Lots of people did assert that adenovirus vaccines were old-fashioned. But this is false. The first such vaccine was approved in 2019 (maybe a more appropriate comparison date is is 2015). I am skeptical of trying to manipulate lies, even if it is easy to predict that people will ultimately believe many falsehoods.
Note the tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Germans who got the illegal Stöcker vaccine, a recombinant protein vaccine, that is, a 20th century vaccine, an actual old-fashioned vaccine. Were they just opposed to government sanction, or did they care about how old the techniques were and would have gotten the Novavax vaccine, had it been available? Maybe a better strategy would be to encourage actual diversity.
I recently went to a public space that advertised that its escalator handles were disinfected by UVC. Focusing on marketing can produce the worst of both worlds.
Viral vector vaccines aren’t old fashioned, I agree, but they are an older technology. We’ve been playing around with them since a least the 1980s (summary). You’re right that the first one to get US approval wasn’t until 2019, but a lot of that was the FDA moves very slowly when it doesn’t have a reason to move quickly (well, and still pretty slowly even when it does). As of the beginning of covid I’d say viral vector vaccines had a ~20y head start?
Right, Wikipedia cites a 1972 paper using viruses to deliver DNA, but no vaccine until 1984. Whereas, mRNA in lipids went from delivery in 1989 to a vaccine in 1993-1994. So twenty years on one metric, but ten years on another metric that probably screens off the first one by virtue of coming later.
But that’s just playing around. Obstacles artificially created by the FDA are real obstacles. To the extent that the vaccine-hesitant mean anything by “old-fashioned,” they mean large scale experience in humans. More people received vector vaccines in the Oxford trials than in all deployment before. If you want to know about Bell’s palsy, that’s the only way to find out. On the other hand, if you want years of follow-up, a 2015 trial of vector vaccines could have been an big advantage over mRNA vaccines, although I don’t know if they actually followed up after years. With no placebo group, it’s not clear what analysis they could make.
Lots of people did assert that adenovirus vaccines were old-fashioned. But this is false. The first such vaccine was approved in 2019 (maybe a more appropriate comparison date is is 2015). I am skeptical of trying to manipulate lies, even if it is easy to predict that people will ultimately believe many falsehoods.
Note the tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Germans who got the illegal Stöcker vaccine, a recombinant protein vaccine, that is, a 20th century vaccine, an actual old-fashioned vaccine. Were they just opposed to government sanction, or did they care about how old the techniques were and would have gotten the Novavax vaccine, had it been available? Maybe a better strategy would be to encourage actual diversity.
I recently went to a public space that advertised that its escalator handles were disinfected by UVC. Focusing on marketing can produce the worst of both worlds.
Viral vector vaccines aren’t old fashioned, I agree, but they are an older technology. We’ve been playing around with them since a least the 1980s (summary). You’re right that the first one to get US approval wasn’t until 2019, but a lot of that was the FDA moves very slowly when it doesn’t have a reason to move quickly (well, and still pretty slowly even when it does). As of the beginning of covid I’d say viral vector vaccines had a ~20y head start?
Not sure what level of playing around you’re talking about, but there was also research on mRNA therapeutics as early as the late 1980s.
Right, Wikipedia cites a 1972 paper using viruses to deliver DNA, but no vaccine until 1984. Whereas, mRNA in lipids went from delivery in 1989 to a vaccine in 1993-1994. So twenty years on one metric, but ten years on another metric that probably screens off the first one by virtue of coming later.
But that’s just playing around. Obstacles artificially created by the FDA are real obstacles. To the extent that the vaccine-hesitant mean anything by “old-fashioned,” they mean large scale experience in humans. More people received vector vaccines in the Oxford trials than in all deployment before. If you want to know about Bell’s palsy, that’s the only way to find out. On the other hand, if you want years of follow-up, a 2015 trial of vector vaccines could have been an big advantage over mRNA vaccines, although I don’t know if they actually followed up after years. With no placebo group, it’s not clear what analysis they could make.
You may be right; I’m not very knowledgeable here and digging deeper into this isn’t something I’m going to be able to do very well.
For the point I was trying to make in the original article, it seems like your other vaccine examples would have been better.