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by GhettoComputers 1634 days ago
Will this be a neutralizing vaccine? I like the idea of mRNA based vaccines but unless it prevents infections and is permanent like for polio, I don’t see any great uptake if it’s expected to decompose rapidly like the COVID vaccines.
2 comments

The inactivated polio vaccine used in the US doesn't elicit neutralizing antibodies, just binding ones. The oral polio vaccine used abroad can elicit neutralizing antibodies, but also sometimes gives recipients polio. There are always tradeoffs...
Ideally we’d want neutralizing vaccines wouldn’t we? Before the pandemic, my idea of a vaccine was a preventative measure that worked for long periods of time. I read Harvard did a study of tetanus shots and found boosters had no significant statistically beneficial effect.

I have never heard of a polio vaccine have this issue, I think Salk did an excellent job at testing it’s effects without forcing participants and there’s a great deal of historical data to prove it. Of course a vocal minority may have issues but I haven’t heard them on polio at all, only on relativity new Lyme disease vaccine ‘causing autism’.

I’ll look at binding vaccines more, I just want vaccines that aren’t subscription services.

> Ideally we’d want neutralizing vaccines wouldn’t we? ... I just want vaccines that aren’t subscription services.

I think you're mixing up concepts here. What kind of immune response a vaccine elicits (neutralizing antibodies vs. immunoglobulins vs. B-/T-cell response or some combination of the above) and how long it remains efficacious needn't have anything to do with one another, and vaccines that confer non-sterilizing immunity can still very effectively prevent disease spread. Lots of vaccines don't confer sterilizing immunity and still work very well. Unrelatedly, lots of vaccines' efficacy also fades with time (e.g., MMR, TDaP, varicella, both Hep vaccines, etc.), and those can also be very effective and valuable.

Obviously ideally you'd have a one-and-done, totally sterilizing vaccine for every ailment, but we take what we can get.

> I think Salk did an excellent job at testing it’s effects without forcing participants and there’s a great deal of historical data to prove it

The one that sometimes causes polio isn't the Salk vaccine (that's IPV), it's the Sabin vaccine (OPV), which uses a live attenuated virus -- see https://www.who.int/immunization/diseases/poliomyelitis/endg... for more info. But the Sabin vaccine is still widely used, because it's easier to administer (no needles), this particular issue is rare, and it generally works better than IPV does, because it elicits a gut-tissue response instead of a serum response, and polio is a fecal-oral route pathogen. Like I said: tradeoffs.

> Ideally we’d want neutralizing vaccines wouldn’t we? Before the pandemic, my idea of a vaccine was a preventative measure that worked for long periods of time.

That is because it was the common definition, which is why vaccination treatments were sometimes called immunization. The definitions had to be changed for the COVID vaccines because they perform so poorly in comparison to other common vaccines that they would not be vaccines under the previous definition.

They shouldn’t have changed the definition. I saw them as the same as flu shots. They call them seasonal flu vaccines, the COVID ones have the same issues but decrease their efficiency rapidly.

If people knew it would lose its efficiency so rapidly I doubt they’d have used it, or gotten 2 shots in quick succession.

What would a neutralizing vaccine against ticks look like? And why would it matter that much for a parasite that doesn't usually go from human to human?

The polio vaccination is 4 doses, and a booster every 10 years if you are at risk. Maybe the covid vaccines will fare similarly. Two shots very close to each other isn't ideal for immunisation, we knew that from the beginning.

It would cause tick saliva from causing infection for a lifetime, it matters so you can give a vaccine and not need to upkeep it especially in rural areas. It matters because it will prevent it forever. I think I’m thinking of something that lasts longer, someone mentioned a binding vaccine.

What does at risk of polio mean? I read that polio infections only affect Americans who aren’t vaccinated and touch recently vaccinated baby feces. If you aren’t in that situation you won’t get polio.

As I understand it that's not what neutralizing vaccine means (if it even is well defined). It means you will not get an infection when you are vaccinated, not that being vaccinated will last for a lifetime. This in contrast to leaky vaccines which make you less sick but still allow for infection and transmission. Since this vaccine does not target anything that causes diseases, it's there to make the tick detach, I don't see how neutralizing makes any sense to this vaccine.

>What does at risk of polio mean?

Going abroad to places where there is still polio for example. Checked again and apparently it's not a booster every 10 years but once after at least 10 years.