Studies are still required because a hypothesis is just that - a hypothesis - but I wouldn't completely dismiss a discussion of the mechanism, because this may still provide meaningful context and/or help form an initial understanding of risk before having real study results.
So, by this point, you’re telling me I can’t understand what editing a cell in my excel spreadsheet will do without a huge test of hundreds or thousands of people all making the same edit to figure out if it’ll work.
We know it works. We know how it works. It works by handing the task to the immune system and getting the fuck out of the way.
Clinical trials are to assess if it works well enough to consider widespread use.
Yes, I still test my code.
But when I write it, I do it with the lessons I’ve learned over decades, and it’s usually close to working before the first test comes into the picture.
That’s where we are with vaccine production: we’ve been cranking them out for decades, and the process is so robust that failures at in the six plus nines range of outliers.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Drug-discovery-and-devel...
You’re building things from a library of tested techniques.
Vaccines aren’t drugs.
They’re a method of delivering material to the immune system for it to do its thing.
We do that by finding the thing we want to present, finding a pipeline to extract that, and finding a delivery mechanism that is tested and compatible.
We don’t “discover” a new flu vaccine ever my season, we put together this seasons release.
That’s why it didn’t take years to design and release a new vaccine for covid: we have the technology already, we just needed to pick the payload and select the rocket best suited for the job.
SARS-CoV-2 RNA reverse-transcribed and integrated into the human genome
I haven't seen it in this thread either, but it's been a very common [false] talking point in the conspiracy/anti-vax circles.