Past mRNA cancer vaccines haven't failed to get through trials because of ineffectiveness. They failed clinical trials in the 2000s and 2010s due to their side effects being too bad. The side effects of mRNA vaccines are getting less and less severe over the years, but the proof of the pudding will come in phase III for this vaccine, as with all the other ones.
IIRC from when Moderna started getting hot back in 2012 the preclinical trials weren’t going well. I think those were running ca. 2004–2005. Moderna took the infectious disease approach.
Moderna mostly took an initial infectious disease approach because extant mRNA formulations at the time provoked too much of an immune response that neutralized the effectiveness of subsequent dosing. There's a goldilocks amount of immune response you want-- too little and the immune system doesn't learn the antigens you'd like, but too much makes it miss the mark and focus too much on the formulation of the vaccine itself.
For a cancer vaccine that you want to dose multiple times (9 times in this study) to keep up peak immune response this is a problem. For infectious disease, where some early sensitization of the immune system can be enough, it's not so bad.
The acquired immune system basically includes a feature where it can squirrel away some of the white blood cells that fought an infection in the past at the site of the infection. This is a subset of the cells that were activated by the chemicals that were found during the infection.
But the immune system doesn't have a great way to distinguish the chemicals that actually cause illness from ancillary chemicals that may have been present during the infection as well. This is one of the root causes of allergies... you get sick with, say, rhinovirus at the same time that the pollen count is really high and your immune system defeats the rhinovirus but squirrels away both the white blood cells that were activated by the rhinovirus and the ones that were activated by the basically harmless chemicals on the surface of pollen grains. Then the next time allergy season comes around, your nasal passages and lungs fill up with pollen grains and the white blood cells close to the surface that were squirled away due to that old rhinovirus infection activate and trigger your immune system to respond to the pollen.
Most of them are awful but only in rare cases do they cause permanent damage beyond what is already happening with the cancer and usually the patient can recover after the treatment is stopped.
Anything that stimulates the immune system runs the risk of increasing its sensitivity too much till it attacks normal cells and at that point, a lot of horrible things can happen ranging from a new mild allergy to neurological disorders like multiple sclerosis to acute organ failure.
Since the point of the therapy is to get immune cells to attack the cancer cells, there's the very real risk of instead targeting the tissue the cancer evolved from.
> Most of them are awful but only in rare cases do they cause permanent damage beyond what is already happening with the cancer
That's simply not true. Chemotherapy, in particular, is ridiculously bad.
Chemo brain is a thing. Another example, people have to wear cold packs on their hands and feet in order to minimize the neuropathy that some chemotherapies can cause. Other chemotherapies cause your veins to leak with attendant swelling everywhere. Several years after therapy, some of that swelling still persists. Radiation is horrendously bad at damaging intestinal tissue. etc.
Yes, it beats being dead. That's about all you can say about it.
I agree. I have not been through it, myself (crosses self), but I live on Long Island, which means that I have watched a lot of people go through it.
Most recover nearly completely, but they all suffer some permanent effects, like sun sensitivity, hair loss, digestive problems, anemia, weakened immune system, etc.
Why would living on long island mean you would watch a lot of people go through it? Is there some some kind of cancer hot spot on long island? Genuinely curious.
What Long Island is, is the site of some of the oldest heavy industry, built for the world wars.
Many those planes and tanks you see in the documentaries, were often built right here.
And they set it up quickly, with very little regulation. People have been straight-up dumping toxic sludge for decades. Since Long Island gets almost all its water from local aquifers, there you have it.
Traditionally, this kind of thing happens to disadvantaged communities, without much clout, but Long Island has a lot of billionaires (old-money billionaires). They get cancer, as well.
But they are also absolutely aghast at the prospect of government intervention, and hate regulations. Add a bit of mob spice, and you have a situation, where no one wants to raise a stink.
We do have some damn good cancer hospitals, though. Very few of the people I have seen fight cancer have actually died.
The puke and diarrhea after every chemotherapy session might feel bad acutely, but the real killer is neuropathy. When it gets bad, it's impossible to operate zippers, pens, shoe laces, walking like made from wood, nails falling off due to nerve degeneration, teeth gums getting swollen. In cold climates (-10 below freezing) it is especially hard.
> bar for side effects is much stricter for preventative treatments like vaccines
These vaccines are for treatment. They don’t prevent cancer. They treat it. They’re vaccines because they work by arming your immune system versus doing the fighting themselves.
A comparison with rabies vaccine may be useful here.
On the scope of the entire human body, the virus usually enters first, before the vaccine is used.
However on the scope of individual tissues and cells,
the vaccine is often the first on the scene, prepping your cells before the (sneaky, slow) virus makes its main attack.
Rabies post-exposure prophylaxis is different because it's made up of several components: human rabies immune globulin (HRIG) and the vaccine. The vaccine takes a while to work so HRIG is the first line of defense that prevents the virus from entering the nervous system until the immune system is able to fight the virus.
From what I've heard it's still usually "preventative" because we can't confirm that the rabies infection will successfully infect until it's too late. So we vaccine anyone with (very) likely case.
If the Rabies virus, or cancer, "beats" the vaccine on a significant scale, then it matters little what it is called because you will probably be dead in short order.
> The cancer vaccine: Moderna and pharma giant Merck are developing an mRNA-based cancer vaccine, mRNA-4157 (V940), for people who’ve had high-risk melanomas removed.
Isn't this hair splitting on definitions? They are there for vaccinating against future instances of cancer after somebody is in remission from previous instances of cancer.
It's not a generally-distributed vaccine, but there are all sorts of vaccines that aren't generally distributed and instead applied only to populations likely to encounter the illness protected against (such as the battery one is exposed to if one travels to particular parts of the world).
This further redefinition of the term "vaccine" is a huge problem
by definition a vaccine should NOT be a treatment, a vaccine has to be preventative, and further personally I believe only Sterilizing immunity should be considered a "vaccine"
This is very important, because a "vaccine" in the US has legal protections other medical drugs, treatments, etc do not get, which is why there is a push to include alot of these things under the definition of "vaccine" so now they get the legal shield
That's not the definition of a vaccine. A vaccine is something that registers our active immune system against an antigen, so that our body detects and eradicates it upon detection. The timing doesn't really matter and there are a lot of therapeutic vaccines [1].
I took it as the literal and previously accepted definition was uniformly changed by both government and secular organizations in near unison. As late as January 2021 vaccines were thought of as dead pathogens - https://web.archive.org/web/20210118194713/https://www.merri...
The word “vaccine” comes from the recognition that people could gain immunity against smallpox via infection with the less-deadly (and live) virus cowpox.
> The technique of cultivating a virus repeatedly in artificial media and isolating less virulent strains was pioneered in the early 20th century by Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin who developed an attenuated tuberculosis vaccine called the BCG vaccine.
> MMR is an attenuated (weakened) live virus vaccine. This means that after injection, the viruses cause a harmless infection in the vaccinated person with very few, if any, symptoms before they are eliminated from the body. The person’s immune system fights the infection caused by these weakened viruses, and immunity (the body’s protection from the virus) develops.
There were plenty of protein subunit vaccines and a few viral vector vaccines in use in humans prior to the COVID vaccines. Neither of these are dead pathogens.
It is now, it has been expanded over the years most recently in response to covid as to include mRNA in the definition of what a vaccine is explicitly to shield these big pharma companies from liability for any harm adverse reactions to mRNA may have to individuals
It is shocking to me that soo many people that normally at against large companies, and against even capitalism do not see the huge danger in classifying these things as something that gives the companies creating them an almost complete liability shield from harms caused by their products.
Once something is a "vaccine" in the US you lose all ability to sue for most harms caused by said vaccine.
It should not matter to you whether the compensation is paid by the government or a company, but you can file for compensation and if valid, get compensated for it.
there are all kinds of problems first and foremost is incentives if tax payers (i.e government) are paying for the losses why should they care if they injure anyone? removing product liability is universally a bad idea
Further there is all kinds of Due process issues that make filing a Vaccine claim problematic and very expensive to appeal, there are all kinds of horror stories out there about denied claims, and to appeal the denial is $$$$$$$$$$$$ and no lawyer will take it with out up front payment, and no class action is possible to spread the costs out...
That is why vaccines need FDA approval in the first place.
Everything else you said is true for all kinds of appeal and not just for vaccines. There are horror stories about everything and lawyers not wanting to take things up without upfront payment. But that does not stop those things. Marriage and divorce, child custody, DUI cases, police excess, companies overcharging for things, DMCA being used incorrectly, tech companies having too much power etc. are all problematic and very expensive to appeal. But we live with those. Similarly, there are trade-offs here.
>>That is why vaccines need FDA approval in the first place.
this is probably where the most of our different world view comes from, I believe the FDA is just a corrupt organization rubber stamping big Pharma, and serves no actual safety purpose. Given the revolving door between the major companies and top level positions in the FDA and the actions of the FDA during COVID I have lots of examples to prove my position.
>>Everything else you said is true for all kinds of appeal and not just for vaccines
Incorrect, the Vaccine process establishes an extra Judicial process where by a committee at the DHHS gets to choose if you were actually injured by the vaccine or not, skipping the jury process completely. if you are denied by the DHHS you have to jump right to the Expensive Appeals process, there is no way to fine a standard civil lawsuit and get a Jury of your peers.
Also there is no way to form a class if the FDA screws up and a vaccine causes harm to 100's. 1000's or 10'000s of people, each case has to go through the process individually
I understand that this point you believe the FDA is infallible organization that only cares for the individual, but the FDA has proven time and time again that to be false.
I think our worldviews are different. While I do not think everything is perfect with FDA, the world without FDA is much, much worse than the one with it.
Just because criminals break laws does not mean no laws should be passed. Just because corruption happens in FDA does not mean FDA is entirely corrupt and we should let everyone sell whatever drugs they can think of into the market.
I mean the general problem is that the word vaccine has been merged with two meanings of "creating something so your immune system gets prepped to prevent disease".
Moderna here create something so your immune system gets prepper but it doesn't prevent it's used to fight.
I mean this word came from cow, you are right, it's time to redefine some of these terms.
This is a bullet you can bite, but it’s inconsistent with your original point: the tetanus and rabies vaccines have long been called vaccines, undermining any claim that we’ve somehow only recently redefined the word “vaccine.”
Edit: to be clear, this kind of argument is only slightly less asinine than arguing that a vaccine isn’t a vaccine unless it comes from a cow’s udder.
>> by definition a vaccine should NOT be a treatment, a vaccine has to be preventative, and further personally I believe...
Hmm, I don't see the basis for this conclusion. This treatment is acting according to the common definition of a vaccine. Whether before or after disease activation is not part of the definition. As far as your personal belief, I understand that you may feel strongly, but I'm sorry to say that doesn't really enter into articulating an accepted scientific definition.
vaccine: any preventive preparation used to stimulate the body’s immune response against a specific disease, ...
Could you be more specific about any particular legal shield? They all have to go through the same phased trials system. I don't see any reason to conclude this is a legal shenanigan. What they have created meets the well-known definition of a vaccine.
I'm not taking a side either, but seeing as drug companies are shielded from liability w/ vaccines, if I was a drug company I would be motivated to lobby broadening the definition. it would just be good business.
Drug companies are only shielded for specific vaccines deemed necessary countermeasures. It isn’t automatic for all vaccines; the COVID vaccines had to be deliberately added to the list via a formal process.
It's also personalized, which to me says that it's unique and each could have different likelihood of autoimmune response.
The vaccine works by instructing the body to make up to 34 “neoantigens.” These
are proteins found only on the cancer cells, and Moderna personalizes the
vaccine for each recipient so that it carries instructions for the neoantigens
on their cancer cells.
You’re both right. It’s preventative, not prophylactic.
We’re strict with the latter because they’re administered to healthy adults. That doesn’t apply here. If you took every coronavirus mRNA vaccine side effect and multiplied the severity and frequency by two orders of magnitude, this vaccine would still be worth it for many with melanoma.
The reason preventative treatments are held to a higher standard is because they are given to a very large number of people who might never get the disease anyway. Hence, a 1 in 1000 risk is significant. If you are treating people who have had cancer, their risk of getting it again in much higher than 1 in 1000.
Right. There's also the fact that the FDA will accept much worse side effects for a cancer treatment than they would for (e.g.) an athlete's foot treatment.
For a bad cancer like some melanomas, just about anything that doesn't kill the patient outright is gonna be on the table.
I think you might be confusing mRNA vaccines with immunological cancer treatments in general, which have been tried in trials for decades and have occasionally caused horrible side effects in some patients.
> the ones for the CV vaccine were listed on many pages of tiny text (both from Pfizer and from Moderna)
The size of the pages side effects were written on says absolutely nothing about what the side effects are or their severity.
> Then there are the long term consequences, many studies keep coming out with surprises (recent buzzword “Ribosomal frameshift”
Ribosomal frameshift is in itself not a “long term consequence.” It is simply that depending on where translational of a piece of mRNA starts, different proteins can be produced. This is an essential part of how our own (or any other organism’s mRNA) is translated into proteins. other proteins present in a cell can regulate which proteins can be produced - again an essential part of how our cells function. This has been known about for decades.
It is one of the main potential areas that could lead to side effects of an mRNA vaccine so understanding what other proteins might be translated and under what circumstances is important.
Please don’t fear monger without any actual evidence to back it.
I think the methylated pseudouridine is actually a tRNA component. Could be wrong. I’m not sure what the 3D structure of the vaccine mRNA is, but it could depart quite a bit from the high-school-biology linear strand portrayal of mRNA.
> other proteins present in a cell can regulate which proteins can be produced - again an essential part of how our cells function
I thought manipulating this was a design goal.
Regardless, I somewhat doubt the simple story presented to the public is 100% accurate.
Appropriate medical treatment to manage immediate allergic reactions must be immediately available in the event an acute anaphylactic reaction occurs following administration of Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine.
Postmarketing data with authorized or approved mRNA COVID-19 vaccines demonstrate increased risks of myocarditis and pericarditis, particularly within the first week following vaccination. For Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine, the observed risk is highest in males 18 years through 24 years of age. Although some cases required intensive care support, available data from short-term follow-up suggest that most individuals have had resolution of symptoms with conservative management. Information is not yet available about potential long-term sequelae.
How did that make it "the right thing to do" for healthy people to take the COVID shots? Given their extremely poor effectiveness against transmission, the odds of the groups in those last two points eventually being infected with SARS-CoV-2 were no different with vaccine uptake at 60% or 90% or 99%. What, then, is accomplished by forcing healthy adolescents (for example) to take these shots?
I lost track of COVID research in the past two years. Can you please provide me some good articles about bad transmission effectiveness? I’ve seen this mentioned many times here, but my search seems contradict to that: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10073587/
Conflicting papers have been published on transmission effectiveness. Everyone believes whatever they want.
“Similarly, researchers in California observed no major differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in terms of SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in the nasopharynx, even in those with proven asymptomatic infection.
Thus, the current evidence suggests that current mandatory vaccination policies might need to be reconsidered, and that vaccination status should not replace mitigation practices such as mask wearing, physical distancing, and contact-tracing investigations, even within highly vaccinated populations.”
I thought that we had some new hard evidence, or revelation. So does this mean we still don’t know, or is there a considerable skew to one side in the statistical meaning, like in the case of eating red meat, or climate change, but as with everything there are contradicting studies?
I like to look at the big numbers when it comes to the effectiveness of measures. To me they tell the story. But that requires a lot of work, so I can’t really recommend diving into it.
None of the studies showing some level of effectiveness against transmission/infection show anything close to what would be necessary to establish herd immunity and thus provide durable protection against eventual infection for those who can't be vaccinated.
> but the ones for the CV vaccine were listed on many pages of tiny text (both from Pfizer and from Moderna).
A whole bunch of OTC drugs carry CYA lists like this, it's not the gotcha you think it is.
> but to me as a healthy 40yo person, with no known immunity issues, not overweight etc.
My father is getting a stent put in for a 70% artery blockage. Older of course but skinny, looks after his health, exercises. He had no symptoms like pain or being out of breath. Just high cholesterol.
A friend of mine in his early 30's healthy nearly got taken out by RSV last year because it aggravated a heart condition he was unaware of.
People aren't as healthy as they like to convince themselves they are.
Yeah you gotta love the people like “COVID is only super dangerous if you have comorbidities!” Yeah dude have you ever walked around and looked at people? Then have you ever talked even to people who outwardly appear healthy?
mRNA will eventually save the day for everyone, including for perfectly healthy individuals, but to me as a healthy 40yo person, with no known immunity issues, not overweight etc. etc. it is in my opinion still too risky to take just like that.
It's an interesting take. From what we know so far, the risk from taking vaccine is much smaller than from covid infection. You might counter this with highlighting the "so far" part, but keep in mind that many studies keep coming out with surprises not only regarding vaccine side effects, but also negative long term effects of covid.
It's not a dichotomy. The vaccine is effectively only for a couple of months so you have to compound the effects of the vaccine PLUS the effects of infection. You also don't know if the effects of the vaccine are cumulative with each new booster.
And that's even assuming it's effective in the first place. The "it reduces symptoms" mantra is gaslighting since the whole point of its accelerated approval and forced application was for the reduction of transmission.
I'll tell that to my colleague that got Covid vaccine induced blood clots, and has been told he will be on blood thinners for life.
While this is anecdotal, the amount of people I know personally that have told me they had significant health issues with a Covid vaccine or covid booster is weird.
Blood clotting in COVID is higher than instances of Vaccine induced clotting, in every measure. For every example like your colleague, there are many more for COVID itself.
Which begs the question, how do they know that it was vaccine induced blood clots and not covid or any other possible cause of blood clots?
Since at the same time mass vaccination rolled out, essentially all lockdowns were lifted and at least speaking for myself, that is when I caught Covid (and got sick in general again, no colds for almost two years was nice).
It would take a specific study isolating people that got the vaccine but never tested positive for COVID, which of course is open to some misreporting (1/3 of COVID cases are asymptomatic and most likely never identified).
Yes. The vaccine trains your immune system to create antibodies used to fight off the disease. Already having those antibodies when the virus appears means that it will not last as long and the symptoms will not be as severe.
Without the vaccine, your body has to create those antibodies while you are already sick, and that takes time. This gives the virus a huge head start.
Plus, the trick that this virus uses to kill is that it kicks off a cytokine storm, which is far more likely if your body is racing the virus to eradicate it than if your immune system is already primed and squashes the virus when its infection volume is small and localized.
We're not just talking the flu-like symptoms here, the most relevant symptoms are "risk of death decreased."
There's a key difference here that cancer mRNA vaccine you are taking after you've been diagnosed with cancer.
Otherwise for Coronavirus vaccines you couldn't argue that risks are much smaller for any given person under any given conditions. E.g. a person could be completely isolated for the next 10 years and have virtually 0% chance of getting Covid-19, so in this case there's no calculation that could show a vaccine being with more favourable benefits/risks.
If there's a 1/10,000 chance of giving you a sore shoulder that would be worse in the calculations if you are for sure to be isolated from being anywhere near the virus.
Otherwise for Coronavirus vaccines you couldn't argue that risks are much smaller for any given person under any given conditions. E.g. a person could be completely isolated for the next 10 years and have virtually 0% chance of getting Covid-19, so in this case there's no calculation that could show a vaccine being with more favourable benefits/risks.
Well yes, in completely absurd and unrealistic situation the risk of taking vaccine might be larger than that of Covid-19.
> Well yes, in completely absurd and unrealistic situation the risk of taking vaccine might be larger than that of Covid-19.
What about a person living in simple solitude who works remotely and orders everything in? This is a realistic, non-absurd scenario and they would possibly risk getting Covid-19 on their way to the appointment of getting the vaccine.
> What about a person living in simple solitude who works remotely and orders everything in? This is a realistic, non-absurd scenario and they would possibly risk getting Covid-19 on their way to the appointment of getting the vaccine.
The biggest whine from anti-vaxers was that they were being told they needed a vaccine to do social things they enjoyed , like air travel or coughing on the elderly.
I don't think you're hypothetical neo-hermit would being doing either of these, so itseems unlikely they'll be "forced" to get a vaccine.
I don’t think anyone would care about such a person opting not to get a vaccine. But this describes, pretty much by definition, a very small portion of a society.
For an individual it is a formula of should_vaccinate = (risk_of_getting_covid_19 * bad_outcomes) - (bad_outcomes_from_vaccines + risk_of_getting_covid_19_after_vaccine * bad_outcomes_of_covid_19_after_vaccine) > 0
On the group level you would have to consider the damage on the group level as well from not getting vaccinated due to increase of covid-19 spread, and increased hospitalisation levels.
On the global communication and messaging level I agree you should tell everyone to vaccinate as you can't easily provide everyone with those calculators. And not to mention people not being able to come up with correct values for those factors themselves.
However, pretty much any real world person doing those calculations and arriving at the conclusion that they're better off not getting the vaccine is engaging in motivated rationalization rather than reasoning. Almost no one is actually living as a hermit, unlikely to ever be exposed to covid. And just about everyone who will be exposed will be safer having had the vaccine, considering all the risks and probabilities you listed.
1. Age. Not all age groups were recommended the vaccine.
2. Last time or where you have had Covid-19 at all.
3. General pattern of activity and the amount of contacts with other people.
4. Last time you have had the vaccine.
E.g. in my country through it's technical systems didn't allow you to get a Covid-19 vaccine when you had the virus within last 6 months. While US recommended the vaccine much shorter period of time after having had Covid-19.
> Almost no one is actually living as a hermit
Also consider that in 2021, there were actually many people living as hermits, including I, as I really didn't want to get the virus. At the time I was terrified of getting it. In 2020-2021, I did live with my partner, but we worked remotely, worked out outside away from other people and we did cardio/gym, but with home made equipment or outside keeping distance to other people.
Not only, psychological consequences, lack of socialization, potentially lack of sun exposure, lack of getting medical checkups or adequate treatment etc.
Along with the health drawbacks of a sedentary lifestyle, unless you're vigilant about getting enough intentional exercise to replace the walking around we do over the course of a typical day outside the house.
That's also a weird assumption. The sedentary part. My dream life is owning large amount of land with a house where I can be completely self sustainable, including various automations and this includes having an in-built gym.
I was talking about risks in general population, those are not zero, in spite of some individuals who post factum may turn out just fine after 10 years of isolation.
No, it's a myth (albeit a popular one) that the human immune system benefits from being "toughened up" by actual pathogens. It's more about calibration by non-pathogens we co-evolved with.
What about the isolated populations, e.g. Sentinelese that are documented to die because they don't have the immune system developed to protect themselves against the viruses rest of the World has?
Although I would agree that 10 years later in your life is unlikely to create an issue.
> The Andaman and Nicobar Islands Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation 1956[9] prohibits travel to the island, and any approach closer than 5 nautical miles (9.3 km), in order to protect the remaining tribal community from "mainland" infectious diseases against which they likely have no acquired immunity. The area is patrolled by the Indian Navy.[10]
A: What behaviors or environments lead to adult immune systems calibrated to minimize autoimmune dysfunctions.
B: Comparing populations that already/ haven't developed inherited countermeasures against certain diseases.
C: (In some cases) Specific pathogens where it is less-damaging to encounter them at different phases of life.
In particular, I'd point out that sometimes a population strong against a particular disease does not necessarily have "better" immune systems... Sometimes it's literally survivorship bias, where all of the vulnerable individuals they used to have already died in tragic ways.
For coronavirus maybe, because it's not much of danger for you in the first place, but those risks would be thousands of times more acceptable for cancer.
There are no side effects observed from mRNA CV vaccines that could be worse when compared to cancers with 1%+ mortality rate.
As a reminder you won't be taking it before the cancer, you would be taking it after the fact.
>those risks would be thousands of times more acceptable for cancer.
This might be true if the treatment was thousands of times more effective than the best available alternative treatment. I don't know enough about this treatment to know if that's the case or not
There are maybe no effects that we know about right now. Different people have different opinions on what their risk tolerance is, so there could be people that may outright disagree with your statement.
And there were even fewer such effects when the vaccines have rolled out back in 2020 with emergency approval, but without being used “in production” beforehand.
Now we know much more about the mRNA platform, but I still can’t exclude the possibility entirely for me. So I will take my chances and focus much more on quality of food, on staying fit, reducing stress etc. etc.
You should do the healthy things to avoid cancer in the first place, but once you are diagnosed with a cancer with high mortality rate, it's a whole different calculation in terms of risks vs benefits compared to Covid-19.
There's multiple vaccines that can also work after you've been exposed to a pathogen. In many such cases risks vs benefits will change by the event.
For example rabies vaccines is not given to everyone, however after you get rabies you will be given that vaccine.
Vaccine in this case is a less harmful training tool to prepare you for the more harmful pathogen that may still be reaching its peak strength.
You can think of vaccines as a training tool. In some cases it might provide you with a response that can completely throw the pathogen out, in other cases it will just be able to fight it better.
>For example rabies vaccines is not given to everyone
If you could spread something as bad as rabies by sneezing. You would see actual mandatory vaccinations, not the mild nudge people have been complaining about the last three years.
But they are all very general and very vague.
Eat right.
Exercise.
Avoiding smoking and alcohol, unless it's red wine.
Be wealthy
Drink Coffee.
Sorry just when I see people suggesting healthy lifestyle under this and other articles for things like heart disease mRNA treatments, it generally betrays that they view being sick as a personal failing.
Get ready to see vaccines be used to prevent and cure conditions you that you probably think are outside the scope of what vaccines can address.
Projecting further into the future, the world is going to be divided into those with access to and willingness to use biotechnology and those who don’t. Note that I am including things like fitness and health tracking apps under the umbrella of biotech.
I have to disagree with this, clearly visible under my profile. In general I try to stay clear of any vaccine debates, in general because of being labeled in certain ways I don’t identify myself with at all.
Where, exactly, are the long term consequences of mRNA vaccination for SARS-CoV-2? Compared with, say, actually developing COVID? (Please note I’m not arguing that receiving a COVID mRNA vaccine is entirely risk free, however on a risk weighted basis receiving a COVID vaccine is much safer than having COVID)
To me the biggest risk is still the unknown, as in not enough experience. They have never been used “in production” until 2020.
I saved this post as a favorite and set up a reminder in 2 years and in 5 years about it. Hope there will be nothing to add, and we just got ourselves a mighty vaccines platform at zero long term consequences.
If this turns out to work as promised, in a idealistic universe, Moderna gets a big influx of money from all countries in the world and they immediately publish details and surrender any patent allowing the treatment to be produced worldwide and be affordable for everyone.
It's not a general vaccine , but a tailored one aimed at people being treated for cancers that have a high risk of it coming back. So it's not something that can just be handed out to everyone.
I agree though if a general vaccine is created.
I'm really looking forward to a future where this and heart disease or just merely annoying.
The vaccine works by instructing the body to make up to 34 “neoantigens.” These
are proteins found only on the cancer cells, and Moderna personalizes the
vaccine for each recipient so that it carries instructions for the neoantigens
on their cancer cells.
And let me guess - there's a massive lobbying effort to be able to patent each of these neoantigens, if they're not already getting patents approved for them?
I'm not sure that patent is worth much to be honest. The general approach has been known and published in research circles for the better part of a decade before the patent was filed, and actually training a machine learning system in that way that gives usable predictions is still an open problem afaik.
Free market would automatically cause a big influx of money.
A "big influx of money from all countries in the world" - if from governments themselves and not individual citizens buying - would in fact be a proof point against its claimed effectiveness, if forcing the otherwise free market (via easily-commonly captured political-government-institutional channels) is what's required to drive funding towards it, e.g. regulatory capture to provide profits when they may not actually be deserved-warranted - say by trying to get approval for a fraudulently approved product, e.g. "... the 26 pharmaceutical companies paid some $33 billion in fines during the 13-year period. The top 11 alone accounted for $28.8 billion" - https://www.pharmaceuticalprocessingworld.com/gsk-pfizer-and...
And arguably this is just the tip of the iceberg and the industry hasn't been held accountable for most of their fraud since the industrial complex formed.
This isn't just a problem with the pharmaceutical industry but with clearly corrupt-captured regulators like the FDA - who allowed this fraud to happen to begin with, missing or not checking into whatever lies were presented for the fraud to occur and the products to make it to market.
And that's why headlines like "Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than expected" should be taken with extreme skepticism.
The current status quo system, sure, but it's passion of scientists, researchers, biologists who inevitably make discoveries - it's the industrial complex and those wanting to control, mainly for profits sake, that has changed the way it worked and solutions were found early on.
We don’t know how valuable this tech is. It could be worth trillions. It could be niche. Risk sharing, not cost, is the currency of deal making.
> immediately publish details and surrender any patent
mRNA vaccine production methods are tough, e.g. Moderna’s encapsulation technology. Add to that the personalisation required for these treatments, and we’re still far from economies of scale.
IMO they resulted in massive reductions of death across the world. In a world where pharma companies needed to surrender their IP if it was too useful, Moderna wouldn't have gotten funded to pioneer this new and difficult technology, and mRNA vaccines simply wouldn't exist.
Having publicly-funded research doesn't mean you can ignore profit either — the public funding for mRNA was that the initial research was done at UPenn, which receives NIH grants. But large research universities don't exist on public funding alone — they license the patents they hold to companies to develop them, which is a huge part of their revenue. For the mRNA royalties alone, in 2022 UPenn received over $750 million, which exceeded the total of all of UPenn's NIH grants for that year combined. Even in smaller-revenue years like 2020, public funding represents significantly less than half of UPenn's revenue sources. Take away UPenn's ability to monetize their research, and their ability to fund the fundamental research goes down too.
In my view the default isn't that diseases cure themselves. The default is people die. If pushing forward the state of the art of vaccine tech didn't need money in order to be built, what was stopping anyone else from doing it? And if it does need money, well... Then it needs to be well-funded, meaning it needs to show the potential for profit. I don't think charity has proven an excellent model for funding advanced scientific development of this kind.
A long wall of obfuscation and pharmaceutical industry apologetics that can be trivially dismissed by simply pointing at myriad other vaccines that were also publicly-funded, are not constrained by IP, and saved millions of lives.
Your last point is also hysterical because yes, the research needs massive investment, the state provides it, and then allows private companies to run off with it and charge them again for the very thing they made possible in the first place. It’s about as insane and corrupt as could ever be imagined.
I’ll also highlight that Cuba developed a highly effective COVID vaccine as a poor country, under extreme sanctions, and shared hundreds of millions of doses to other poor countries, which further demonstrates what you claim to be untrue.
Using existing vaccine tech isn't the same as developing entirely new technology, which mRNA is and Cuba's vaccine isn't. And the tech Cuba used was developed by pharma companies first, too — protein subunit vaccines are well established, used for hepatitis B, tetanus, and others.
And if existing tech works well enough — great! Then use it, and don't use the more expensive mRNA ones.
Of course, there are benefits to mRNA vaccines, which is why they were deployed first — Moderna had a working vaccine barely over a month after starting work on it, with only the gene sequence of the virus from Chinese labs to work with. All the rest of the time was just testing. Effectively being able to print a vaccine given a gene sequence is extremely useful.
And again — the state (aka the United States) does not fully fund research. It provides less than half of funding in a non-banner year, and a fraction in boom years. Cutting funding not only would hurt deployment and development, it would also harm fundamental research.
I never argued that they should cut funding, but should reap the benefit of their investment and not allow private companies to run roughshod over them at the expense of global public health. I have no idea why I’m on a VC-backed website explaining the concept of ROI, surrounded by special pleading about how the initial investor (the state) isn’t owed anything in return.
> Your last point is also hysterical because yes, the research needs massive investment, the state provides it, and then allows private companies to run off with it
A research is only the beginning. It usually takes many years and lot of investment to bring a drug to the market. There is also high risk that none of the investment will be recouped. That’s the role that private companies can do well. They don’t just “run off with it”.
ASML, for example, benefits heavily from EUV research done in the US with public fund. Yet you can’t say they ran off with it. They invested heavily, and it took them many years to perfect the technology.
Almost all of them are still long way to go before becoming commercial products, if at all. Does it look like they run off with it as you asserted? Or do they have to shoulder the development cost and risk?
One of the drugs is of course their COVID vaccine which is a home run. It’s the potential of such windfall that makes them willing to bet on all of the other drugs in the pipeline.
You cited Cuba’s COVID vaccine. How many other drugs do they have in pipeline? Right, not so many compared to all of the drugs developed by private money. Ask yourself, with regard to their COVID vaccine, how extensive was the testing? can they scale the production? how widely can they distribute the vaccine?
Cuba has a fairly large biomedical sector and export industry, despite being under crushing sanctions. It’s absurd to ask about the scale of their development relative to private industry in the US because it’s impossible for them to even gain access to the same raw materials. But that’s also entirely beside the point because the discussion was about whether we need to allow Moderna to rake in billions off public investment in basic research and IP rentiering in order to make COVID vaccines possible. The example of the Cuban vaccine disproves this, but all the pharma apologists of course prefer to talk circles around this point instead of addressing it.
> were invented with publicly-funded research that they’ve now privatized, resulting in large death tolls from vaccine inequity in poor countries
This is an odd complaint for this circumstance.
Those poor countries didn’t materially fund these vaccines’ development. And production was fundamentally constrained; nations entered into bidding wars to secure them. In the end, geopolitics dictated which vaccines—if any—poor people got. Covid vaccines were distributed through non-market channels.
It’s not at all odd because we learned the disastrous, widespread international consequences, of privatization of HIV/AIDS treatments in the 90s and 2000s. Treatments were developed with publicly-funded research in rich western countries, hoarded for profit at the cost of mass death in the developing world, which led to increased severity of the disease from unchecked spread, which then spread back into the countries that hoarded them. There is nothing more fundamentally stupid than trying to manage global pandemics with nationalism and IP restrictions in a world with interconnected economies and constant international travel.
We saw the same in case with covid too. But, ..., the main issue is that those poor countries have increased their population by many orders of magnitude and this makes large scale support incredibly hard. Imagine if African population was still around 200 million people as it was in 50s instead on 1.5 billion it is today.
From what they said it doesn't actually need to be individually produced. Rather, there are 34 possible targets, which ones are actually used depends on the patient's cancer. You aim at the targets which the tumor expresses, the others would simply cause side effects for no gain.
Thus, instead of custom manufacture your distribution system is 34 separate compounds, the patient receives whatever combination would be best for their tumor. Probably not viable at the ordinary pharmacy level, but viable at the cancer center level or a compounding pharmacy.
We have seen how that went during covid, so dont i wouldn't hold your breath on it. The only hope is competition from China and others initiating a race to the bottom.
It wasn't free, just paid by the government means tax money means money that's now missing for other things in countries like Germany because they still are fixated on the 60% debt ceiling based on an Excel error.
I mean the person i was responding to said "Moderna gets a big influx of money from all countries in the world" - i assume that cash would come from tax revenue. Money doesn't just magically appear.
Vaccines are not intended to prevent people from getting the disease. Their purpose is to make the body defeat the disease faster while taking less damage.
No vaccine in existence actually prevents infection. Rather, it primes the immune system so the battle is typically a total rout, the invader losing very quickly and the patient never noticing. That's what they got against Covid/Wuhan and the world actually did achieve herd immunity--against Covid/Wuhan. (The Wuhan strain has been extinct for some time.)
Unfortunately, it turned out to mutate quite rapidly (like the flu) and soon the battles weren't always a rout. It still reduces severity, though, and thus is still used.
> the invader losing very quickly and the patient never noticing.
That's called preventing Covid. Covid is the disease, not simply an infection.
The problem is that the vast majority of people who got the vaccine did in fact notice very well they've had Covid.
> That's what they got against Covid/Wuhan and the world actually did achieve herd immunity--against Covid/Wuhan. (The Wuhan strain has been extinct for some time.)
The Wuhan strain wasn't that relevant even before the vaccines were widely available.
> Unfortunately, it turned out to mutate quite rapidly (like the flu) and soon the battles weren't always a rout.
Which was predicted and expected all along.
> It still reduces severity, though, and thus is still used.
Only if you take really awful studies seriously.
Nobody bothered to test this hypothesis in a proper trial.
We knew it would eventually mutate and reduce the effectiveness of the vaccine. The vaccine remained effective in the time it was developed and for a while afterwards.
And, yes, nobody has tested the severity reduction in a proper trial. It would be expensive, difficult and serve little purpose. What we can observe is that given matched populations the unvaccinated die at a considerably higher rate than the vaccinated. Beware of some bogus "studies" to the opposite--which didn't use matched populations. Those at higher risk are more likely to be vaccinated and a vaccinated high risk individual can easily still be more likely to die than an unvaccinated low risk individual.
> And, yes, nobody has tested the severity reduction in a proper trial. It would be expensive, difficult and serve little purpose.
No purpose except for actually knowing whether it actually reduces severity.
> What we can observe is that given matched populations the unvaccinated die at a considerably higher rate than the vaccinated. Beware of some bogus "studies" to the opposite--which didn't use matched populations. Those at higher risk are more likely to be vaccinated and a vaccinated high risk individual can easily still be more likely to die than an unvaccinated low risk individual.
The sad reality is that you can't do matched population without a randomized controlled trial. You can't control for confounders you don't understand.
A recent hillarious example is the well-publicized paper that showed a drop of over 90% in Covid-related mortality after the first booster. Other researchers managed to obtain the data and it turned out there was also a similar drop in non Covid related morality. This resulted in the following correspondece, which is well worth reading:
A choice quote from the authors of the original paper:
> During the B.1.617.2 (delta) wave in the United States, similar associations were observed between the use of mRNA vaccines and lower mortality not related to Covid-191 and mortality from any cause.
They mean that many of the studies showing a drop in Covid mortality after the mRNA vaccines, also showed a similar drops in non-Covid related mortality. In other words, the vaccinated population were healthier at the outset and the drop was bogus.
You need a proper clinical trial here to make this claim, as the observational data is ridiculously confounded.
What is wrong in funding everyone's health through taxes? I paid a lot of them for years, although living a quite healthy life, then one day everything changed, and in just a couple years I had to get covid vaccines, a vertebral stabilization after an accident, then two stents after a heart attack. All for free. So far, my healthcare taxes have been the best possible investment.
"No you can't just fight cancer this way, that's cheating, drink this completely natural juice made from pulped fruits and vegetables that have been growing separately for 80 million years."
Should this really be called a “vaccine”? I feel like that is going to give people the wrong impression about what it does. I think labelling it gene therapy, immune therapy, or something like that would be closer to what it actually does.
Also really interested to see if people will need and/or benefit from periodic re-treatment. I guess they can figure that part out if it makes it to market.
Yes the word 'vaccine' seems misleading to me as well, as people tend to think of vaccinations as ways to prevent contagious illness. I think immune therapy is a much better term.
Yes this should really be called a vaccine. A vaccine is a preparation that stimulates the body's immune response against diseases. For example, a specific vaccine injection (such as a flu shot) can boost the body's own immune system to help protect against a specific disease (such as the year's flu variant).
All previous vaccines were aimed at preventing infectious diseases. None of them are (primarily) indicated for preventing recurrence of a non-infectious disease. Whether it meets the technical definition or not, we can probably agree this is fundamentally different to all other vaccines.
Also, since no other vaccines are custom to each patient, using the term “vaccine” could cause confusion. Do we really want to give people the idea that they can be “vaccinated against melanoma” when the reality is that they can receive a treatment to prevent their specific melanoma, which they have to have already had, from recurring? It seems laden with confusion. Personally, I’ll just call it immunotherapy.
> All previous vaccines were aimed at preventing infectious diseases.
This is a common misconception, and that's whythe U.S. CDC is now emphasizing that vaccines can do more to help people.
The most important recent example is the world's widespread rollout of COVID vaccines. These are primarily aimed at better protection against severe illness, hospitalization, and death; these are not primarily aimed at preventing an individual from ever being infected by any COVID variant.
No, covid vaccines were not kind of crappy, just the virus itself evolved so rapidly that the virus had evolved enough even before complete rollout of the vaccines. Yet even then the boosted vaccination was highly effective against the delta variant and still effective against omicron on the level par with flu vaccines. Omicron was just infectious on the level of measles and with very short incubation period giving the immune system very little time to ramp up the immune response.
I'd argue that a vaccine that allowed the virus to evolve rapidly out of it because it's only targeting on small section of the virus is pretty crappy by definition.
Don't get me wrong, it saved a lot of lives. Compared to every other vaccine we've all taken in our lives it's the absolute bottom of the barrel, and the fact that politically (and possibly for public health reasons) a good portion of politicians effectively lied about that made it so companies didn't feel like they should invest in making a better vaccine. I've had Covid twice and both times I was very sick - I'd love a better, more broad, vaccine.
I'd argue it's definitely not as effective as flu vaccines vs omicron. On a good year the flu vaccine can prevent 50% of flu cases in those that take it. Everyone I know has gotten Covid, vaccinated or not.
Do you have any studies to share that confirm this claim? As far I am aware the new variants evolved from regions that were not highly vaccinated like South Africa.
Omicron was considerably more virulent than flu - the risk of getting an infection is also a function of prevalence.
But I don't think we'll get any better vaccine soon the medical community appears to be too stubborn for this to happen.
I'm not arguing that vaccines can't or shouldn't be much better. Just that they actually were considerably good if we take everything we should into account.
Sure, another example is the flu vaccine as you mention. The primary aim of the flu vaccine in the U.S. medical system is to protect high-risk people from life-threatening symptoms, even during infections from different strains.
Another example is the shingles vaccine. The primary aim is to prevent severe symptoms (such as neural damage and long term pain) during a reactivation of an existing chronic infection.
> It’s insane we’re changing the definition of words
The semantic meaning of the word vaccine hasn't changed. All that's changed is the U.S. CDC official definition text, to clarify that the primary aim of vaccines is to activate the body's immune system, rather than solely to prevent a new specific infection.
If you're curious about the language exactness, beyond the U.S. CDC, the U.S. FDA is also involved. For example, the U.S. FDA during COVID stated that a vaccine would need to be at least 50% effective for diminishing the severity of COVID-19 symptoms to obtain regulatory and marketing approval. In other words, the primary aim was to help people reduce damage; the primary aim was not to full-stop prevent infection.
The idea that marketed vaccines are safe & effective has been well marketed and deeply planted in the minds of the public. It's easier to leverage that familiarity than it is to build awareness and trust for "immunotherapy".
Down voted by those who don't understand marketing, human behavior, read the Heath Brother's "Made to Stick", etc.? Love you HN but you're jumping the shark.
Well, they could at least always say something like “…vaccine, but not like you are thinking. You, like billions of other people, have a misguided and frankly incomplete understanding of the word. …”
>In 1986, a meeting at the Institute Of Medicine defined gene therapy as the addition or replacement of a gene in a targeted cell type. In the same year, the FDA announced that it had jurisdiction over approving "gene therapy" without defining the term. The FDA added a very broad definition in 1993 of any treatment that would ‘modify or manipulate the expression of genetic material or to alter the biological properties of living cells’. In 2018 this was narrowed to ‘products that mediate their effects by transcription or translation of transferred genetic material or by specifically altering host (human) genetic sequences’
mRNA vaccines don't alter the host genome, hence not gene therapy. You could use a broader definition I suppose since (ideally) they lead to the production of certain immune cells; and that would also include all other vaccines.
mRNA vaccines are a gene therapy, and a gene therapy does not mean "must irreversibly change the genome".
Take for instance Moderna's own SEC filing discussing mRNA [1], which summarised the regulatory situation:
"Currently, mRNA is considered a gene therapy product by the FDA. Unlike certain gene therapies that irreversibly alter cell DNA and could act as a source of side effects, mRNA-based medicines are designed to not irreversibly change cell DNA; however, side effects observed in gene therapy could negatively impact the perception of mRNA medicines despite the differences in mechanism.
In addition, because no product in which mRNA is the primary active ingredient has been approved, the regulatory pathway for approval is uncertain. The number and design of the clinical trials and preclinical studies required for the approval of these types of medicines have not been established, may be different from those required for gene therapy products, or may require safety testing like gene therapy products. Moreover, the length of time necessary to complete clinical trials and to submit an application for marketing approval for a final decision by a regulatory authority varies significantly from one pharmaceutical product to the next, and may be difficult to predict."
The industry itself was quite open about mRNA being a gene therapy [2].
At some point there were clearly industry and marketing concerns, and we saw a sharp u-turn into asserting they were vaccines, and additionally that any claim they were gene therapies was the mark of an ignorant rube.
On the marketing front: probably a concern that uninformed memes formed around the "changes your DNA" fears, which at the time were unfounded.
On the regulatory front: I seem to recall some potentially more rigorous regulatory approval if they were considered gene therapies instead of vaccines.
It seems rather clear: they are a gene therapy, and because that adds uncertainty in terms of the regulatory pathways, and consumer acceptance, commercial interests worked hard to recategorise them as a more palatable 'vaccine'.
That the term 'gene therapy' is being redefined to exclude mRNA seems an exercise in commerce rather than science, given the history available to anyone who cares to look.
Your first link shows is about the FDAs legal definition, and I don't know what the second link is supposed to mean, other than somebody somewhere called it a gene therapy.
I have no commercial interest in any of this, and my opinion is that any definition of "gene therapy" which includes mRNA vaccines is overly broad. "Change the host genome" is clearly what the average person things when they hear "gene therapy", and legal definitions should match that.
But it doesn't. There's no transcribing going on. mRNA is the *result* of transcribing from DNA. The genes aren't touched.
In normal operation the genes are the master blueprints from which work orders (in the form of mRNA) are generated. The cells use that mRNA to build the requested proteins. The mRNA vaccines are bogus work orders slipped into the production queue and they go nowhere near the DNA.
I could see how someone could twist that to "gene therapy" but it's certainly not how I learned biology. Genes are the master copy from which working copies are made for production purposes.
It primes the immune system to be vigilant for certain patterns. That's a vaccine. It is not altering genes, it's not gene therapy. It is not otherwise boosting the immune system, it's not immune therapy.
The fact that it's target isn't realistically transmissible has no bearing on it's nature. We don't give people rabies vaccine to people to keep them from spreading it, either. In humans the R0 for rabies is exceedingly close to zero in any society that understands what rabies is.
Ridiculing people who are worried about long term effects of something that has been in use for only a few years is such an HN thing.
There's countless precedent for things once touted as being safe to turn out incredibly damaging. We just don't know the long term effect yet. Please spare me with the "but there's no mechanism for it to do harm!!!!!" the same was said for all the other drugs that ended up causing cancer or malformed babies and were only pulled from the market after decades of "nutjobs" being dismissed for suggesting a link.
The vaccines that people are getting ridiculed about have been administered to more than 5 billion people. If there were any such extremely damaging long term effects, we would have seen some already.
I think most people understand that the physical processes that would result in long term complications would show signs earlier in some individuals and later in others.
It makes women not so scared of sex, thus making them more likely to end up in the infernal regions. Never mind it if it took them longer to reach their final resting place.
It’s been tested for decades. The issue is protein-based platforms deliver the protein outside the cell. This means most do not get processed and presented by MHC-1 and 2 the way a genetically encoded therapeutic does. The issue with DNA is it separates the innate immune activation signal (eg cGAS and TLRs) from the presentation so you don’t get co-signaling. This may be the ticket why mRNA could work…
Our body has been using mRNA for at least hundreds of millions of years if not billions. (I'm not going to bother to look up how far back it goes.) We have DNA to mRNA proteins, we do not have mRNA to DNA proteins.
Why should our body suddenly start doing something that has never happened? The mRNA vaccines are simply slipping some bogus production orders into the job queue, they go nowhere near the master blueprints. There are various forces that would like you to believe otherwise. Mostly originating in Beijing and Moscow.
You’re aware that mRNA is a fundamental part of DNA based life biology, so there are lots of long term issues, by design of biology. Just probably not the ones you’re thinking of.
I would note there’s billions upon billions upon billions invested in developing cancer treatments across hundreds if not thousands of research labs, not just Moderna. This isn’t an all eggs in one basket thing.
The reason they got immunity is that the percentage of claims about vaccines that are valid are minuscule. Juries don't do well when faced with an obviously harmed "victim" and a "bad guy" with deep pockets. They see the suffering victim and no evidence to prove yes or no on whether the "bad guy" inflicted the harm and tend to side with the victim.
The only way the vaccine industry can survive in such a legal climate is to get the claims reviewed by medical people rather than juries. Lawyers hate it because they can't woo the jury with the plight of the victim.
Society would work a lot better if more systems worked this way. Locally the lawyers utterly hated the system where to bring a malpractice case you had to go before a board of three lawyers and three doctors first. While you could then go to trial with less than 4 votes from that board your chances were minimal when the jury heard what the board said. Effectively that meant you had to convince one of three doctors your claim was sound--if you can't do that why do you think you have a case?
mRNA can be used as indirect vaccine, by manipulating cellular factories to produce a foreign object that draws the attention of the immune system.
There is no known pathway of persistence in this mechanism, and there is good reason to believe such a mechanism cannot exist as it would be a highly versatile attack vector and viruses would have evolved to be much more virulent by using it. Retroviruses do complex work to infiltrate the DNA repository of a cell, if all it took is to drop some mRNA it would have been exploited and 'patched' a billion years ago.
And if some of that mRNA happens to land in cells that don't readily get replaced, like heart muscle, what happens next?
>There is no known pathway of persistence in this mechanism
No known, and published in a paper, pathway. Engineering is about using things in practice we don't yet understand. They didn't know why suspension bridges kept falling down, so they just used a "safety factor" to decide how much to over-build a structure vs its theoretical capacity.
We have no idea what the long term consequences are of this gene treatment. It's not possible to have 10 year or more data on something just cooked up in the past 3 years.
