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Medicine Science

Bird Flu Fears Stoke the Race for an mRNA Flu Vaccine 103

Posted by msmash from the race-begins dept.
Concern over potential human-to-human transmission of bird flu has risen after six Missouri healthcare workers developed mild respiratory symptoms following contact with a patient infected with H5N1. The CDC reports only the original patient has tested positive for the virus. Scientists are ramping up efforts to develop mRNA vaccines against H5N1, with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and major pharmaceutical companies like Moderna, Pfizer, and GSK leading the charge. While mRNA technology offers rapid vaccine production, clinical trials have shown mixed results, particularly against influenza B strains. Wired adds: [...] Traditionally, flu vaccines contain inactivated viruses that are grown in hens' eggs. This works reasonably well, but it takes a long time to make such jabs, which means health authorities have to publish their predictions about which strains of flu will be circulating during the upcoming winter well in advance. If you could manufacture vaccines more quickly, you could make more accurate predictions nearer to flu season.

Not only that, researchers hope that a single mRNA shot could one day target 20 or more strains of flu at once, relieving the need for some of this guesswork. Scher's colleagues are working on such a "universal" flu vaccine. With clinical trials ongoing, it's still early days. Sheena Cruickshank, an immunologist at the University of Manchester, has watched reports about emerging mRNA flu jabs with interest but says that questions remain. "We don't yet know how long-lasting the immunity they produce is," she says. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, concurs, though he notes that all flu jabs, regardless of how they are made, have a waning immunity problem -- your protection could decline by around 10 percent every month following injection.

Bird Flu Fears Stoke the Race for an mRNA Flu Vaccine More | Reply

Bird Flu Fears Stoke the Race for an mRNA Flu Vaccine

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  • Yes please, sign me up to take untested medication to help with my cold.
    Yikes!

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jhoegl ( 638955 )
      Dont worry, nature doesnt care if you believe or dont. It does care if you got a vaccine though.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country [wikipedia.org]

      https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines/keyfacts.html [cdc.gov]

      Logic of the insane "Companies only want to get richer off this!" meanwhile "privatize schools!" and "private companies should do this work!" (hint: you should look at the cost difference)

      • You're comparing primary education and mRNA vaccine development. Impressive.

        Stupid, but impressive. If privatizing education is bad, why is privatizing medicine NOT...? Oh, cause the government does such a great job.

      • Nature also gives no indication any of the 6 workers had bird flu as all their tests for it came back negative.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 )
      You're more likely to die from a food allergy than a vaccine.

      In other news, have you heard that the earth is spherical & orbits around the sun? Oh, & that the USA has successfully landed several manned missions on the moon? Oh, & Donald Trump didn't win the 2020 election; Biden won it fair & square?

      That should keep you busy for a while ;)

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 )

      The covid vaccine is one of the most tested and closely studied vaccines in history. Plus mRNA has was discovered in the 60s and research started in the 90s. https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2... [jhu.edu]

    • Who modded you up? If you don’t know the difference between a common cold and a virus that just made the zoonotic leap 2 months ago and has had almost zero time to co-evolve with humans, you deserve the darwin award you’re much more likely to get.

  • I think it will be hard to do without collateral damage. Influenza is a very persistent virus that humanity tolerates very well. So there are possibly a lot of molecular mimicry risks where if you target the wrong protein, you're going to have a vaccine induced autoimmune disease. It sort of happened with the ACE2 receptor and COVID, but considering how widespread the virus itself was the side effects were more likely to happen from the real virus than a vaccine.

  • 1. How fast the 5G conspiracy theories get revived.
    2. How fast the democrats will push to make it a mandatory condition of stepping outside your door.
    3. Whether or not it actually works better for the regular ol flu than the shit they hand out now.

    Discuss

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 )

      #1 is the fault of a conservative media that revels in giving life to things like 5G conspriracies, they own that one.

      How fast the democrats will push to make it a mandatory condition of stepping outside your door.

      Yeah ok, conservatives from small folks to right to the largest media figures told us for what, a year or two, that Federal mandates would be a thing and how any day now, how it didn't work and how there would an upcoming wave of side effects all the way to mass death.

      None of this happened and they get to just brush past it and pretend they never said all those things with conviction, so are

      • Re: Betting pool on (Score:4, Interesting)

        by dknj ( 441802 ) on Friday October 04, 2024 @05:25PM (#64840549) Journal

        But they did get to limit what drugs women can put in their body. So partial win??

    • Re:Betting pool on (Score:4, Funny)

      by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Friday October 04, 2024 @04:12PM (#64840337)
      4. How fast the GOP will organise "flu parties."

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 )

        4. How fast the GOP will organise "flu parties."

        Not 'troll'.
        If the Marburg virus or Ebola virus started having human cases of them in the U.S., they'd have 'parties' to infect each other with those, too; call it 'evolution in action ' -- which is ironic as fuck, since most of them are 'creationists'.

        • Ebola doesn't have a fucking 0.1% IFR, either. Folks will use their own judgement. *GASP* I know, right... can't have that.
          • How is it that someone as imbecilic as you managed to survive to adulthood without killing yourself off or having someone kill you?
            Oh that's right you're probably not even an U.S. citizen, just some asshole Russki getting a paid in Rubles.
            Or if not then you're just a Useful Idiot for criminal rapist-traitors like Trump and the Fascist Pig Party (formerly known as 'Republicans').
            Get medicated, your head is sick.

      • Conservatives walking around with my body my choice signs in regards to vaccines is the most hypocritical shit ever. https://www.npr.org/sections/h... [npr.org]

        So does that count for abortions?

        • It does when you ask real people with real beliefs. Yes, it's possible to actually believe in body autonomy. All it requires is that you walk away from your partisan affiliations and think for yourself (GASP, I know right, clutch those pearls harder). I happen to believe that body autonomy means both. You cannot tell women they cannot abort a fetus in their own body and you cannot tell a refusenik to take a vaccine they don't want. Mind blowing eh?

    • Re:Betting pool on (Score:4, Informative)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Friday October 04, 2024 @05:24PM (#64840543)

      2. How fast the democrats will push to make it a mandatory condition of stepping outside your door.

      Do you have children in public schools? You must provide proof of vaccination before children can be enrolled. Nearly every employer in the medical field has vaccine requirements for employees. When you let religious nutjobs skip vaccines you get outbreaks, like this for example. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doh... [nyc.gov]

      Hell in 2000 the CDC declared measles eliminated, thanks to vaccines of course. https://www.cdc.gov/measles/ab... [cdc.gov]

      • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

        by Seven Spirals ( 4924941 )
        The Measles vaccine is a traditional vaccine, not an mRNA "vaccine". It prevents transmission and prevents illness whereas the CV19 vaccine from Pfizer (the most popular one) does neither. Also against Omnicron, for example, the Pfizer vaccine was around 40% effective. The Measles vaccine is 97% effective.

        • You're comparing two very different kinds of viruses. Traditional flu shots are only 40-60% effective on a given year because they rapidly mutate like coronaviruses do. They are still highly recommended. Even if you don't prevent illness, you reduce transmission. And even when there is transmission, you reduce severity.

        • Tell me why mRNA is bad.

          • Cuz the gay frog chemtrailz. Duh.

          • Well these cheerleaders [time.com] claim it's recently 54% effective and they are carrying major Big Pharma water. So, you tell me, is that great compared to Measles vaccine or Tetanus? Sounds not great compared to anything in the 90th percentile, like the kind of stuff they'd require in school before all this madness, which was the original topic of discussion.

      • I do. And get ready to have your mind blown: they get their shots on time and on schedule. The exception to that is, like something like 3/4 of parents even in the blue districts, I didn't bother getting them covid shots given they all got covid (ranging from no symptoms to standard kid cold) before kiddie shots (with their mind-blowing 20-30% claimed efficacy) became available.

        If I were to have another newborn now, maybe a covid shot would be in the cards. But not because some didshit at the CDC who flunke

  • Two doses then two boosters. I will take NO MORE of them. The vaccines I was given in the 1970's worked and don't need to be retaken. These MRNA vaccines are NOT vaccines!
    • Fact. You take vaccines for Tetanus, Measles, or HPV, or Smallpox and guess what!? You don't get the disease. Those are vaccines. Something you take that might kinda sorta maybe make it less bad if you're old or something is a therapeutic, at best.
      • Fact: When is a vaccine not a vaccine? When you have to change the definition of the word vaccine to include your money making gene therapy.

      • Sometimes. Most vaccines are less than 90% effective.

        You can look at per capita infection curves for all of these diseases and vaccines were introduced as they approached zero with little inflection of the curves. That's just the hard data.

        Add in ethyl mercury sequestration and macrophage-mediated associated aluminum nanoparticle transport across the blood-brain barrier, SV-40 cancers, and the lack of PC-RCT's for modern vaccines with zero liability and the calculus isn't straightforward.

        I went from an advo

        • If you're worried about SV-40 today, then you didn't read carefully enough. That was contaminated polio vaccines from at least 60 years ago and really nothing to do with the vaccines themselves. Pretty sure they're gone now.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luthair ( 847766 )

      Lots of vaccines don't provide total lifetime protection. You should get a tetanus booster every 10-years, rabies vaccines last a couple years, flu shots, etc.

      Ten seconds of consideration might lead to you realizing you can catch a cold a couple times a year, but chicken pox will only infect you once. Its almost like the immune system doesn't behave the same way with every infection....

    • Settle down grandpa. It's time for Wheel of Fortune and a mug of sleepy time tea.

  • Here we go again! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Cue the right-wing conspiracy theorists who will claim any mRNA vaccine is just some 'liberal conspiracy' to kill people, make them impotent/gay/trans/zombies/whatever, just like with the COVID vaccine.
    Aside from the above, also cue the people who will insist that whatever it is, is 'untested' and would rather wait YEARS for a so-callled 'traditional' vaccine, even if it's too damned late to do any good.

  • The current strain of H5N1 jumps to mammals regularly.

    For example, dozens of tigers died in Vietnam [msn.com], and before that seals in Patagonia [apnews.com].

    It is only a matter of time before it infects humans in significant numbers.

    Oh, and by the way, this is zoonosis at work, no lab leak crappy hypothesis...

    • So what? That could have happened at any time. It could have been the cause of the 1918 Spanish Flu. Lots of risks to our existence abound. I think you're fear-mongering.

      Also, it doesn't prove that CV19 was Zoonotic and credible sources [perma.cc] (the Director of the FBI) say it wasn't. The most definitive article in Nature I could find didn't come down either way and the DNI also suspects a lab-origin.

  • Sure, developing the new vaccine is faster but the long pole seems to be testing. That is why COVID vaccines and boosters are based on the strains circulating the previous winter. The 2022 version was available in September based on variants circulating in July. It was really cool because it was the only time most of us had access to a vaccine based on the currently circulating strain. However, they achieved this by going directly from animal testing to shipping product. No human testing. That was app

  • Are exactly the people I do not want vaccinated.
    • Well, well, now; That's what I always expect from you guys. You wish death on "the other side" like a crazy Greek partisan or some kind of deranged cultist. It's disgusting and evil. Watching posts like this during COVID was ugly enough, but I see you guys are still at it. We are definitely foes .

  • So, everyone who was pro vaccine mandate ( and many even went full Nazi with deny those people healthcare, put em in quarantine camps and let them die ) loved to parrot the phrase " Follow the Science " during the entire event.

    Which I find amusing as hell because, what they really meant was, " Only follow the Science that we approve of and ignore everything else. "

    To wit:

    THE SCIENCE says, the vaccine development timeline usually takes around 5 - 10 years to go through all the trials, ensure its safety and d

    • don't drag the rest of the World into your insanity along with you.

      Well, that's the thing, they cannot mind their own business. They feel a moral imperative to come get into your shit and quiz you about your medical status and jockey politically to get everyone on a vaccine passport. Nevermind the fact that if the medicine worked that well in the first place and they had already taken it, there would be no reason to fear, would there? Well, it's "for the children damnit!" and how many times did kids get politicized as reasons for authoritarian policies? Then in the end tho

    • So, everyone who was pro vaccine mandate ( and many even went full Nazi with deny those people healthcare, put em in quarantine camps and let them die ) loved to parrot the phrase " Follow the Science " during the entire event.

      Which I find amusing as hell because, what they really meant was, " Only follow the Science that we approve of and ignore everything else. "

      To wit:

      THE SCIENCE says, the vaccine development timeline usually takes around 5 - 10 years to go through all the trials, ensure its safety and do the whole regulatory process to do as much as possible to ensure the safety of the product in question. But, those who pushed the Covid-19 vaccine just flat out ignored -THAT- science and elected to cut some corners in an effort to be seen as " doing something ".

      You all want to line up and be a guinea pig, be my guest. But don't drag the rest of the World into your insanity along with you.

      Why would Donald Trump do such a thing? https://trumpwhitehouse.archiv... [archives.gov]

  • This mRNA vaccine is made with plasmid DNA, the residue of which is still present in the vaccine.

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