> put the lungs into a constant state of readiness, allowing fast responses to almost any invading germ
Succeeding at this would prove that our bodies have the capacity to do that but evolution "tuned" the system differently. A corollary would be that this vaccination is probably a net negative for public health, even if nobody'd really know why.
We're not really calorie constrained anymore and most humans live in much denser environments than they used to. You would expect rate of exposure, the rate of mutation / change and the rate at which new pathogens appear to be higher than in the past.
Consequently, you wouldn't necessarily expect ancestral "defaults" to be optimal for modern environments.
> you wouldn't necessarily expect ancestral "defaults" to be optimal
I like the term ancestral defaults and indeed, we've come a long way since then and our biological and environmental reality is substantially different.
There is this book series Mortal Coil by Emily Suvada which imagines a future where technology has advanced enough to allow one to tweak their genome as easily as we use apps on our phone today. It was a fascinating read.
In the agriculture world, application of harpin proteins (https://www3.epa.gov/pesticides/chem_search/reg_actions/regi...) can be used to help treat diseases by inducing a defense response. Mind you, it’s not a standalone treatment, but helps make applications of fungicides and the like far more effective.
Pathogen defenses can roughly be thought of having a metabolic cost at the very least. Meaning if there’s no selection pressure (such as death) otherwise, then it often ends up being more optimal to not have a defense active until it’s needed.
Problem is we have a global distribution system that is forcing organisms that have previously evolved into an equilibrium with the disease complex in their area, to encounter multiple novel threats in rapid succession. Like how aggressive species of downy and powdery mildews are now everywhere in the US. Giving plants a boost by inducing defenses early on helps them resist the onset of infection and helps treatment succeed.
No. Evolution is not "tuning" it's just statistics at a huge scale. The high likelihood of back pain, the lack of important sensors, broken synthesis pathways, this is not a carefully tuned system, this is just blind luck plus statistics. Which means we can do better because we're purposeful.
We know enough specific things about immunology and about the illnesses we're trying to avoid to be something more than clueless and we're learning more all the time, including about the potential applications of "everything vaccines" that are being tested for potential programmatic use.
Don't we have a problem of ever increasing auto-immune diseases? If we know "enough" then I think we should be able to make it go away. Until that happens, I don't think humanity can claim to know "enough".
Also, evolved systems are hard to reverse engineer.
If something simple like an electronic circuit with comparatively short evolution can end up with mysterious, un-intutive and complex inter-dependent behavior, imagine how non-understandable an immune system that evolved over millions of years can be..
So I still think we are mostly clueless, and it is nearly impossible to safely engineer changes into something that was not engineered in the first place...
Evolution is not a process toward better quality of life and life expectancy of individuals. As long as enough individuals can reach the age to procreate in their environment evolution is done. Evolution didn’t train our bodies to reject the diseases we already have the vaccines for neither, so your reasoning would apply to smallpox as well. And what about viruses appeared after Homo sapiens evolved (such as HIV)?
I don't think it works like that, from my recollection of the uni courses I did 20 years ago.
Even a small advantage like 1% will quickly propagate in a population, because it's about advantage over 1,000s of generations.
That this disease defence CAN be turned on, means some people would have at some point had a genetic mutation to turn it on.
As the GP pointed out, therefore it must be a net negative from an evolutionary stand point.
I also suspect it would be calorific consumption, as someone else said, so it might be ok.
However, there are plausible other explanations. For example there are medical conditions that result from a too aggressive immune system and it could instead be reducing the chance of that occuring.
I would say you are both right in that if you have two competing variables (on-time for the defence vs calorie consumption), when the main causes of death before procreating were infectious disease and malnutrition before modern times, I would expect some equilibrium to be reached and we have not had that much time to evolve since caloric scarcity in the western world was a solved problem for large swaths of the population.
If in the future we could trade a few hundred extra calories per day for a great immune system (without auto-immune side effects) we would have found a nice cheat code!
Thinking about your point- I bet we do not know if some people have it on or not. It feels like something that would have to be specifically investigated.
Don't bat immune systems work like this? Except they end up in equilibrium instead of eliminating the viruses, which is why it's so dangerous to come into contact with them.
I think almost everyone would avoid this if it meant you became deadly to your dog or cat.
Autoimmune diseases often are due to suboptimal vitamin D3 softgel intake (typically 4-5K IU) or suboptimal magnesium intake (300-400 mg). Bringing both to highly optimal levels should minimize the risk of development of new or worsening autoimmune diseases, although it won't revert any existing ones. Low dosing either one doesn't work in this context.
Those who reject this even after reading the following 100% deserve to suffer, but worse yet, they make others suffer, often due to their conflict of interest as shills for pharma. The general commitment to truth is well below zero for those who stand to gain from its suppression.
It seems like every year we find links between viruses and disease. I wonder if broader vaccines will lead to accidentally eradicating some diseases like the HPV vaccine is currently eradicating cervical cancer.
the tech behind this is cool but i wonder if the delivery mechanism is gonna be a bottleneck for scaling. if they cant solve the stability of the platform then its basically just a theoretical win. how are they planning to handle the actual distribution at scale though?
As someone who has taken the HPV vaccine, I'd take the other side of that trade. It's been 6 years since covid mania, who is taking these booster shots now? Anyone?
Same here in France, and it’s free as in “paid by public money".
persons aged 65 years and over;
people under 65 with certain chronic diseases (including children from 6 months of age);
pregnant women;
people with obesity (with a body mass index, BMI, greater than or equal to 40);
persons staying in a follow-up care facility or in a medico-social accommodation facility, irrespective of their age.
Vaccination is also recommended for other populations, in order to ensure indirect protection: health professionals (especially those who have contact with people at risk), the entourage of infants under 6 months at risk of serious complications and immunocompromised people, home help for vulnerable people, professionals exposed to swine and avian influenza viruses.
I hadn't since the pandemic was (more or less) over, but last November I got a booster shot, as people seemed to be getting more sick than before. I know someone who (probably) has long-term covid, and you definitely don't want to catch that. However, I always become sick the next day, so I'm not too eager to get it.
If someone got the jabs and has long COVID now, it'd be best to assume that it's not long COVID but vaccine injury, unless we acknowledge that the vaccines aren't all that effective (nor safe for that matter). At least the few people around me willing to consider this got this confirmed by their doctors after many tests and lots of gaslighting.
> put the lungs into a constant state of readiness, allowing fast responses to almost any invading germ
Succeeding at this would prove that our bodies have the capacity to do that but evolution "tuned" the system differently. A corollary would be that this vaccination is probably a net negative for public health, even if nobody'd really know why.
We're not really calorie constrained anymore and most humans live in much denser environments than they used to. You would expect rate of exposure, the rate of mutation / change and the rate at which new pathogens appear to be higher than in the past.
Consequently, you wouldn't necessarily expect ancestral "defaults" to be optimal for modern environments.
> you wouldn't necessarily expect ancestral "defaults" to be optimal
I like the term ancestral defaults and indeed, we've come a long way since then and our biological and environmental reality is substantially different.
There is this book series Mortal Coil by Emily Suvada which imagines a future where technology has advanced enough to allow one to tweak their genome as easily as we use apps on our phone today. It was a fascinating read.
>our biological and environmental reality is substantially different.
As true as it might be, that does not mean that it is possible to work around evolution to change ourselves to fit better with the new reality.
>We're not really calorie constrained anymore
Why do you bring this up? It seems a weird hypothesis to bring up given that the parent comment did not suggest the possibility...
In the agriculture world, application of harpin proteins (https://www3.epa.gov/pesticides/chem_search/reg_actions/regi...) can be used to help treat diseases by inducing a defense response. Mind you, it’s not a standalone treatment, but helps make applications of fungicides and the like far more effective.
Pathogen defenses can roughly be thought of having a metabolic cost at the very least. Meaning if there’s no selection pressure (such as death) otherwise, then it often ends up being more optimal to not have a defense active until it’s needed.
Problem is we have a global distribution system that is forcing organisms that have previously evolved into an equilibrium with the disease complex in their area, to encounter multiple novel threats in rapid succession. Like how aggressive species of downy and powdery mildews are now everywhere in the US. Giving plants a boost by inducing defenses early on helps them resist the onset of infection and helps treatment succeed.
No. Evolution is not "tuning" it's just statistics at a huge scale. The high likelihood of back pain, the lack of important sensors, broken synthesis pathways, this is not a carefully tuned system, this is just blind luck plus statistics. Which means we can do better because we're purposeful.
>we can do better because we're purposeful.
"Purposeful" does not help if we are mostly clueless.
We know enough specific things about immunology and about the illnesses we're trying to avoid to be something more than clueless and we're learning more all the time, including about the potential applications of "everything vaccines" that are being tested for potential programmatic use.
Don't we have a problem of ever increasing auto-immune diseases? If we know "enough" then I think we should be able to make it go away. Until that happens, I don't think humanity can claim to know "enough".
Also, evolved systems are hard to reverse engineer.
https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
If something simple like an electronic circuit with comparatively short evolution can end up with mysterious, un-intutive and complex inter-dependent behavior, imagine how non-understandable an immune system that evolved over millions of years can be..
So I still think we are mostly clueless, and it is nearly impossible to safely engineer changes into something that was not engineered in the first place...
There's no wise guiding force behind evolution. It's all guesswork.
It might be guess work, but it has got a ruthless filter called natural selection and really long time to get here.
So I don't see your point. It is really tuning for surviving within the constrains.
There's no guessing force behind evolution. It's just statistics at scale.
Yea, so what is the point in this context?
Evolution is not a process toward better quality of life and life expectancy of individuals. As long as enough individuals can reach the age to procreate in their environment evolution is done. Evolution didn’t train our bodies to reject the diseases we already have the vaccines for neither, so your reasoning would apply to smallpox as well. And what about viruses appeared after Homo sapiens evolved (such as HIV)?
I don't think it works like that, from my recollection of the uni courses I did 20 years ago.
Even a small advantage like 1% will quickly propagate in a population, because it's about advantage over 1,000s of generations.
That this disease defence CAN be turned on, means some people would have at some point had a genetic mutation to turn it on.
As the GP pointed out, therefore it must be a net negative from an evolutionary stand point.
I also suspect it would be calorific consumption, as someone else said, so it might be ok.
However, there are plausible other explanations. For example there are medical conditions that result from a too aggressive immune system and it could instead be reducing the chance of that occuring.
I would say you are both right in that if you have two competing variables (on-time for the defence vs calorie consumption), when the main causes of death before procreating were infectious disease and malnutrition before modern times, I would expect some equilibrium to be reached and we have not had that much time to evolve since caloric scarcity in the western world was a solved problem for large swaths of the population.
If in the future we could trade a few hundred extra calories per day for a great immune system (without auto-immune side effects) we would have found a nice cheat code!
Thinking about your point- I bet we do not know if some people have it on or not. It feels like something that would have to be specifically investigated.
Don't bat immune systems work like this? Except they end up in equilibrium instead of eliminating the viruses, which is why it's so dangerous to come into contact with them.
I think almost everyone would avoid this if it meant you became deadly to your dog or cat.
Fascinating. Looks like you’re right. However, disease and other stressors can disrupt that equilibrium.
https://news.usask.ca/articles/research/2020/bat-super-immun...
Which means bats are the Mr Burns of the animal kingdom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI0euMFAWF8
Next up: scientists are creating the everything vaccine for dogs and cats.
Maybe not! Let's find out.
I'm in my armchair thinking autoimmune diseases.
Autoimmune diseases often are due to suboptimal vitamin D3 softgel intake (typically 4-5K IU) or suboptimal magnesium intake (300-400 mg). Bringing both to highly optimal levels should minimize the risk of development of new or worsening autoimmune diseases, although it won't revert any existing ones. Low dosing either one doesn't work in this context.
Those who reject this even after reading the following 100% deserve to suffer, but worse yet, they make others suffer, often due to their conflict of interest as shills for pharma. The general commitment to truth is well below zero for those who stand to gain from its suppression.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-10-vitamin-d-deficiency-...
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01-vitamin-d-supplements...
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-02-magnesium-vitamin-d-i...
But that just means more $$$ for the pharma, so not sure why that would bother them.
1. do randomized control against *inert* placebo 2. measure net health benefit over 10 years
If #1 and #2 look good, by all means roll this out.
> put the lungs into a constant state of readiness, allowing fast responses to almost any invading germ
Pretty sure we call this "autoimmune disorder"
That’s how the zombie apocalypse starts in many novels
It seems like every year we find links between viruses and disease. I wonder if broader vaccines will lead to accidentally eradicating some diseases like the HPV vaccine is currently eradicating cervical cancer.
https://archive.is/ZSvop
the tech behind this is cool but i wonder if the delivery mechanism is gonna be a bottleneck for scaling. if they cant solve the stability of the platform then its basically just a theoretical win. how are they planning to handle the actual distribution at scale though?
I hesitate applying credibility to any article written on April 1
How much you want to bet that you'll have to get a yearly booster shot so their stock prices can keep going up?
As someone who has taken the HPV vaccine, I'd take the other side of that trade. It's been 6 years since covid mania, who is taking these booster shots now? Anyone?
> who is taking these booster shots now?
People who would be at risk of serious harm if they catch it. At least that's how it works in here in Norway. See https://www.fhi.no/en/va/vaccines-for-adults/vaccines-in-the...
Same here in France, and it’s free as in “paid by public money".
persons aged 65 years and over; people under 65 with certain chronic diseases (including children from 6 months of age); pregnant women; people with obesity (with a body mass index, BMI, greater than or equal to 40); persons staying in a follow-up care facility or in a medico-social accommodation facility, irrespective of their age. Vaccination is also recommended for other populations, in order to ensure indirect protection: health professionals (especially those who have contact with people at risk), the entourage of infants under 6 months at risk of serious complications and immunocompromised people, home help for vulnerable people, professionals exposed to swine and avian influenza viruses.
https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/actualites/A...
I hadn't since the pandemic was (more or less) over, but last November I got a booster shot, as people seemed to be getting more sick than before. I know someone who (probably) has long-term covid, and you definitely don't want to catch that. However, I always become sick the next day, so I'm not too eager to get it.
If someone got the jabs and has long COVID now, it'd be best to assume that it's not long COVID but vaccine injury, unless we acknowledge that the vaccines aren't all that effective (nor safe for that matter). At least the few people around me willing to consider this got this confirmed by their doctors after many tests and lots of gaslighting.
So like the AI of vaccines? Sounds promising!
Joe Rogan wouldn't like this.
Joe who?
“Put that **** directly into my veins”, as they say
That's how it typically works, yes.
Typically intramuscular actually
That's true.