Hacker News Reader

Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

That's probably why they tend to start these trials with people who are already in medically dire straits.

If someone is currently pretty much guaranteed to die -- which is what the eligibility criteria sound like to me, someone correct me if I'm wrong here -- then there's less concern compared to accidentally killing someone who was doing fine before. And those initial trials will let you check for things like virus mutations.

They did the same thing with the pig heart transplant recently, did the operation on a guy who desperately needed a new heart but was ineligible for a regular transplant.

View on HN

I think jvalencia meant what if the virus transmits between humans for example, and escapes into the wild.

oh crap, didn't even consider this as a possible 'side effect' I hope someone on HN who has the right scientific background can explain why this is highly unlikely or an impossible outcome..

I would presume because flu vaccines etc. require infecting a human with a virus in some form or another, there was plenty of time to ensure engineered viruses do not transmit.

Is that an accurate comparison? I don't know much about biology so I'm open to be corrected, but I thought that flu vaccines are attenuated or dead versions of the virus, which aren't strong enough to transmit, and RNA vaccines don't include the full virus at all.

I stand corrected (but FWIW I don't think there's a strong reason for worry unless one is a specialist in this field and has concrete grounds for concern).

Flu vaccine does not infect you with the flu. It feeds something that looks like carcasses of the flu virus to your immune system to train it.

Not quite.

1) There are live adenovirus vaccines currently in use (e.g., https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0264410X163061...).

2) People report being sick from inactivated vaccines so those carcasses you mention evidently still trigger symptoms, and according to Wikipedia "most" viral vectors are designed to be incapable of replication so presumably some could transmit. Additionally, at least with Sputnik botched inactivation had been reported (by Brazil, https://www.dw.com/en/brazil-was-there-sloppiness-with-the-s...). Frankly if I get symptoms and am contagious then I will consider myself infected for all intents and purposes.

In the end, though, we can engineer non-transmittable viruses if warranted, and with proper care we successfully do so. I don't know the approach taken with the cancer-fighting virus in question but I bet proper care had been taken.

Great job cherry picking tangentially related info off the internet. Those kind aren't in widespread use for the flu.

Technically you aren't incorrect but presenting the information like that is disingenuous.

This is almost exactly the premise of “I Am Legend” — the film, at least.

I think the book deals with a bacteria-based pandemic of unspecified origin. It does have a much, much better plot than the movie tho.

The alternative, book-correct ending apparently failed with test audiences who failed to identify the doctor as the bad guy.

https://youtu.be/Bju1srxOYxo

oh, I didn't know that ending existed, thanks!

It's been a while since I read the book, but it makes sense to me people failed to identify with the doctor as the bad guy at the end of the movie.

In the book, we're shown what amounts to a small love story between him and a vampire, and the living-vampires brutalizing the dead-vampires, and finally the doctor.

There's a ton of build up to the reversal that the alt ending does not seem to have.

“Life always finds a way”

We're swimming in a sea of viruses. Not sure why we'd expect this one to be any more effective than another.

We have one that we tried to get rid of for 2 years now and we ended up giving up on that.

We have however developed effective treatment for the infected at this point as well as have a very effective vaccine. If whatever escapes turns out to be worse, I think our response will be much better. Plus remember that we eradicated smallpox entirely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com