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Progress Reported on Universal Flu Vaccines

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

takyon writes:

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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Original Submission

• Re: Flu shots will become mandatory Re: Flu shots will become mandatory (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]

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• Re: Flu shots will become mandatory Re: Flu shots will become mandatory (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.

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  • Re: Flu shots will become mandatory (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.

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• Re: Flu shots will become mandatory (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

  Parent