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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the super-flu-ent-in-vaccines dept.

Two separate U.S. teams have reportedly made progress on creating a universal influenza vaccine, according to the BBC:

Researchers say they are closer to developing a vaccine to give life-long protection against any type of flu, after promising trials in animals. Two separate US teams have found success with an approach that homes in on a stable part of the flu virus. That should remove the problem with current flu vaccines which must be given anew each year because they focus on the mutating part of the virus.

The proof-of-concept work is published in Science journal and Nature Medicine [both paywalled]. Studies are now needed in humans to confirm that the method will work in man.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:57AM (#227517)

    You know it. Didn't get your flu shot? Well sure, that's your choice, but look here, your drivers license just got revoked, and Social Security has been informed that you are no longer allowed to work, and your house has been seized under eminent domain. Keep paying those taxes, though.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by pe1rxq on Tuesday August 25 2015, @11:55AM

    by pe1rxq (844) on Tuesday August 25 2015, @11:55AM (#227533) Homepage

    No they won't, but I wouldn't mind if those without would be banned from entering public places where they can put others (those without a choice) at risk.
    Like working at a hospital or elderly home, or visiting those places (not as a patient).

    • (Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Tuesday August 25 2015, @12:08PM

      by curunir_wolf (4772) on Tuesday August 25 2015, @12:08PM (#227536)
      I'd rather ban people from public places if they are obese or hygienically offensive than their willingness to be injected by the incredibly untrustworthy pharmaceutical industry.
      --
      I am a crackpot
      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by gidds on Tuesday August 25 2015, @01:37PM

        by gidds (589) on Tuesday August 25 2015, @01:37PM (#227577)

        There's a huge range of strong evidence for the benefits of many vaccinations.  (And no credible evidence against them, despite what people like now-discredited Andrew Wakefield [wikipedia.org] used to claim.)

        Or don't you think it's possible to hate the (admittedly highly-dodgy and in need of change [alltrials.net]) pharmaceutical industry without unreservedly hating anything connected with it?  Do you avoid aspirin for the same reason?

        If a universal flu vaccine is discovered, and there's reasonable evidence of its safety, then why shouldn't vaccination be mandatory?  After all, none of us here died from smallpox or polio, and that's in a large part due to previous generations being vaccinated.  Flu isn't as bad as those diseases, but it still kills a quarter to half a million people each year (and occasionally many, many more).  Being vaccinated benefits ourselves, but it also benefits all of humanity for many generations to come.

        --
        [sig redacted]
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @02:13PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @02:13PM (#227596)

          The medical research community has shown no indication they are capable of assessing the evidence for anything. The method of disproving a null hypothesis cannot provide any support for an explanation like "vaccine works". In fact what has been created is something like occult mystery school knowledge where the same information has two totally different interpretations that sometimes agree. The real logic goes something like: A big effect size is unlikely to be due to a messed up experiment or unthought-of factors. This is often reasonable if an experiment is properly run, but be sure it has nothing to do with statisitical significance. That part is just there to confuse the uninitiated, which is apparently most medical researchers.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @02:46PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @02:46PM (#227612)

            There are no more smallpox infections and rabies, a nearly 100% fatal disease, is successfully treated with a vaccine. Those are two obvious examples that vaccines work.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @03:09PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @03:09PM (#227622)

              I'm not sure it maks sense to talk about vaccines as some monolithic entity. There is no contradiction if vaccine A being 100% effective, safe, and cheap, while vaccine B is an expensive death injection that does not even offer any protection.

              • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @03:50PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @03:50PM (#227644)

                Vaccination is a successful strategy to prevent disease and mechanism of protection is understood so well that they can be rationally designed. Any medical treatment has variability in the way that it is administered and its effect on diverse groups of people with various statuses of health or history.

                People should be smart enough to understand that "vaccines work" does not mean "every single vaccine, from the dawn of time, has always worked with 100% efficiency and with absolutely no side effects".

                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @04:35PM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @04:35PM (#227664)

                  Vaccination is a successful strategy to prevent disease and mechanism of protection is understood so well that they can be rationally designed

                  I don't think there has ever been a rationally designed vaccine shown to be successful, which ones? Noone even knows where the smallpox one came from, the usual measles one was taken from a sick child and then modified in unknown ways in cell culture...

                  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @05:51PM

                    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @05:51PM (#227699)

                    Did you read TFA?

                    If you mean in use, then there is the recombinant canarypox vaccine for rabies. Subunit vaccines, such as HBV and HPV, are used to generate antigens that will produce neutralizing antibodies. Seasonal influenza vaccines are specifically recombined with high-yielding egg strains to maximize production while preserving HA neutralization. A VZV-vectored ebolavirus vaccine is in trials now and has demonstrated efficacy.

                    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @07:46PM

                      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @07:46PM (#227758)

                      You think these flu vaccines have been shown successful? That is extremely low standards, using your standards we should believe in all sorts of paranormal crap. Make it easier for me by linking the exact papers you are referring to for one of the other cases. I do not believe any of those has really been tested, but could be wrong.

                      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:05PM

                        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:05PM (#227814)

                        Why would you not believe that the currently used HBV and HPV subunit vaccines have been tested?

                        "2012 meta analysis found that flu shots were efficacious 67 percent of the time"
                        Not exactly paranormal.

                        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_vaccine#Medical_uses [wikipedia.org]

                        Ebola vaccine link:
                        http://www.thelancet.com/pb/assets/raw/Lancet/pdfs/S0140673615611175.pdf [thelancet.com]

                        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:16PM

                          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:16PM (#227817)

                          A quick glance at the ebola vaccine paper brings up some oddities:

                          All vaccinated individuals assigned to immediate vaccination versus all eligible individuals assigned to delayed vaccination (primary analysis).

                          So what we are seeing in figure 3A is *eligible* people in the delayed vaccination group vs *vaccinated* in the immediate vaccination group. Now look down at figure 3C which is eligible vs eligible. Why are there no cases even amongst the unvaccinated people assigned to the "immediate" group? We are talking about 1000 people here, when they were seeing infection rates of 0.5-1%, there was something else different about these two groups of people.

                          The other problem is that figure 2 shows 446 confirmed cases, of which 5 were later excluded because the tests were later negative. That means there can be up to 1% rate of error in diagnosis. This is of the same order of magnitude as the infection rate they observed, yet they do not take this source of error into account at all.

                          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:33PM

                            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:33PM (#227823)

                            The nesting with two ACs is getting ridiculous, but there was an error in something I wrote:

                            Why are there no cases even amongst the unvaccinated people assigned to the "immediate" group?

                            https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=9169&cid=227817#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]

                            That refers to after day 19. There are no more cases even amongst the 1000 unvaccinated people in the "immediate vaccination" group after day 19, while diagnoses continued in the case of the "delayed vaccination" group.

                        • (Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:43PM

                          by curunir_wolf (4772) on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:43PM (#227828)
                          Efficacy only measures whether a human body reacts to the vaccine, not whether it actually prevents disease. The Effectiveness of the flu vaccine is somewhere between 12 and 18%, according to most meta-analysis over large populations for many years.
                          --
                          I am a crackpot
                    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @09:54PM

                      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @09:54PM (#227808)

                      Wow, just like for Zmapp these immunology researchers decided that blinding was unimportant:

                      Animal groups were not blinded to the investigators.

                      http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nm.3927.html [nature.com]

                      WTF is going on in that area of research that they don't meet the standards of 8th grade science fairs?

                      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:08PM

                        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:08PM (#227815)

                        Do you think the scientists told the B cells of the mice to make broadly reactive antibodies?

                        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:21PM

                          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:21PM (#227819)

                          Do you think the scientists told the B cells of the mice to make broadly reactive antibodies?

                          No, they subjectively decide when the animals are killed:

                          Clinical signs of infection, weight and temperatures were recorded twice daily for ferrets. Activity scores were assigned as follows: 0, alert and playful; 1, alert but playful only when stimulated; 2, alert, but not playful when stimulated; and 3, neither alert nor playful when stimulated. Ferrets that showed signs of severe disease (prolonged fever, diarrhea; nasal discharge interfering with eating, drinking or breathing; severe lethargy; or neurological signs) or that had >20% weight loss were euthanized immediately.

                          http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nm.3927.html [nature.com]

                          You are going to snarkily argue in favor of not blinding the people who determine your primary endpoint? Also afaict the Science paper does not claim blinding either way, so it is possible they have the same problem. Medical research practices need to be cleaned up. Big Time.

        • (Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:37PM

          by curunir_wolf (4772) on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:37PM (#227826)
          Actually, there is very little evidence of the efficacy of the smallpox vaccine. If you study the history of the disease and the epidemics that occurred both before and after compulsory vaccination, there's not really any correlation. The prevalence of smallpox decrease over time pretty much independent of vaccination efforts.
          --
          I am a crackpot
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @11:20PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @11:20PM (#227848)

            Interesting, do you have a link to this data?

      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @02:46PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @02:46PM (#227611)

        An universal flu vaccine that gives lifelong protection would almost certainly not be fake. I mean, if you provide fake vaccinations to earn easy money, which one would make you more money: A yearly vaccination as we have now, or a one-time vaccination that protects you for the rest of your life?

        I'd be more inclined to believe a conspiracy if that vaccine were found not to work in humans, and we continue to have our yearly flu vaccination.