I'm confused. Where does this say the vaccine is mRNA? The Valneva VLA15 website explicitly states "VLA15 is a multivalent recombinant protein vaccine" [1], and the linked press release calls it a "investigational multivalent protein subunit vaccine". Does nobody actually read these things?
It's not just the OP. I've heard from multiple sources that "Pfizer has an mRNA vaccine for Lyme in clinical trials." Somewhere along the line someone(s) saw Pfizer, vaccine, and put 1 and 1 together and got 3. And it spread. This is the first time I realized that's not true.
I've heard it described as such but, no, it seems to be a distinct if perhaps somewhat related type of vaccine? (UPDATED: It's not.) The company that actually created the vaccine is also unrelated to the company that developed the vaccine that Pfizer is currently distributing for COVID.
Prepare to read the headline "mRNA vaccine trial for <...>" a lot in the future. My guess is that they are going to produce mRNA versions of basically any vaccine (and then some) in the future. The nice thing about the technology seems to be that you only need to exchange the mRNA payload while the surrounding delivery method can be reused. That makes it not only a fast method to create a vaccine but a very convenient way as well. Nice side effect might be that for the next pandemic, we might have doses for everyone ready at the moment the trials are done.
Take that with a giant grain of salt because I'm not in the industry.
At the beginning of the pandemic, people theorized that public health will influence future media for a generation, much like WW2 did. For decades, we got war TV shows, war movies, war comics, etc. Hogan's Heroes ran into the '70s, Sgt. Rock was published until the late '80s, and so on. And I think we're about to see the same with media based on public health efforts.
One of the things that'll come out of this is that mRNA vaccines as miracle wonder drugs that cure everything are going to get huge amounts of attention, and media will reflect that. Especially if the Lyme, Malaria, and HIV vaccines prove successful. We are going to see mRNA vaccines as plot devices and MacGuffins in media for decades to come. It's going to get the same treatment radiation got in the '60s and '70s and genetic engineering got in the '90s and '00s. For example, it wouldn't surprise me if, the next time Marvel decides to make a new adaptation of Spider-Man, the spider will have been treated with mRNA instead of radiation (the original story) or gene therapy ('90s cartoon, '00s movies, maybe others).
> At the beginning of the pandemic, people theorized that public health will influence future media for a generation, much like WW2 did. For decades, we got war TV shows, war movies, war comics, etc. Hogan's Heroes ran into the '70s, Sgt. Rock was published until the late '80s, and so on. And I think we're about to see the same with media based on public health efforts.
but we actually won that war, which precipitated a rise to global hegemon status. covid has been a pathetic, fumbling showing, one that clearly reflects institutional decay and foreshadows future decline -- the reverse of the first situation
WW2 had the Red Scare, Japanese interment camps, and shocking amounts of human experimentation. I would like to hear about the fear mongering and downright lies that were going on during WW2 from someone who was there. I’d bet there was lots of misinformation going around, social media has made those types of things flourish.
If you look back at history through rose-tinted glasses everything will appear better than it was.
Especially once it stops being about race when we say we need to investigate how humans used the Scienctific process took "a solution in search of a problem" and collected samples laboratories, like searching for a needle in a haystack in Wuhan to purposefully replicate and infect chimeric rat/humans with bat viruses. Whether maliciously or not that is the likely prevailing Truth on why we now have a 5th corona virus we need to guide toward an endemic state.
I'm obviously not happy with the state of the world as a computer scientists.
That's an opinion piece by a journalist with a BA in Natural Sciences from 1964, not a virologist or otherwise an expert on any of the topics. His claims have not held up well and the biggest scientist he interviewed (David Baltimore) has backed away from that[1]. As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and he had very little other than speculation.
I mention all of that because even that wobbly claim was still couched in terms like “did” or “could” while the comment I replied to described it as “likely prevailing truth”. We have no evidence and limited data supporting that hypothesis and a number of people pushing it for political reasons, which is rarely helpful to the scientific process.
until it stops being true that the lead scientist at the wiv pioneered work in & published papers about inserting FCSes -- which other than covid do not exist in coronaviruses -- into bat coronaviruses for gain of function research, you will be facing a very uphill battle. there are so many damning claims in that piece that would be convincing on their own that i suspect you haven't even read it.
If you read it more carefully, notice how those claims are much stronger than the supporting evidence. Note how often he says something is possible and then treats it as the most probable explanation without doing the real work of establishing it as such - this is one of the things all of the actual scientists who critiqued this op-ed focused on.
> covid has been a pathetic, fumbling showing, one that clearly reflects institutional decay and foreshadows future decline -- the reverse of the first situation
Against a totally novel virus, we developed and widely deployed vaccines with efficacies beyond anyone’s wildest dreams using totally novel technology in the span of a year. Not sure that quite meets my definition of “pathetic.”
Not a totally novel virus. The reason why vaccines were developed within days of isolating the virus is because SARS-COV-2 is not that different from SARS-COV-1 and all the vaccine research efforts carried over.
What was pathetic was the federal coordination - hesitation on travel restrictions, CDC response, recommendations against PPE… Lessons that could have been learned even from the 1918 pandemic were painfully ignored.
What makes you think the war wasn't won /despite/ pathetic and fumbling actions by leaders and governments? Ha, my country sent a small contingent (25k) to fight against the Axis in Italy. There were new uniforms made for this expeditionary force. Turns out they chose uniforms that closely matched that of the german uniforms (!).
From a book on this subject: "Another problem in the country's preparation was the production of uniforms similar to those of the German Army. 'They even threw rocks at us in Naples thinking we were the invaders'.”
I don’t think anyone “runs” the federal government. I think offices and processes exist, and I think there’s a semi-hereditary politburo occupying said offices, but I don’t think anyone has much authority.
What makes you think the war wasn't won despite pathetic and fumbling actions by leaders and governments? WW2 wasn't a showcase of efficiency and practicality. Ha, my country sent a small contingent (25k) to fight against the Axis in Italy. There were new uniforms made for this expeditionary force. Turns out they chose uniforms that closely matched that of the german uniforms (!).
From a book on this subject: "Another problem in the country's preparation was the production of uniforms similar to those of the German Army. 'They even threw rocks at us in Naples thinking we were the invaders'.”
I thought the rollout of the vaccines in the time it took, with the effectiveness it had, just went to show how the knowledge and technology of vaccines makes it one of the greatest human achievements, ever.
The us actually handled the 1918 pandemic even worse than this one.
Public authorities largely claimed it wasn't happening and wasn't a big deal as hospitals overflowed and we dug mass graves.
They even cancelled public gatherings but pretended it was unrelated to a health crisis. Health responses in the us were completely scattershot, and no one trusted information coming out from the government.
Compared to that this response was actually far better and more organized.
Oh, pandemics can certainly have long-lasting social and cultural effects. I ran into something quite interesting just the other day while playing with Google's Ngram on a whim. This is the occurrence of the word "contamination" in contemporary English texts in the last century: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=contamination&... (Care to guess what happened in the early 1980s?)
I'm actually a little worried about this. Of course, I'm happy it'll boost interest in vaccine development. But the terror and fear in reaction to AIDS led to a general biosecurity obsession that became biosecurity paranoia and then hysteria and then a renewal of persecution of homosexual men for a couple decades. Who says we'll be immune to the worse effects of fear, paranoia and panic this time around?
mRNA vaccines just get your body to produce a particular protein you want to induce an immune response to, instead of injecting the protein directly.
Is it really the slow uptake of mRNA techniques that's prevented an HIV vaccine? Or is it HIV's capacity for rapidly mutating into large numbers of disparate strains inside one person, let alone in the entire community?
I mean, look at the delta variant of Covid, the mRNA vaccines reduce the severity of infection, but do not prevent infection or spreading thereof.
mRNA vaccines will enable rapid iteration, which is good. But they're not a wonder drug at all.
> I mean, look at the delta variant of Covid, the mRNA vaccines reduce the severity of infection, but do not prevent infection or spreading thereof.
I keep seeing that surface here. It is at odds with what I'm reading that says it /is/ effective at preventing infection[1] though not perfectly so. Are we looking at different metrics, or is my own ignorance of the field preventing me from fully understanding what I"m reading?
The anti-vaxxine crowd has never had any problem with cherry picking the statistics that they can twist to show their view. I've been watching them do it for at least 10 years (and evidence they have been doing it longer), but only now is the rest of the public seeing it. I have just enough statistics to see what they are doing, but it is complex enough that most people don't understand it.
But that doesn't equate to saying that it is ineffective at preventing infection. I think we'd need follow-up studies showing a trend towards zero, but that doesn't seem to exist yet.
> For example, it wouldn't surprise me if, the next time Marvel decides to make a new adaptation of Spider-Man, the spider will have been treated with mRNA instead of radiation (the original story) or gene therapy ('90s cartoon, '00s movies, maybe others).
mRNA vaccine tech being discussed here is not gene therapy. It cannot (appreciably) alter host DNA the way radiation or gene therapy can. It simply causes the host cells to manufacture desired proteins for a limited amount of time.
Does anyone know why they haven't released a Delta varient vaccine? Is seems that it would just involved we changing the mRNA sequence in a computer at the factor, but I'm really just guessing. Also maybe it is considered a whole new vaccineand needs to go through approval again.
One reason is because they've found that simply boosting with the original mRNA gives a massive spike in protection even against Delta, apparently on par with variant specific versions of the vaccine.
Another is that recent studies are showing that natural infection provides much more comprehensive, long-lasting immunity against all variants than the vaccination does, while vaccination with the current vaccines offers much more immunity than individuals who have never been vaccinated or infected. So it would seem like the best course of action moving forward may be to vaccinate everyone possible initially to prime their immune systems and reduce the severity of the disease, and then allow Covid to run its course. Eventually vaccinated individuals will have break-through infections, gain the more durable natural immunity, and Covid will become a less serious, endemic virus more like the flu or cold.
In short, we don't yet have a need for a Delta variant vaccine. That may not be true eventually, especially for future variants.
Not an expert, but afaik there's been quite a few studies showing that natural immunity is superior to the vaccine-induced one - I'm also fairly sure that virologists have theorized to that end even before the data became available for the following reason: the vaccine is 100% focussed on detecting the spike protein, so changes to the spike can result in evasive variants. Natural immunity OTOH is developed against more sites of the virus and thus provide a more broad and robust response to variants, present and future.
There's been some mixed signals coming out of the research, but that's in part due to how immunity is being measured. There are definitely some studies showing that particular antibody levels for vaccines can be higher or longer lasting than natural infection, but recent research is showing that those with natural infection have had a far smaller risk of reinfection than those vaccinated, even when controlling for comorbidities. There are still confounding factors, such as behavioral differences between the groups, but its a pretty stark difference. It also makes sense from a theoretical standpoint, as acquired immunity is based on more than the just spike protein, unlike the vaccines, which is a big part of the differences between variants like Delta. The thought is that natural immunity is therefore more resilient to changes between variants.
Its all early enough that its still an open question, but there's definitely early evidence that natural immunity is more resilient than vaccination only.
These requirements will have to be loosened for anti-Covid vaccines. They are tailored to other diseases, but SARS-CoV-2 mutates too fast. The flu vaccine has an exception, too, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to prepare the correct vaccine (against the expected dominant strain) on time.
One bad autoimmune reaction from a poorly engineered vaccine and the whole society will boycott the mRNA vaccines forever after. Safety is higher priority to ongoing viability than speed.
Safety and speed must usually be balanced in a trade-off, and we are actually used to it, that is why people drive a car, even though it comes with a risk of dying or being maimed.
I have no doubt that some kind of safety-related trials must be run on boosters and that they will be run, but they will likely only take weeks in the future, not months.
You presume the time required is a function of something other than observing the physiologic reaction to the inoculation over an adequate period of time.
J.G. is a famous case and his death definitely delayed development for a decade or more, but it should be noted that when he died, the technology was extremely untested in humans.
We now have a few hundred million people who got mRNA vaccine and had no trouble. I don't think that even after a death, mRNA would be completely toast. It has already proven its merit.
J.G.'s death involved an experimental modified adenovirus (the same family of viruses used as the vector for several non-mRNA COVID vaccines: Johnson & Johnson/Janssen, Astrazenica/Oxford, and Sputnik V).
But it doesn't make sense in this context. They're literally changing nothing except the mRNA sequence.
If a new vaccine is made by taking a gene sequence from a virus protein that's already in the wild, and packaging it into a delivery mechanism (LNP) that's already approved for another vaccine...
If there are any strange reactions to the new spike protein, that would also be caused by the wild virus spike protein, so it's an obvious competing harms situation where the vaccine should be approved, at least so long as the pandemic is ongoing.
Right, all you're changing is the mRNA, but that can still be really dangerous. What if you code for a protein that causes cross-reactivity with a human protein and you give millions of people an auto-immune disorder?
I'm 1000% pro mRNA vaccines and pro covid vaccines, but they still need to be tested.
Then the virus variant itself would cause autoimmune disease, and we'd have a much bigger problem than deciding whether to approve a new vaccine.
For fuck's sake, I'm not saying do no testing. I would assume they do basic checks, first in humanized animals, then using bioassays to try to detect all sorts of problems including antibody cross-reactivity with a wide variety of human cells. I'm also not against a preliminary limited human trial, with bloodwork checked after a few weeks to try to see if the assays missed anything obvious.
Short of that, what do you want them to do? We can't wait years to see if people develop symptomatic auto-immune problems. If we even wait 3-6 months for each new protein, the time advantage offered by mRNA or adenovirus vaccine tech is blown, or at least reduced to the point where there's no ability to react quickly to changing dominant viral strains in a pandemic, or new outbreaks of known diseases.
>Then the virus variant itself would cause autoimmune disease
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about or why the GP comment mentioned an autoimmune disease specifically. mRNA vaccines express specific proteins whereas the virus expresses entire viral molecules. A novel protein expression could cause an autoimmune disease because the novel proteins couls cause the immune system to attack the cells producing the isolated proteins, a problem you wouldnt have with cells producing entire viral bodies.
I think you misunderstood the (G)GP comment which mentioned cross-reactivity, i.e. the immune system's antibodies cross-reacted with both the spike protein and an endogenous human protein, like what can happen with Epstein–Barr virus Nuclear Antigen-1.
The immune system doesn't generate antibodies to an entire virus. It generates antibodies to specific immunogenic proteins or parts of proteins.
If the spike protein resulting from a vaccine causes an immune response that generates antibodies to the spike protein and oops, also some endogenous human protein, that's autoimmune disease.
If you get infected by a virus with the same spike protein, your body will generate antibodies to the same spike protein and also cause autoimmune disease if the antibodies are cross-reactive.
If cells expressing exogenous immunogenic proteins triggered autoimmune disease[1], even the existing wild-type (alpha variant) vaccines would cause autoimmune disease. Presumably that's not happening. The immune system may attack those cells expressing the exogenous vaccine-coded spike proteins, but normal immune systems down-regulate it well enough that it doesn't cause major problems. It would be a sign of a broken immune system if it decided to initiate a long-term attack of human cells just because they once expressed an immunogenic protein. If it did that, any virus would cause autoimmune disease.
Please tell me you work in a field related to immunology and you have a subtler point that I'm missing, and that you didn't just create an account to criticize a point you misunderstood yourself.
[1] to an unacceptable degree. Obviously, things can go wrong with the immune system and almost anything could, if you're unlucky enough, trigger an immune reaction leading to autoimmune disease eventually.
Harm ratio = harm caused by vaccine / harm caused by virus
Exposure ratio = projected people who would be infected by the virus / projected people who would take the vaccine
In an airborne, high-R_0 pandemic situation, the exposure ratio is high enough that only one of two cases apply:
1) The potential health problems caused by small-scale exposure to the spike protein alone is relatively small compared to problems caused by infection, in which case vaccinate everyone. This is the current situation.
2) The potential health problems caused by small-scale exposure to the spike protein are significant (for example, hypothetical antibody cross-reactivity with a normal human protein, as mentioned in a parallel comment), in which case obviously don't vaccinate everyone, but lock down the world for a few weeks since having much of the world suffer autoimmune disease is untenable.
The potential health problems are unknown. For example, we are assuming that Myocarditis/Pericarditis is extremely rare, or at least more rare than in a viral infection. Do we really know that, for all age groups and all vaccines? I have doubts, we are still in the discovery phase:
The spike protein is not necessarily a problem, but both NLP and viral vectors have never been rolled at the current scale. TTS seems to be particular to viral vectors, Myocarditis/Pericarditis more so to NLP.
> They're literally changing nothing except the mRNA sequence.
This is like comparing my house to the Willis Tower and saying, "they're literally changing nothing except the blueprints."
mRNA codes for proteins. Coding for a different protein will produce different effects in the body. Most will probably be harmless. If a vaccine codes for a protein too similar to proteins that already exist, that vaccine will produce autoimmune disease.
I think the best solution here would be challenge trials. With it without them we are relying on people getting sick. With challenge trials we just reduce how many people outside the trial get sick as well because we can massively cut down on time. I'd be more than happy to take the new vaccine and get exposed to Delta. It's a easy way to make a huge contribution to society.
Couple of months ago when Pfizer & Moderna were talking about developing variant specific boosters, wasn't the discourse about how the variant boosters wouldn't need full trials again?
It's a cocktail of vaccines against the expected dominant strains based on data of strains in the opposite hemisphere because it mutates too quickly to produce a targeted vaccine against any specific strain before it arrives.
But I believe they can develop the vaccine fresh as new strains arrive, as well as reuse previous vaccine strains.
I’ve read somewhere that they don’t just take a sequence. There’re some tweaks they make to produce effective immune response. CureVac failed to produce a good vaccine for this reason. My take is that mRNA technology is being overhyped, although it’s a massive step up over other approaches.
CureVac probably failed because they used unmodified RNA base pairs. Both Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer use modified nucleosides such as N1-methyl-pseudouridine. Extracellular unmodified mRNA - which could arise from the lipid nanoparticles which contain the mRNA breaking down before transfection of cells - can trigger a deleterious innate immune reaction against said mRNA. This interferes with the desired immune recognition of the spike protein. The modified mRNA largely evades that undesired immune reaction. That's probably what sunk CureVac's vaccine.
I think our approval processes haven't kept up with the technology. The existing vaccine is already approved, and boosters seem to have some beneficial affects.
Probably because going through another round of certification is harder than using the existing vaccine as a booster, the hope being that this will already significantly improve delta resistance.
There's nothing to update. The mRNA allegedly encodes for the 'spike' protein, which is the infection vector. The theory at the time was that by targeting that protein specifically, if the virus were to mutate, it would loses it's ability to infect because it could no longer successfully bind to the ACE2 receptors.
In practice, the efficacy is a fraction of what the trials stated it was. It didn't lose efficacy due to the delta variant, the manufacturers just lied about the efficacy by cherry picking the data.
The only option they have now is to blame people's immune systems for lack of response, thus the 'boosters' are needed.
To my knowledge Pfizer didn't really invest anything, it was the German population who financed Biontech through funds paid with taxes: the lab infrastructure pre-covid (through funded cancer research), the vaccine trials, and mass production (both directly and through pre-purchases before the vaccine existed).
Biontech invested in the early research. Pfizer invested a lot more into manufacturing and the trials. Both are needed at different times. What Pfizer invested in was a lot lower risk (don't confuse that with low risk - it wasn't except by comparison!), but they invested far more money.
Quit trying to sell either short - without both investments we would be in lockdown yet.
I really looked into that quite deeply. Biontech got so much money for funding the trials that they apparently had too much and put it in reserve for 2022. The public invested billions into building production capacity.
I'd be glad to see what Pfizer actually invested that wasn't backed by prepurchases.
I think the term you're looking for is capitalize. Pfizer made some investments in a technology that had wide applications, and now they want to capitalize on it. It's good business, and a lot of people are going to be helped in the process.
My understanding is that it has been known for years that mRNA is a viable vaccine delivery vector, but the R&D hadn't been completed for the other aspect of the business - production and safety at scale.
No, mRNA was suspected to be viable, but it was never proven. Like most new medical developments the early tests showed it didn't work and those needed to be worked around. Some believers did the research to make it work, but they had their detractors who said they were wasting there time as the problems weren't solvable. This time the detractors were proven wrong, but there have been other cases where more effort was put into something with no result (at least so far?)
Afaik, it was backed up behind a lack of safety trials.
Given how expensive those are to run, and how mRNA's primary benefit (speed of development) wasn't a competitive advantage in "normal" times, we had something that we thought was better, but no financial case to toss the gobs of money at it to get it certified.
If SARS-CoV-2 is remembered for one thing, it should be for finally breaking the logjam and "giving" us approved mRNA platforms.
That's incorrect. They are vaccines even while working differently.
The body develops immunity in reaction to the spike proteins that it produced itself after turning the mRNA instructions contained in the vaccine into proteins (namely the spike proteins that the SARS-Cov2 virus uses to enter cells).
Ribosomes, tiny and amazing molecular machines, read this mRNA and produce the encoded sequence of aminoacids. With every reading, a bit of the tail of the mRNA sequence gets used up and once it's too short, the whole sequence is broken down. That means the mRNA in the vaccine gets used up with time.
The mRNA never makes it into the nucleus where your DNA resides.
Ribosomes are interesting btw, you can read about them here:
Amazing technology. What I cannot understand is how can a foreign mRNA be injected so efficiently into host's cells without all the virus-like methods to be applied? Why should host cells be ready to accept any mRNA from their environment so blindly? Wouldn't it be used by natural selection to create subviral agents which will destroy such naive host cells rather quickly?
The mRNA is hidden inside lipid nano-droplets. These droplets merge with cells and the mRNA gets released into them. From what I understand, pure mRNA would be broken down if it ended up in the interstitium (fluid filled space between cells) without being hidden inside this lipid shell. The sequence is also slightly altered compared to original one to make it more stable and less likely to produce an immune response (one of the bases ('U') is swapped out for one that is functionally the same but does not trigger the immune system).
You can read more about the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine and the lipid particles here:
mRNA is just instructions, it does not have to "authenticate" itself with the cell. If it is in there, it will be "executed". The filtering is done before stuff should get into cells (i.e. caught be the immune system).
You might be interested in this article. It is about a biochemist who invented the way to prepare these nanoparticles but was cheated out of his share of the fame and money.
The short answer is that it is virus-like initially, in that it bypasses the cells passive defenses to enter the cell intact, but the payload can’t reproduce itself, so it dies out almost immediately afterwards, unlike a virus.
Technically, anything but doctor Jenner's original vaccine against smallpox, which was derived from cowpox, isn't a vaccine. Vacca is literally cow in Latin and vaccine means from cows, which the other vaccines aren't.
I am curious about this line of thinking. If you believe that mRNA vaccines should be considered "gene treatments" then why don't you also believe that traditional vaccines are "gene treatments"? What exactly makes one fall under that description but not the other?
Out of curiosity, if you're onboard with previous typical vaccination, but hesitant to jump on board with mRNA treatments, what are you? Does that now fall under "anti-vax" in internet lingo? Is wise to group everyone under one umbrella term?
That depends on why they're hesitant about mRNA vaccines. The "anti-vax" label isn't just about not taking some subset of the standard vaccinations. There's a tribal element and a conspiracy/disinformation element.
What's the point in differentiating? They at best deluded themselves with a slightly different brand of anti-vax propaganda. Do we need a separate term?
So there's no possible valid logic for not wanting an mRNA vaccine. It's all completely "delusion" stemming from propaganda? Anyone who does not have complete faith at this point is in the wrong?
There are no general reasons to avoid well tested mRNA vaccines, no.
Specific medical conditions (eg allergies to components of the shot), being under the recommeded/tested ages, etc., sure.
I unfortunately know several anti-vaxxers, I've seen what they pass around as "reasons". It's nonsense. And it just so happens that they all get their news from similar places. It's a total coincidence I'm sure.
And I assume that you consider all the available variations as "well tested". Nice to hear that any personal concerns I have are not valid, and that you don't even need to read them to know that. Sad to see so many websites where discussions were once welcomed turned into echo chambers. Or perhaps I'm just one of those uneducated people who shouldn't even be on HN
They went through the full multi-round set of testing that all vaccines go through in the US (even ignoring the overlap elsewhere), and have since been administered to hundreds of millions of people. I'd call that well tested, yes.
What would be the point of me pretending it's up for debate? I'm not stopping you from sharing whatever concerns you have, not sure how you think I even would. I'm not likely to be interested in them if I'm being honest, I've seen far too many sites and stories already. But you do you.
Absolutely not correct. They do work exactly like conventional vector vaccines, the only difference is how the genetic material of the foreign virus is delivered to the cells of the patient. The genetic material of the patient (the genes) is not modified.
Technically speaking ... the genetic code of the B cell receptor gene of B cells is altered by vaccines. The same goes for pretty much all antigens the body comes across. But that's the point of the adaptive immune system and is obviously not what OP meant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination
I actually had Lyme disease when i was younger. Curiously enough, i didn't get the somewhat common rash after the tick bite, but instead it was discovered later, as a part of blood testing. I was submitted to that after my relatives had concerns about how lethargic i was being, as well as because i was experiencing joint pain, which the blood test later seemed to confirm.
If i recall correctly, i was given antibiotics and felt pretty bad for a month onwards, though nowadays i'm not aware of any lingering long term effects, apart from maybe my short term memory being slightly worse than i'd expect it to. Of course, i think that in my case i had it pretty easy, since some other folks are known to develop symptoms that are considerably more worse. Whether there will be any lingering consequences in my future because of it, only time will tell.
A vaccine would definitely be welcome, especially because of how common ticks are here in Eastern Europe - any walk in the forest might end with more than one of them on your clothes. If you have dogs, you'll probably have to remove dozens of those from their fur every summer.
In a side note I usually read that those rashes are only present in 30% of cases or so. Probably good advice to get checked out if you suspect an infection. Multiple times, if necessary, as the testing also doesn't appear to have a high degree of accuracy.
Yeah, got lyme disease one month ago and there was no rashes as well. Good idea is to send the tick to laboratory for testing, it will take quite some time (week or two) but better than nothing.
About 8 weeks ago I was bitten by a tick and contracted Lyme Disease and I put my story up on YouTube to try to help others, let's just say it's a crazy ride downhill if you neglect the bacterial infection:
In the video I talk about the treatment I followed to recover.
Today symptoms appear gone but there have been testimony of hidden, lingering, or reoccurring issues after infection.
All that said, I still do not fully trust mRNA vaccines. Ticks carry a huge array of illness, bacteria and virus besides just BB.
If you are into Permaculture or Solar Punk, my 1/3 acre plot has a mini Food Forest and is a stones throw away from Lyme Connecticut where Lyme Disease was first observed affecting people and children. Like the video if you want to see more.
Ever since I moved to the 'first world' I've been scared of this disease. We don't have it where I come from and the long term effects sound straight up terrible.
The disease appears to be a problem mainly in Europe and Asia, but if you're planning a camping trip in those areas it looks like you can ask a doctor for the vaccine. You also can get the disease from unpasteurized dairy products.
From the Wikipedia article about that disease [1] it seams the disease isn't prevent in the US, so it wouldn't make sense to get vaccinated against it there (like European people who aren't vaccinated against yellow fever by default).
Lyme disease is not the same as tick-borne encephalitis. Lymerix was a vaccine approved by FDA in US in 1998 because lyme is pretty common in Appalachia, but it was taken off the market. Dogs are recommended to receive a lyme vaccine here, but it's not available to people.
It's super easy to treat if caught early. But that's where the good ends. Vast majority of cases present the infamous circle. But some don't. And if you got the circle in a hard-to-notice spot, it's easy to miss it (it will a month or two into infection) too.
First precaution is to check your legs (and possibly torso/hands) for ticks after passing through high grass. And whole body after coming from the woods. The nasty bit is you may bring ticks home, they stay active for a while and they may bite someone else.
If you get a rash in a weird spot and you've been out in the woods in the past 48 hours, check it out thoroughly. You may have a tick there. I've had countless ticks hiding in weird places that I found due to weird itchy-rashy feeling.
Once you get the tick, remove it in a safe manner asap. Lyme is transferred after the tick is done feeding and about to take off. Which is ~48 hours.
Personally Lyme Encephalitis is much scarier. Not as common, but long term effects are much more likely and even worse. On the bright side, there's a vaccine for it.
IIRC 20-30% is for the picturesque classic bullseye. A small amount of cases have no skin indication at all. And the rest get various other rashes. Maybe circley without gradient, maybe bullseye-ish square, maybe just a random redness. Itchiness may or may not be there too.
Personally I had Lyme twice. Neither was 100% bullseye. The first that I let stay for a while before realising what is going on had little bullseye-ish gradient and was a perfect circle. It took some time to develop the gradient. Next time I realised what is going on very early and all I had was a red patch. I don't know if it would have developed the pattern if I didn't take antibiotics literally the next day after little redness appeared at the tick bite location.
Should we assume we are safe if we go hiking in a place where we never brushed against any plants or grass or twigs? In other words we went through woods but only stayed on wide open trails. I assume ticks don’t “fly” in the air ?
They like to crawl up and can do so from your ankles/feet, so it’s not a safe assumption. I spray my hiking boots and socks with deet. If I am going to get into brush, I wear permethrin-laced hiking pants and I tuck the cuffs into my socks. Then I take a shower after coming in from outside.
Deer ticks can be tiny, much smaller than wood/dog ticks so just checking yourself isn’t a great form of protection.
Ticks don't fly and they generally dislike sunlit or dry places. They will mostly lurk in darker, wetter places, up to 3 feet from the ground. So a shady tree patch with overgrown grass at the edge of a swamp or creek is much more likely to be thoroughly infested than other places.
Use a repelent, wear some light-colored clothes to spot a crawling tick easily, tuck the (long!) trousers into your hiking shoes and you should be OK.
The short answer is "no." You should still do a check. And maybe spray some pemethrin on shoes/socks/trousers
The longer answer is that they're much more likely to get on you if you're walking through tall grass. They're bad this summer and I've mostly gotten them when walking through grass (on a trail I've actually been avoiding). But I have gotten 2 or 3 others.
This is Phase 2, but I wonder how long Phase 3 will take, given that getting Lyme disease is still pretty rare, can easily be missed or misdiagnosed, it will takes a lot of time and people to get a significant effect between a control group and vaccinated people
Lyme disease is very common on the northeast coast of the United States nowadays. The disease is increasing every year due to a massive increase in deer and mice and is considered a major public health issue.
Since 14 states account for 95% of infections it might seem like a rare disease if you live outside of those 14 states.
Not rare in New England. I’ve contracted it twice since the beginning of covid. And once 23 years ago. The first time I was sick for a year even with treatment. These last two times I caught it early but still suffered for months and my body hurts with changes in the weather.
How effective would such a vaccine need to be? A vaccine of say 70% might be effective enough for herd immunity for a disease that is contagious person to person. But you don't get Lyme disease from other people so herd immunity is not possible, unless the intention is to inoculate deer, (no pun intended).
As a benchmark, the dengue fever vaccine (Dengvaxia) is about 60-70% effective and is very effective at suppressing the worst symptoms, but may actually put the person being vaccinated under more risk of serious symptoms if they've never had Dengue before and manage to catch it anyway post-vax. Dengue is an unusual disease in that, to simplify somewhat--there are actually 4 strains--catching Dengue a second time can be much more serious than the first time.
Anyway, between the effectiveness, possible side effects, and the aforementioned risk, it's not considered a great vaccine and it's authorized for fairly limited use in the US.
Unfortunately it won’t, as Chronic Lyme is most likely lingering damage triggered by the initial infection rather than an actual ongoing infection.
There are some people who believe that chronic Lyme is caused by persistent hidden infections, but you have to cherry-pick a lot of evidence and ignore a lot of contradictory evidence to arrive at that conclusion. Regardless, it seems unlikely that the vaccine would help if the infection had some mechanism to hide from the immune system anyway, as they claim.
Not sure if there's evidence for that but it's much more likely to be the case.
There's no solid evidence "chronic lyme" exists either. The only "doctor's" you'll see treating it are typically into the naturopathic stuff and all other sorts of unproven treatments for things the medical community doesn't even agree exist.
It's funny how it sometimes happens that the scientific or medical community makes a decision. I'm not quite sure how it happens, but once it's done, you need an overwhelming amount of evidence to overturn it. Much more than if the decision had never been made in the first place.
Who makes these decisions, and on what grounds? I honestly don't know.
Edit: But my theory is that it's based on informal groupthink.
There was one but it was taken off the market. It's a bit of a sad story because it worked but because of unfounded claims that it had side effects, it lost trust of the public:
"In clinical trials involving more than 10,000 people, the vaccine, called LYMErix, was found to confer protective immunity to Borrelia in 76% of adults and 100% of children with only mild or moderate and transient adverse effects. [...] Subsequently, hundreds of vaccine recipients reported they had developed autoimmune and other side effects. Supported by some advocacy groups, a number of class-action lawsuits were filed against GlaxoSmithKline, alleging the vaccine had caused these health problems. These claims were investigated by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control, which found no connection between the vaccine and the autoimmune complaints.
Despite the lack of evidence that the complaints were caused by the vaccine, sales plummeted and LYMErix was withdrawn from the U.S. market by GlaxoSmithKline in February 2002, in the setting of negative media coverage and fears of vaccine side effects.",
Unfounded claims from 100s of people developing imaginary autoimmune disorders?
Mind you people are still getting compensated in court for autoimmune disorders arising from the Hep-B vaccine, even though no causal link was found.
Just yesterday I had to accompany my sister to the phlebologist, because of severe side-effects from Pfizer, he told us he was seeing troves of patients for similar reasons even though officially no causal-link was established.
At some point you have to wonder if health-policy takes precedence over truthful reporting when it comes to vaccines. (I'm "pro-vax" btw, I was the one who convinced my sister to go take her dose even though she's quite young. Now I feel like a moron.)
> Just yesterday I had to accompany my sister to the phlebologist, because of severe side-effects from Pfizer, he told us he was seeing troves of patients for similar reasons even though officially no causal-link was established.
This is the issue with correlation vs causation. When you look at sufficiently large group, like tens of millions of people, some percentage of them are going to die for various reasons. Some will have medical emergencies. Some will get cancer. So, you can’t just say “these people got the vaccine and then had this effect”. You have to look at how many were effected and compare that with the “normal” rate.
For instance, venous thromboembolism (VTE) already effects 2 out of every thousand Americans (600,000 cases a year) [1]. So, many people that get a vaccine will also experience some form of VTE because they were going to anyway. However, preliminary information is showing that the mRNA vaccine does cause about a 3 times increase in the risk of VTE, while covid causes about a 15 times increase [2]. For reference, taking hormonal birth control causes a 1.5 to 7 times increase risk of VTE [3]. So just taking birth control can be far more “dangerous” than the vaccine, so I wouldn’t beat yourself up.
You compare the vaccine to birth control to dismiss the risks of the vaccine, however birth control is taken by sexually active and mature women.
That is people who have a real probability risk and want to avoid getting pregnant. You don't give birth control to 10 year old girls or to boys.
In the OP’s case his sister was in the low risk category (quite young). So its not obvious that a priori the vaccine outweighed the risks. Nor is it obvious that the young have a moral responsibility to to society to take on a personal risk to ameliorate a risk that doesn't affect them (this is unlike a defensive war where, presumably, the defending youth will also suffer devastation if their country is overrun)
>You compare the vaccine to birth control to dismiss the risks of the vaccine
Or I compare it as a reference to a commonly taken medication to contextualize the risk. I also included a comparison to the disease it is vaccinating against, again, to contextualize. It is also worth noting that the absolute risk amounts to about 4 additional cases of VTE per 100,000 people that are vaccinated.
>In the OP’s case his sister was in the low risk category (quite young). So its not obvious that a priori the vaccine outweighed the risks.
Between 12 and 115 children end up hospitalized with covid per 100,000 total child population, not per 100,000 that catch covid (which is 1,900 per 100,000 infected children) [1]. So the risk of catching covid, and having a case severe enough to end up hospitalized, is far higher than your chance of VTE from the vaccination. So I find it odd that you would describe those odds as “low risk” for covid. And yes, its pretty obvious the vaccine outweighs the risk.
I'd imagine a phlebologist is in a good position to know the difference between correlation and causation with regards to their practice and their patient population.
Thanks for the links about VTE, that's interesting, I don't know if it's precisely what my sister has. Though I don't remember reading about it on any of the official websites I consulted regarding possible side-effects.
I'm mostly feeling dumb about convincing her using incomplete data at an age at which I'm not sure the vaccine is critical, the doctor having told me these side-effects are common and not being reported.
>I'd imagine a phlebologist is in a good position to know the difference between correlation and causation with regards to their practice and their patient population.
Well, you would be wrong. Someone’s intuitive estimation of a section biased sample from an unknown total sample size compared to their memory from years ago is basically guessing. That is exactly why studies need to be conducted, with literally millions of people, and differences measured in a handful of people per 100,000, it is the only way to get any sort of useful data.
>the doctor having told me these side-effects are common and not being reported.
I don’t even understand what they mean. They or you can and should report it to VAERS. Its entire function is to collect data on these things so scientists can look into possible causations.
You're overly confident for an assertion that relies on your belief that someone with decades of medical experience would be ignorant of these basic statistical pitfalls. Not that all doctors do research but I learned that stuff in my first year in the health industry and I can assure you that doctors are in general very knowledgeable about their patient base and the diseases they treat.
A symptom with a 1 in 100 000 occurrences would result in about 800 cases in my country. Arranged according to demographics, divided by the number of phlebologists in these areas, and the baseline prevalence of these symptoms you can start to make an informed guess as to what amount is "normal".
I don't know if we use VAERS at all being in Europe. I know there was some talk of our reporting system not being interested in non-severe symptoms because of the labour cost of evaluating reports. In truth I don't know exactly what they meant, drugs aren't my domain of expertise and they didn't elaborate. But assuming this doctor is trustworthy in their assessment and intent when they speak of troves of patients with these symptoms and complain of this lack of reporting, it's evidence of a dysfunction somewhere seeing as those side-effects aren't advertised on official channels.
>A symptom with a 1 in 100 000 occurrences would result in about 800 cases in my country. Arranged according to demographics, divided by the number of phlebologists in these areas, and the baseline prevalence of these symptoms you can start to make an informed guess as to what amount is "normal".
But things aren’t normal. Travel patterns have completely changed due to covid, so less or more people might be visiting a clinic than previously. People have been far more sedentary compared to previous years, a key risk factor for VTE, which could increase individual risk by as much as 30%. Covid itself causes VTE, so people with diagnosed and undiagnosed earlier cases of covid would increase the numbers.
> You're overly confident for an assertion that relies on your belief that someone with decades of medical experience would be ignorant of these basic statistical pitfalls.
Even in well thought out, carefully conducted studies, biases and confounding factors can cause serious issues. These aren’t “basic statistical pitfalls”. These are things that even the smartest people cannot account for without conducting an actual study with actual controls and randomization, actual statistical analysis, actual identification of confounding factors, actual reanalysis accounting for those, and actual peer review to make sure there were not issues you did not think of. I’m confident because I know that we do medical studies because we know that even the smartest people cannot just eyeball changes in incidence rates and cannot know which of many factors is likely causing the change. Even experts have human biases and we require the structure and rigor of studies to help mitigate them. I’m not confident that I am more knowledgeable than a doctor, I’m confident that the people much smarter than me developed evidence based medicine because they understood that no one is above bias, even your doctor.
>I don't know if we use VAERS at all being in Europe.
For Germany, you can report possible side effects here [1] which goes to the Bundesinstitut für Arzneimittel und Medizinprodukte (Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices) and The Paul-Ehrlich-Institut (Federal Institute for Vaccines and Biomedicines). If I was incorrect and you are in another European country, you can find your reporting agency from the EU website here [2].
What I find interesting in the replies to your comment is that you are not taken at your word. I find we have lost our ability to do that.
You’re point is a strong one: shortly after preforming a very novel and rare action, your sister got ill with a rare disease. Her Dr. also mentioned that he had seen multiple patients who shortly after preforming a novel and novel action they got ill with a rare disease.
instead the replies boil down to:
1. Correlation doesn't imply causation
2. its psychosomatic.
Both annoy me.
1. People forget that the inverse is also true - causation doesn't imply correlation. For example, a quadratic relationship between independent and dependent variable will show zero correlation.
So why bother with correlation at all?
Because we need something to tell us where to start looking
Take the famous ice cream sales vs. robberies example. A lot is learned explaining the strong correlation between the two, even though there is no causation.
Of course, all the AI fanboys have no problem with flaky correlation as long as they predict well and they don't have to explain them.
2. This one really annoys me. While I believe that psychosomatic reactions are real and understudied (my great uncle - head Dr. at the largest hospital in a large city once told my dad that half of all ailments are cured with placeboes) this explanation is far less mechanistic and unscientific than blaming the vaccine itself.
The explanation boils down to “i don't want to believe its something I cherish, so Ill blame your hysterical sister instead”.
Psychosomatic digestive, blood pressure and heart problems are hardly surprising. All those systems are tightly connected and controlled by the mind. But vein issues? What is the mechanistic link between the mind and veins?
> Mind you people are still getting compensated in court for autoimmune disorders arising from the Hep-B vaccine, even though no causal link was found.
That's because the standards for being compensated in vaccine court are very, very low, by design, and there is indeed a vaccine court of sorts in the US. It was set up specifically to address the fact herd immunity is so extremely valuable to society as a whole that it's worth having some people be harmed by the vaccine to achieve it because many more people will be saved by it, but not necessarily the same people. Anyone who suffers basically anything that could possibly be linked to a vaccine is then indemnified by that court, even though the vast majority of those who are were probably not indeed suffering because of the vaccine.
Don't take it as a proof that the vaccine is at fault, it's fallacious and is just one in the long list of completely idiotic arguments antivax cultists use. It makes barely more sense than calling ARNm "gene therapy" or complaining about non-existent mercury.
I wish they had put mercury into the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. At least you could use a vial for more than a few hours if they did that. Currently you have to throw away doses because bacteria may have started growing in them. The type of mercury they use in vaccines kills bacteria very well.
"These claims were investigated by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control, which found no connection between the vaccine and the autoimmune complaints."
Yes, of course, but you then appeared to query the "unfounded" nature of the claims. I thought you had missed the part where they turned out to be indeed unfounded.
You should assume the strongest interpretation of the comments you reply to, it leads to better conversations and is part of the site's guidelines.
I disagree about the fact that they're unfounded having read the comment I replied to, therefore it follows I do not believe the results of the FDA's investigation are conclusive. I illustrate this with the Hep-B vaccine for which the health-autorities have not found a causal link, yet the legal system implicitly acknowledges one. There's also my personal experience with the Pfizer vaccine of which some side-effects are not being reported, putting into question any scientific conclusion that'd be reached from the incomplete data that is being gathered.
Wait. You quoting the site's guidelines because the poster assumed you were questioning the unfounded claim but now you are stating you disagree with the unfounded claim?
Assuming I'm questioning the unfounded claim is not the issue. I'm quoting the site's guidelines because the poster copied verbatim the message I was responding to. This is either quite snarky or assumes very low reading ability on my part.
In short the exchange was:
A: "The claims are unfounded because the FDA found no causal link."
B: "The claims might not be unfounded because the absence of evidence of a causal link is not sufficient to qualify them as such, as is evident by this legal precedent and my personal experience."
C: "`the FDA found no causal link.`"
I hope this clarifies things, I'm afraid we're getting very meta.
id like to read up on it, if there were any articles etc i was thinking it would be great to reference (for myself) since ive been googling and haven't really found anything much...
I'm not confident one way or another. But I'm not ready to take this story at face value as a sad story of a vaccine being recalled because of a few loud-mouthed anti-science idiots just because "no causal-link was established by the FDA".
Health-policy and politics in general have a perverse effect on the science. What was the official stance of the government one day becomes misinformation the next, and vice-versa. I think it's important to recognize that going with the narrative of the government is a political stance rather than a scientific one and that it reflects trust in the system rather than anything else.
Over the years my government has given me many reasons not to trust it blindly when it comes to medical issues. Our legal system recognizes that finding a causal link is not the end-all be-all of medical responsiblity and my personal experience reflects it as well having just done a risk-benefit analysis to convince my sister to get vaccinated, using the information provided by the health-authorities of my country, and discovering afterward that some serious side-effects are not being reported.
I don't disagree with the principle behind what you say. But the application to where you are acting under the assumption that Pfizer caused your sister's side effects seems unwarranted. It's certainly worth investigating, but it is far from a certainty.
The side effects were real and occurred frequently enough to make vaccinating the entire population a net-negative. Lyme disease is still extremely rare in most areas.
What should have happened is the vaccine should've been made prescribable by doctors to patients who live in areas where Lyme disease is common. Despite its side effects, the vaccine would have been hugely beneficial to specific areas of the U.S., but IIRC there wasn't a regulatory pathway at the time for this sort of limited approval based on geography.
It was, and was about 80% effective IIRC. The problem is most tests look for antibodies. So how do you know you're not in the 20%? I believe many people were still beeing treated regardless of the vaccine. I believe the manufacturer also had some legal issues due to adverse events.
I assume that mRNA will vaccinate for a lot of diseases, which means that a lot of new viruses will emerge through this evolutionary pressure. It's possible that we are also starting the same race as with antibiotics. Which is still better than people dying from these tiny evil viruses
That's not really how it works, First, vaccines prevent infection in the first place so the virus never has a chance to replicate and mutate, unlike antibiotics which are given after infection and there are a massive number of bacteria and only the most resistant survive. Second, there isn't anything about vaccine acquired immunity thats different from infection acquired immunity, so any evolutionary pressure would already be there.
> First, vaccines prevent infection in the first place so the virus never has a chance to replicate and mutate
Ideally, yes, but in practice people still tend to develop a viral load, their immune system kicks in faster, and the result is a very brief infection.
>Second, there isn't anything about vaccine acquired immunity thats different from infection acquired immunity
They can probably recruit plenty of subjects from longtime residents of Old Lyme, Connecticut, USA, and Ipswich, MA, USA, where the disease started to take hold. This is good stuff. I hope they make it through efficacy (Phase 2) and safety (Phase 3) trials with good results.
> VLA15 is the only active Lyme disease vaccine candidate in clinical development today, and covers six serotypes that are prevalent in North America and Europe. This investigational multivalent protein subunit vaccine targets the outer surface protein A (OspA) of Borrelia, an established mechanism of action for a Lyme disease vaccine. OspA is one of the most dominant surface proteins expressed by the bacteria when present in a tick. VLA15 has demonstrated strong immunogenicity and safety data in pre-clinical and clinical studies so far.
Why wouldn't there be a vaccine? In Ontario, we give children vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, influenza, smallpox (well, I got it as a child), rotavirus, IPD, measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, HPV, Hepatitis B, meningococcal disease.
Ticks carrying Lyme disease are exploding in Ontario, probably because of climate change. It makes sense to get this into the rotation as soon as possible.
After COVID, we suddenly have everybody is acting like vaccines are something weird, odd, new and scary.
For the record, there is an anthrax vaccine at least in the US, but it is reserved for service members and politicians due to the potential for side effects. I believe we have a stockpile of a few million shots in the event of an outbreak, but that stuff is guarded by national security confidentiality so there's no way to know how prepared we really are.
Yep. Active duty service in Canada get a shit load as well, all the stuff they already should have got as kids and at least Yellow Fever, Typhoid and, I think, Hep A.
Google "ticks in ontario increasing" for literally dozens of references.
The "probably climate change" is supposition, hence the "probably" disclaimer, but a lot of those references above blame "milder winters" or climate change directly.
>The "probably climate change" is supposition, hence the "probably"
Then maybe just leave it out next time. I'm tired of people claiming climate change is responsible with no data to back it up for every natural event. That's no better than someone claiming global warming doesn't exist because they have a cold week of snow.
The discussion does not involve you, so kindy butt out. I asked the OP a question not you.
Burden of proof is on the commenter. They did not provide proof. The burden is not on me to Google anything when someone else spouts a claim.
Your first article is literally just a guy saying it has changed with nothing to back it up.
From the second study which I'm guessing you haven't even read-
"Climate and other environmental changes are expected to increase the risk of ticks and TBDs in a number of ways."
"Prolonged extremes values of temperature (high or low), low humidity and intense rainfall could adversely affect tick development by reducing their activity and increasing their mortality rateFootnote 5. These changes in temperature are expected to have less of an effect on ticks than on mosquitoes because of the tick’s ability to find refuge in their woodland habitats"
"It is important to note, however, that the relationship between tick-borne diseases and climate is not linear."
> Are there going to be vaccine for everything in the future?
For a lot of stuff, the answer is probably yes, mRNA based vaccines are a revolutionary game changer - their quick turnaround time means you can actually tailor them to a specific cancer or pathogen the patient has and use the patient's own immune system to fight against the disease. Another advantage of mRNA is that manufacture doesn't depend on chicken eggs which take about six months to produce, are challenging to keep sterile enough and have issues for people with allergies (https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/27/health/chicken-egg-flu-va...).
However, some viruses like HIV or Influenza mutate so much that it was hard to make effective viruses, we will have to wait and see what the future brings there.
A vaccine is an excellent way to prevent an infectious disease. Borelliosis is an infectious disease. Infectious diseases cause human suffering. Vaccinating against as many infectious diseases as possible will reduce a great deal of human suffering.
I guess the real question is why would you not want to reduce human suffering?
It’s because the human immune system is superb at fighting off disease, so it turns out it’s easier to just prime it than to create our own way to kill viruses.
No need to imagine, HPV infection causes cervical, vulva, vagina, penis, anus, and oropharynx cancer and we have a vaccine for HPV (that is effective against the majority of the strains of HPV that cause cancer)! According to the CDC "almost all cervical cancer can be prevented by HPV vaccination."
>In general, HPV is thought to be responsible for more than 90% of anal and cervical cancers, about 70% of vaginal and vulvar cancers, and 60% of penile cancers. Cancers in the back of the throat (oropharynx) traditionally have been caused by tobacco and alcohol, but recent studies1 2 3 show that about 60% to 70% of cancers of the oropharynx may be linked to HPV. Many of these may be caused by a combination of tobacco, alcohol, and HPV.
Should we have a vaccine for addictions? alcoholism? drug use? eating?
Eg: Give it early in people's lives, that the first time they drink even a little alcohol, it should produce such (non life threatening) symptoms - terrible taste, throw up etc, they would not touch it again, and therefore won't be addicted?
Emphasis should be on tick-bite prevention. I have never had live tick on me and have been literally wallowing on all tick-infested areas of northern hemisphere. They just die. Most probably just drop off, but sometimes there is dead tick only slightly attached. Looks like they die on first drop of blood.
The first vaccine had a problem where it gave people Lyme every once in a while. My hypothesis is that Lyme disease is an autoimmune disease caused by being exposed too acutely in some way, or for too long. For some people, a tick byte isn’t enough exposure to trigger it. For others, the vaccine is enough. They didn’t catch it early in clinical trials because those people are rare enough to not show up in small studies. So by that logic, the same thing should happen here. Maybe this time it will be a small enough group of people to shove under the rug. There’s no medicine in the world that doesn’t harm people in some capacity.
> 59 reports of arthritis associated with vaccination
Maybe it was coincidence. I’m just saying if the vaccine gave people Lyme, here’s my hypothesis. But it makes a lot of sense that an autoimmune disease created by exposure to X could be triggered by a vaccine containing X. The definition of a vaccine is to expose a person to whatever it is the immune system recognizes — spike proteins and so on. It’s plausible. But as you point out, not very likely.
>By 2001, with over 1·4 million Lyme vaccine doses distributed in the United States the VAERS database included 905 reports of mild self-limited reactions and 59 reports of arthritis associated with vaccination [29]. The arthritis incidence in the patients receiving Lyme vaccine occurred at the same rate as the background in unvaccinated individuals. In addition, the data did not show a temporal spike in arthritis diagnoses after the second and third vaccine dose expected for an immune-mediated phenomenon. The FDA found no suggestion that the Lyme vaccine caused harm to its recipients.
54,000,000 Americans have had some form of arthritis [1]. I don’t exactly find it compelling that 0.0001% of them also happened to have gotten a vaccine.
Emphasis should be on tick-bite prevention. I have never had live tick on me and have been literally wallowing on all tick-infested areas on northern hemisphere. They just die. Most probably just drop off, but sometimes there is dead tick only slightly attached. Looks like they die on first drop of blood.
It's pretty hard to say that confidently with how small deer ticks are. I find them crawling on me all the time in Pennsylvania, and those are just the larger ones. Have found a few deer ticks on me over the years, and good luck finding them in your hair without someone else to look.
I mean of course that I have never had a tick which managed to suck anything, except once in 1955.
Also I remember being drunk and watching Ixodes Ricinus move along my arm and trying to stick its nose thru skin. Everytime it backed up real fast, like it found something nasty inside. Very much the same thing as American deer tick Ixodes scapularis.
See [2], "Subunit Vaccines".
[1] https://valneva.com/research-development/lyme-disease/
[2] https://www.niaid.nih.gov/research/vaccine-types