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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Despite push for a universal flu vaccine, the 'holy grail' stays out of reach
It is the holy grail of influenza science: a universal flu vaccine that could provide protection against virtually all strains instead of a select few. A burst of recent headlines have suggested that we might get one soon. Just last week, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases released a strategic plan for the development of a universal flu vaccine, prompting the White House science office to proclaim on Twitter that the goal is "closer than ever."
Experts, however, say we're really not there yet. And to be honest, we can't necessarily even see there from here. "I don't think we're that close at all," Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy. "I think the kind of work that's gone on has been critical and important, but it's only the first 5 feet of what would need to be a 100-foot rope."
There's no doubt that there is some momentum. The release of the strategic plan — which outlines for scientists the research that NIAID sees as critical and that it would be willing to help finance — signals renewed interest in the quest for a universal vaccine. So, too, does a bill — introduced by Sen. Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts — calling for $1 billion in government spending for the project.
Previously: Progress Reported on Universal Flu Vaccines
Related: Susceptibility to a Flu Determined by Your Very First Virus Encounter
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:57AM
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
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
I am a crackpot
(Score: 4, Insightful) by gidds on Tuesday August 25 2015, @01:37PM
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
A quick glance at the ebola vaccine paper brings up some oddities:
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
The nesting with two ACs is getting ridiculous, but there was an error in something I wrote:
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
I am a crackpot
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @09:54PM
Wow, just like for Zmapp these immunology researchers decided that blinding was unimportant:
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
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
No, they subjectively decide when the animals are killed:
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
I am a crackpot
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @11:20PM
Interesting, do you have a link to this data?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @02:46PM
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.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday August 25 2015, @12:09PM
The flu barely seems to survive as it is. I never get a shot and I only get the flu like once a decade and most folks I know don't catch it either. So if even half the population became totally immune, its already pitiful ability to spread might completely wipe it out. Some farmer in China catches it from carnal relations with a pig or however it crosses the species barrier, then it tries to spread to his wife and then to the rest of the world ... and whoops she is one of the half or whatever who are immune so nobody but Farmer Pig Lover suffers from the flu.
Now something like a simple cold, where average dude gets a couple per year, that is not going to be wiped out because its so virulent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @12:38PM
Just because you haven't met many of the "tens of millions" who get infected or the "hundreds of thousands" that die every year, that doesn't mean that influenza barely survives.
Influenza is not transmitted sexually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flu#Impact [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @02:16PM
Your link said they have no idea who is dying from the flu because they don't test for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @02:42PM
No, it says that the exact worldwide numbers are not known. Many parts of the world do not do a PCR or antibody test to confirm what someone died of and just classify the cause based on symptoms. Guess why it is called Influenza-like illness and not coronavirus-like illness.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @11:06PM
Yea, just like once they started confirming measles like illness they find this happens for less than 2% of suspected cases:
http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S185.full [oxfordjournals.org]
Editor CDR. Communicable Disease Report. Volume 7, Number 6, 7 February 1997. Public Health Laboratory Service. ISSN 1350-9357
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20140714084352/http://www.hpa.org.uk/cdr/archives/1997/cdr0697.pdf [nationalarchives.gov.uk]
Note the assumption of constant number of incorrectly diagnosed cases is an assumption. This number may have been much higher in the past. The fact is that many viruses cause similar symptoms, no matter what you look at. Estimating such numbers is not straight forward.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2015, @01:54AM
Are you seriously trying to compare estimating the number of measles cases with those of influenza? Comparing the surveillance of a disease that has been substantially reduced and typically only results in a single presentation with one that infects a large proportion of people every year does not make sense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2015, @02:15AM
Based on previous experience, if we have no idea what percent of these cases will be confirmed we should assume it is low. It is not my fault they decided to implement widespread measles vaccination before collecting good data on how many people actually had measles. It also won't be my fault when they do the same thing for influenza, once again leaving us with ambiguous information that can be explained multiple ways.
My point is that nearly everything I read about medicine is based on sloppy as hell research. I think the basic idea behind vaccinations makes a lot of sense, and should be investigated properly by scientists.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Tuesday August 25 2015, @02:02PM
The flu barely seems to survive as it is. I never get a shot and I only get the flu like once a decade and most folks I know don't catch it either.
exactly! that's why i've become convinced that part of the population secretly licks door knobs and handles. :)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday August 25 2015, @02:38PM
They don't wash their hands, so its the same thing. Just like those people that use the bathroom and walk out without washing their hands, yes people do notice, yes we do.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:48PM
I am a crackpot
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Tuesday August 25 2015, @05:41PM
Where I live, we usually have one or two (usually Seniors) die per year from pneumonia or some other complication which starts out with flu. Several more are generally hospitalized from said complications. I, myself, usually catch it every 2-3 years, because I work in the Library and come in contact with kids and people who need books to read while they are sick in bed.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @12:22PM
If the vaccine is effective in pigs then it may reduce their role as a mixing vessel for new subtypes. I hope vaccines are considered "organic", anyone know?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 25 2015, @02:48PM
Mass innoculation of livestock? Sounds expensive, but apparently eradication of rinderpest [wikipedia.org] only cost $5 billion.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday August 25 2015, @12:35PM
Progress Reported on Universal Flu Vaccines
I had Galactic Flu last year and it wasn't fun. I really don't want to get Universal Flu.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @04:56PM
However I'm interested to learn more about that Progress who reported on the vaccine. Is is a newspaper? Or some medical organization?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2015, @01:04AM
Andromeda strain?
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday August 26 2015, @08:30AM
Not if she eats enough fibre.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk