[inter_netuser]

Please, let's not try doing Marek's disease in humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease

"The evolution of Marek's disease due to vaccination has had a profound effect on the poultry industry. All chickens across the globe are now vaccinated against Marek's disease (birds hatched in private flocks for laying or exhibition are rarely vaccinated). Highly virulent strains have been selected to the point that any chicken that is unvaccinated will die if infected.[14] Other leaky vaccines are commonly used in agriculture. One vaccine in particular is the vaccine for avian influenza. Leaky vaccine use for avian influenza can select for virulent strains.[15]"

[nzmsv]

OK, I'm probably going to burn a bunch of karma on this comment, but this is very interesting. For example, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4516275/ looks like a legitimate piece of research.

Isn't this exactly what we are doing with the current COVID vaccines? How does one explore this question without being labeled a crazy antivaxxer?

[morbusfonticuli]

I do think that you have a point there. However it's complicated.

Money quote from your cited paper: "Our data show that anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts."

However, despite the small odds of a population bottleneck, mutations naturally happen and with "[...] more than a million new infections occurring every day and billions of people still unvaccinated, susceptible hosts are rarely in short supply. So, natural selection will favor mutations that can exploit all these unvaccinated people and make the coronavirus more transmissible." [0].

This [1] nature article from 2020 has a different view on the relation of leaky vaccines, spread control and disease severity; money quote: "Bailey et al. performed transmission experiments using Marek disease virus in chickens and found that the herpesvirus of turkeys vaccine significantly reduced feather viral load in both vaccinated birds and unvaccinated contact individuals. The authors found that contact birds were less likely to develop disease and die, and that they displayed milder symptoms and shed less virus, when infected by vaccinated birds, potentially because of a lower infectious dose"

The article based on current research [2] _also_ examining Marek disease.

So there you are: one probem, multiple views by experts and a bunch of hackernews readers, unable to evaluate the papers.

[0] https://scitechdaily.com/what-is-causing-all-these-new-coron...

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-020-0358-3

[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

[fer]

From your link:

> Chickens become infected with MDV by inhalation of dust contaminated with virus shed from the feather follicles of infected birds. In a contaminated poultry house, chicks are infected soon after hatching and remain infectious for life

A "leaky" vaccine isn't a problem in itself if it helps clear the infection faster, because in fact that means there will be fewer chances for mutations. Now in a massified poultry industry, that vaccine only helped chickens not die while remaining infectious, and that's obviously turning farms into mutation making machines.

The Marek scenario applies to very few diseases.

[fer]

The Marek disease scenario is more a result of massification of poultry industry and the fact that Marek-infected chickens are infectious for life, rather than the vaccination itself. That's several orders of magnitude higher in terms of mutation lottery tickets.

If you're gonna use the ever-classic Marek scenario to push against vaccination, at least use it against the vaccination of a disease that shares some basic characteristics with MD.

[nzmsv]

I'm actually not pushing for anything, and since I wasn't following antivaxxers this is all new to me. I guess this was my 10000 moment for the day (https://xkcd.com/1053/)

[fer]

Congrats on being one of the 10,000!

Sorry if it came off as aggressive, but Marek disease situation is well-loved and ill-interpreted by the antivax crowd, and often brought up even though the similarities between the diseases and their clinical courses alone make them completely incomparable from an epidemiological perspective.

[inter_netuser]

Some quite credible NIH immunologist I know has openly stated that Marek's scenario is very much a valid risk to consider since the very beginning of the pandemic, among many others ofc, including ADE, etc.

Amusingly enough, he also worked on actual mRNA therapeutics for quite some time, in addition to viral delivery vectors in cancer therapeutics. Has a PhD, his h-index is ~15, I think. Triple vaxxed, if you must know his medical status. You should be able to google him rather easily, only 20-40 people in the country that do this.

Looking forward to hear about your credentials.

Remember: science has always been about questioning the dogma. Not the other way around. Criticism and open dissent must be the norm, not something to be scorned and ostracized.

can't believe I'm actually writing this on a technology forum.

[fer]

One of the authors of the 2015 paper[0] on Marek's disease that gave way to the "questioning the dogma" crowd to refuse to vaccinate had to write an article[1] to explain some of what I just said and more.

Since you popped an argumentum ab auctoritate (without even giving a name?), I'd drop that he obviously also has a PhD, and an h-index of 88 which is actually remarkable.

[0]https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

[1]https://theconversation.com/vaccines-could-affect-how-the-co...