#13 | Posted by truthhurts
You overstate things a bit.
Like no more flu vaccine or shingles vaccines or pneumonia or MRSA or covid vaccines?
Annual influenza vaccines aren't really due to new research. They're the same production system every year that makes a call somewhere around late spring (in the northern hemisphere) based on what's circulating in the southern hemisphere and Asia/Australia. There's actually a fairly predictable route strains of influenza move across over time.
The other ones already exist in some form except MRSA. There's no vaccine for that as far as I know, but I fully acknowledge I could be wrong.
If I'm to be entirely blunt, I'd say the golden age of vaccine research looking for vaccines against current diseases is largely over. Candidates for major global illnesses like Dengue haven't done well in trials and vaccines against things like RSV target an ever smaller pool of effected people, unfortunately. It's hard to gain support for a treatment without a major market.
We got out of the last pandemic because we were able to develop a vaccine. What happens when the scientists who have devoted their lives to finding cures for this stuff just leave. What happens next pandemic?
We did. However, mRNA vaccines aren't without their own set of issues that make them a hard sell (IMO) for long term use. They're great for emergency use or, even more excitingly, personalized medicine for things like cancer vaccines. In fact, I insisted that my family and I get the Novavax vaccine (non-mRNA vaccine) this year for multiple reasons.
Currently, "leaving" means going to industry. The talent will remain, it will just rust, if you will. There are other hurdles far larger that RFK might affect.
More to the RFK point, a lot of companies have already switched gears to what he's talking about. Years ago. He's just saying what's already happening as if he's going to cause it.
For instance, a hot topic now is treating obesity and diabetes with GLP-1 antagonists. Cell therapy (ie CAR-T cells) have shifted from cancer treatment to autoimmune syndrome treatment.
Chronic diseases haven't been ignored, they're just harder to puzzle out than RFK leads one to believe.
Nor are they as simple as remove red dye #5 from the food stream.
But then again, when you're a grifter, truthfulness isn't really you're thing.
