They apparently settled on the the sequences for the original covid vacs in a weekend. Going from that design to billions of doses is one of the hardest things to do, but once done, will persist. And it is ready to be deployed for the next hundred applications that we find for this.
Flu vaccines is an obvious application, since the prior egg-based manufacturing required about six months lead time and millions of eggs, but nobody wanted to invest in anything better.
Not sure if you mean nobody wanted to develop mRNA flu vaccines, but at least Moderna and Pfizer are:
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/18/nx-s1-5863570/flu-vaccine-mrn...
No no. They had a candidate for the vaccine. Scaling manufacturing is hard, sure, but the actual barrier was proving the candidate worked. We conducted (by far) the most time-efficient clinical trials in history to prove the vaccines were safe and effective.
Until that happened, we could not have known the candidate drug was actually correct.
Seems to have been a legitimate, very rare, side effect
https://www.flinders.edu.au/research/articles/covid-vaccine-...
The common argument made is that the vaccine saved more lives than they took, but this is pretty fucked up IMO. It's the trolley problem IRL - if you force someone to get a vaccine and they die as a result, you are responsible for their death. Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.
There is remedy against vaccine harm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Vaccine_Injury_Compen...
This was passed in response to claims against DPT vaccine and manufacturers stopping production of the said vaccine. Lawmakers feared loss of herd immunity and passed the law. Now vaccine skeptics say this is not enough and claim inability to sue the company directly as an issue - but what they really want is enforce their minority view on the majority by suing companies and ensuring no one has access to vaccines - tyranny of the minority.
I can absolutely empathize though. It really is fucked up to experience it in the extreme. Usually the trade-offs are much more minor or have a big time delay or are more abstract.
The statistics on men under 25 are still horrific and suggest this was in fact the latter category: atrocity masquerading behind that euphemism.
But the harm those children experience is a infintesimal fraction of the harm all children would feel if there were no infant vaccinations.
It's a trade off but it's one that must be made. The parents whose child died did the best thing they could do. Until we can screen for the infants that will react, vaccinations are the best choice.
Herd immunity arguments can make that calculation more fuzzy but the herd can't tolerate many people opting out and still give group cover. So after a certain amount of people, choosing not to vaccinate is seriously risking illness. Society is built to handle those types of collective action problems. The moral case is still clear IMO.
It is a trade off that is fair to the individual and to the society IF the society live up to its end of the bargain and had come up with a method of producing the vaccines without the profit maxxing incentive.
If there is another country on Earth that produces better vaccines via a better system I'm all ears but this sounds like unrealistic DemSoc complaining to me. Expand Medicare widely. Make private insurance extremely optional. The other Western democracies seem to manage this pretty well.
And what I said is in a global context.
It was and remains statistically correct to vaccinate young people.
I’m not even arguing the government shouldn’t pull the lever, I just want people to be held accountable for the lives lost as a result, and for the families to be treated with compassion.
People repeat this but there is no validation of this.
Sure, children and young adults mostly weren't at risk of dying. It is not at all clear that there are not bad side effects from getting an active Covid infection. We're still crunching the data.
We're just now beginning the process of correlating virii and bad latent effects many years later. HPV -> Cervical Cancer. Epsetin-Barr -> MS. And, of course the one we have known about for a while: Chicken Pox -> Shingles.
You don't have to care about the people who aren't interested in science. Sure, you have to protect immunocompromised people from those people, and we can do that.
You cannot reason a person out of a position they did not reason themself into in the first place.
It's about swaying investors and regulators. And yeah, we need to make sure we excise our regulators of crazy people, but that's cyclic. And next cycle, we'll get vaccines for a lot more.
Grifters like RFK Jr and the supplement charlatans are cashing in on the lies they perpetuate.
And intuitively it makes sense we’re talking about groups of people who are skeptical of main stream institutional health recommendations but trust specific personal sources for medical advice.
I’m vibing but it feels like there is a pretty clear intersection of peptides and the fringe science health community no?
As many of us said at the time, the mandates weren't worth the destruction of public trust, especially because the vaccine wasn't even sterilizing.
The next time there's a crisis, resist the urge to use the government to achieve outcomes by brute force. It doesn't work and has generational adverse consequences.
Proceeds to raw dog a bunch of “research chemicals” cause some roided up bro talked about it on a podcast…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U7gbFMWZWlo
They’re not vaccines though.
Tailored vaccines for things like cancer are a game changer.
I live in hope of a semi-universal flu+related vaccine.
I live in fear of the measles induced "immune amnesia" effect.
Similar for vaccines, just give us the numbers clearly and upfront.
This bypasses regulators from having to make claims beyond “we reviewed the data and agree with these numbers and feel that this should not be banned.” I do think it would also help to separate something “not banned” and being “required to be covered by insurance” or “required for professions like the military”. I think trying to simplify things makes things worse, because this abstraction is not real.
You are aware that literally anyone can go and literally find exactly these numbers, correct?
The trial results are published!
The reality is none of these "do your own research" or "just asking questions" people are actually curious whatsoever. Curiosity requires more than zero effort. Simply saying you're "doing your own research" and "just asking questions" while regurgitating the last thing you saw on your TikTok feed is super easy and gives you all the same sense of intellectual superiority.
Regulators don’t make cures. There’s room to improve on that side of the system.
Especially as emerging approaches seem to be trending more systems-thinking-oriented, eg “this will strengthen your immune system to fight lots of diseases.”
But because they were pushed by the government, many people do not trust them. Sure, they were pushed and mandated for good reasons, but the problem is that a lot of people have already lost trust in the government.
That trust was not lost because of one big decision. It was lost through many small, unrelated government decisions that may not seem noticeable or measurable on their own, but over time, they build up.
I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
Case in point: look at all the people who’ve now built their entire political identities atop this unfalsifiable distrust. They’d even distrust “stand further apart” if the wrong person said it.
> I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
This is the crux. Outrage spreads way faster than the boring truth.
Well, I think it’s pretty clear for starters that politicians lie (and yes this holds for both left and right; although indeed some presidents more than others), and that this isn’t helping trust.
Engage the skeptics in open debate and address their concerns, not censorship and embarking on cancellation campaigns.
However uncomfortable it seems, the median person in society isn't going to do a thorough literature review to make up their mind, they'll do it based on personal instincts.
Dear Previous Paragraph,
Couldn't many small published reviews which don't show a noticeable or measurable positive effect on their own build up over time to rebuild trust?
Sincerely, Your Reader
In the case of COVID, the effectiveness of vaccines was quite exaggerated at first[0]. That absolutely didn't help government rebuild the trust.
> I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
At this point, quite sure more reviews will only trigger people's confirmation bias and make those who already don't trust vaccines trust them even less.
[0]: https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-health-governm...
One's model of "statement made by the POTUS" should be more like 'statement made by mildly likeable (to some segment of the population) boomer dad who probably doesn't know what he is talking about.' It'd be a different thing if a public health official said something like this (and I don't know if they did, but I certainly wasn't left with the impression that it was impossible for me to get vaccinated and still get covid).
Yes, you may still get Covid, but you don't die from drowning in your own body fluids anymore.
Of course, this only attends if you got the damn vaccine. All of the Covid deaths around me in the last couple years (7 deaths) were anti-vaxxers. But, hey, we know that reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Where exactly is this?
If the “do their own research” people don’t manage to kill their kids and family through complete and utter idiocy, those kids and family will 99.99999% of the time continue their idiocy.
We should hope they manage to end their idiocy lineage.
Hogwash. Wakefield predated anything Covid. And measles vaccines aren't mRNA and people would rather let their children die.
Had Trump and Co called the vaccine part of the second coming, people would be lining up at their churches to get them.
You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
I see that your are yourself in a position you didn't reason you into.
Again, trust is a huge factor here.
reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse
if we were all going to drop dead (I think 2 years ago now, I’m waaaaiting!) for whatever the vaccine did, it would apply to a broader population due to covid exposure
Do you know if the vaccine prevented the virus-induced myocarditis? Cause the vaccine didn't do much to stop people from getting covid, multiple times even.
So many people frame this as either/or, you either had the risk of covid induced myocarditis or you had the (supposed) lesser risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. But if you got the vaccine (x times) and then covid (y times), isn't your risk roughly x + y?
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/covid-19-vaccinati...
(Personally, I wish researchers would not forgot quite so often that there is a non-mRNA COVID vaccine available in the US. Where's all the analysis of the effects of the Novavax vaccine?)
none of those were goals of the vaccine, so its a fruitless exercise to build on top of
they communicated poorly at all levels the one time society needed them to communicate effectively, and lost the public trust
The goal was to reduce the spread overall, lessen the symptoms for individuals, have your own body fight it faster instead of becoming a factory for it, de-risking cytokine storms
We don’t know the actual numbers as pericarditis and myocarditis can occur asymptomatically, and people truly need to be under very active medical surveillance to detect it
Channeling Monty Python:
... I got better
"synthesize???"
With almost 200 references and the use of "synthesize???" it sound like AI generated slop.
The article is behind a paywall in any case so why so many positive comments about it?
Say what you will about the Covid vaccine or Kennedy’s specific motivations (which I disagree with), but choosing to cut government funding for development of wildly profitable pharmaceutical products is a reasonable choice.
We don’t generally fund Merck’s R&D with federal money. You’ll note the following critical detail from the article:
> That will impact 22 projects being led by major pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and Moderna, for vaccines against bird flu and other viruses, HHS said.
We’ve gone so far round the bend with partisanship that straight-up corporate welfare has become a left-wing cause.
for the curious:
https://www.usaspending.gov/search?hash=5ec35bf87ec1fd63d28d...
Remember when everyone was contributing spare dimes to fund a vaccine?
If the government never funded another study for vaccines, ever, pharma companies would continue to pump them out.
It is not yet clear whether mRNA will be treated like generics.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X1...
It is really weird that even here in HN where everyone is aware of corporate greed and corruption, corporations becomes the good guys when it comes to vaccines.
Now you might think of bringing up regulators and checks and balances at this point...
But imagine this. If approving a vaccine, or like here, a vaccine technology could unlock 1 Trillion dollars in revenue, imagine how much of that can be paid politicians/regulators/scientists/thought leadrs to act favorably?
How many of those regulators, who are just average human beings, can resist that?
Also, for the record: very few (no?) vaccines are “mandated” by the federal government. Recommendations are made, and state and local governments do this, mainly through school districts.
Various agencies and the military will, of course, mandate things for their own staff.
The game to compensate for that is to be to convince gullible investors that your commercially viable fusion plant, or quantum computer, or unrealistic space ambitions are just 5 years away! Invest now or miss out!
The line between research and scamming in an ultracapitalist economy becomes very blurry.
The "win" is occasionally getting a steadily profitable field or lode for multiple decades after the costs of proving and the fun of raising forward capital loans for extraction and processing plant capital.
Trump 1 was a very different administration.
And Trump himself has publicly backed off what was probably his one major achievement after receiving pushback from his supporters.
Trump one had a sane (terrible, but sane) cabinet that largely controlled his wilder impulses.
This time he went for loyalty above all else.
This is absurdly revisionist. The first administration’s cabinet/staff was a reality show and a merry go round of people like Anthony Scaramucci and Ryan Zinke. If anything “controlled” it, it was just the chaos of incompetence.
As far as loyalty goes, I suppose it’s worth reminding you that Kennedy was a Democrat, who ran in the Democratic presidential primary, and routinely criticized Trump.
1: https://apnews.com/article/maha-glyphosate-rfk-kennedy-trump...
Kennedy was a Democrat as a spoiler.
Here's what we know: In 2014, Obama administration halted the so called "gain of function" research because of risk of laboratory accidents. In 2017, the Trump administration restarted this dangerous research. See links below.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/white-house-to-cut-fun...
Excerpt: [Obama administration] White House announced Friday that it would temporarily halt all new funding for experiments that seek to study certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous. The White House said the moratorium decision had been made “following recent biosafety incidents at federal research facilities.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih...
Excerpt: [Trump administration] on Tuesday ended a moratorium imposed three years ago on funding research that alters germs to make them more lethal. Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic.
So, Trump restarted the dangerous research that Obama had shut down. You may be thinking, what does that have to do with Covid? Covid started in Wuhan, China, right?
It turns out that the Trump administration, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), provided funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, an American non-profit organization focused on studying emerging diseases. The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses. The rest is history.
And then Trump also disbanded the pandemic preparedness team in 2018 just in time for the pandemic. See link below.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/nsc-pandemic-office-t...
Most left-wing critics are still struggling with admitting that Anthony Fauci really did provide funding to EcoHealth, despite ample documentation.
For the record, I don’t care who gets blamed. I just think it’s a hilarious twist of partisan rhetoric.
The WIV is 20km from the Huanan market where the pandemic started. There is no direct evidence linking the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 to laboratory work conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[0] The evidence for zoonotic origin with multiple spillover events at the Huanan market is overwhelming.
This is just one review.
[0] https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur...
There's a minimum level of actual competence needed for that job to not embarrass the Trump admin.
Thanks for the new toll in Hormuz though
This sounds a bit like providing evidence for global warming, gun control or evolution. The "skeptics" just want to remain ignorant. No amount of evidence will change them.
The silver lining about vaccine skeptics, though, is the Herman Cain award[1]. What this means is that conservatives die more than liberals from preventable diseases [2].
Seriously though, I am very pro-vax, but the fact that studies like these come out now is just confirmation that people had the right to doubt the safety of mRNA back then. Many people shamed others for being anti vax but everyone has the right to be careful.
I’m also pro-vax, so I don’t think it is correct to equate ignoring the preponderance of current evidence (in 2021 or 2026) for vaccine protection as being careful. That just seems the logical fallacy sold by “vax hesitant” and social media influencers to make people feel smart to ignore statistics and “make their own choice based on intuition”
Could the vaccines have side effects that became visible after 6 months? Yes and we couldn’t have known that they didn’t.
Could the vaccines have side effects on people with rare conditions? Sure, and we couldn’t have known that either.
My point is that in 2020, the decision to approve the vaccines and pretty much force everyone to get it was a risk tradeoff. It was way more risky to let the disease continue spreading and mutate than it was to release the vaccines. mrna vaccines had been in trials and there was no reason to believe they could have been harmful. But the reality is that we just didn’t know. Biology is complex enough that you can’t just assume everything will be fine without proper testing. And what we deem proper testing is a process that these drugs hadn’t gone through.
I happily got vaxed in early 2021, and did it again 4 times , so I was willing to trust the tradeoff.
But ignoring that it was a tradeoff and hiding behind a sign that says “science” is just taking people for dummies.
I understand that this is to not feed the vaccine hesitancy. But to anyone observing carefully, this is a crucial break in the information chain that can feedback any ill effects of any vaccine back to the creators.
It’s not very complicated.
trials ok => drug most likely ok
trials not done => we don’t really know.
That you believe in any claims of vaccine efficacy made by the manufacturers or the FDA and are more then willing to have them injected into your body?
If the only entity that you can get information from is an entity that is known to lie, you can trust this entity?
It is not that we know for a fact that X is not safe. It is that we have no reason to believe that the powers that can ensure that, does not have an incentive to do it, and a large financial incentive to NOT do it and instead grease a lot of palms and get it mandated.
This is particularly relevant when the cost to grease the palms is minuscule compared to the profit that can be made by the approval.
And it is particularly relavant when the common man cannot any relavant information about it from any other source.
We are sitting ducks here. But people apparently does not notice.
And we shouldn’t assume that all mRna vaccines are the same. The rna sequence that’s used potentially can matter as well.
But I'm not quite sure how that's relevant to the article...
We're way beyond lysenko. China has no intellectual or political baggage in vaccine theory or bio engineering.
Even during the pandemic response it was eventually acknowledged that early claims of vaccines preventing infection or even spread weren't supported by the trials. Trials were only done to study how many participants sought medical attention for symptomatic infection and had no data related to spread or asymptomatic carriers (or even those who just didn't seek care, though hopefully that was negligible).
The overview of this article seems to lean heavily on existing studies, modeling, and observational studies. Modeling and observational studies can only indicate correlation rather than causation, and I'm not aware of controlled studies for mRNA vaccines that tested for protection against infection or spread.
To the very best of my knowledge this is just misinformation. If you have a citation here, please provide it.
I can find you links, though it will be directly to the original studies done for the covid vaccines. The studies were well written and clearly called out their methodology. The problem was with how the studies were interpreted and explained to the public, not with the studies themselves.
The studies only ran for 3-4 weeks each, at which point they were unblinded. Though they did continue tracking reported adverse events for a while if I'm not mistaken, the study was no longer blind or controlled at that point though so I don't put any weight behind that data (I'm sure there's plenty that disagree with me disregarding data collected after the unblinding).
early claims of vaccines preventing infection or even spread weren't supported by the trials.
From my first free of politics encounters with world class epidemiologists in 1980 or so I've not heard one claim that any vaccine had a 100% efficacy rate for both disease prevention and for eliminating spread - it has _always_ been a numbers game, like seat belts, of statistical reduction.
Your own link agrees:
Conclusions: A two-dose regimen of BNT162b2 conferred 95% protection against Covid-19 in persons 16 years of age or older.
Typically, in educated countries, the phrases such as "prevent infection and spread" are understood to mean that in the same manner as "seatbelts prevent death and injury" ( * exeptions expected )
But better late than never I suppose.
No. They didn’t. They said it.
You were the Phase3 trial. You can probably debate the ethicality, the decisions made, but do not pretend they had 5 year data before deploying to the entire world.
Facts matter.
Dec 11 2020- publication of phase 2/3 trial results, meaning not only was the study fully completed, but it made it through peer review too: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
Dec 11 - 2020: first authorization https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/health/pfizer-vaccine-aut...
Do we need 75-year data for Viagra too?
30-year data for aspirin?
What's the logic tree here?