I’m not qualified to assess the accuracy of this post, but do very much appreciate its contribution to the discussion.
I appreciated the historical overview of vaccination at a time just before the mRNA vaccines had become formally approved anywhere. And more generally, I always like to see the Progress Studies perspective of history on LW, even if I don’t always agree with it.
This post also put the various vaccines in context, and how and why vaccination technology was developed.
And it made clear that the vaccine technology you use fundamentally changes its risk profile: e.g. if you produce a vaccine by deactivating a pathogen, you might fail to entirely do so due to manufacturing error; this specific risk would not be present in a vaccine based on a different method.
Finally, this and a related post by the author both mentioned inoculation, and made it clear that some primitive versions of vaccine technology had been available to individuals centuries ago. This in turn was helpful when reasoning about projects like RaDVaC, e.g. in terms of hero licenses and “vaccines are produced by huge pharma companies; how could a small organization ever do the same” and the like.
I’m not qualified to assess the accuracy of this post, but do very much appreciate its contribution to the discussion.
I appreciated the historical overview of vaccination at a time just before the mRNA vaccines had become formally approved anywhere. And more generally, I always like to see the Progress Studies perspective of history on LW, even if I don’t always agree with it.
This post also put the various vaccines in context, and how and why vaccination technology was developed.
And it made clear that the vaccine technology you use fundamentally changes its risk profile: e.g. if you produce a vaccine by deactivating a pathogen, you might fail to entirely do so due to manufacturing error; this specific risk would not be present in a vaccine based on a different method.
Finally, this and a related post by the author both mentioned inoculation, and made it clear that some primitive versions of vaccine technology had been available to individuals centuries ago. This in turn was helpful when reasoning about projects like RaDVaC, e.g. in terms of hero licenses and “vaccines are produced by huge pharma companies; how could a small organization ever do the same” and the like.