medical research or operations that would affect a small number of people. Is it ethical to compel others to pay for the research deemed valuable by some, but not by others. Who is the arbiter of that research’s value?
I could say I believe the government should fund research into fixing people who think cilantro tastes like soap because for most of us it is delicious and promotes healthy diets. Should I be able to compel (tax) you to pay for that research?
Where that line is drawn will always be wrong to someone. How research is prioritized will always be wrong to someone. Is there an ethical way to determine the best use of collective resources and what portion of one’s property must be taken from them to fund that research.
I think that taxpayers should be advised that science is not a straightforward process like building a house from blueprints, and that a lot of important discoveries happen serendipitously.
The cilantro taste stuff does not sound absurd to me at all. In biology, there is no hard wall between banal stuff and critical stuff; they interact and fundamentally operate in the same environment under the same genetic and epigenetic rules. Sure, the research necessary for correcting cilantro-as-soap may be marginal, but there is a chance of discovering something significant along the way.
We should be more careful and also honest when communicating about science to taxpayers.
That is not comparable at all. To save people from obesity, smoking and drinking, you don't need more resources on fundamental research. You need different education, and socio-economical programs, possibly even less funds on the overall: if no resources is spent anymore in promoting bad habits, you end up with more financial resources and a healthier population.
Instead if no resources is allocated on developing all the technical requirements to do such a thing, humanity ends up with less tools to heal itself, and that's it.
a) that statement above has nothing to do with RFK
b) the whole point of NIH and other government research funds is to pay for this sort of "not clearly an effective use of dollars" type of research that Pfizer et al won't touch. but you can look at a ton of future applications from this - lipid packaging, CRISPR methods, drug delivery, etc that had to be devised, and could conceivably be commercially viable if the methodology is perfected and the cost comes down.
It's not even that. Utilitarian premises still let a very broad set of perspective. A long term perspective on large humanity won't lead to same conclusion as what will be the most joy inducing experiences in the next 24h for the 1% wealthiest people in the world right now.
Fire the managers. More realistically, just let the big bulky companies fumble around until eventually they're outcompeted by the next generation of startups.
I don't hate the sentiment, but realistically, big bulky companies would go down in flames with much collateral damage from lobbying the government, regulatory capture, anticompetitive practices, squashing creative destruction that might threaten their dominance, etc.
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