Inhaled Vaccine Delivers Broad Protection Against SARS-CoV-2

[blakesterz]

MIT looks like they're trying inhaled vaccines for cancer: https://news.mit.edu/2021/vaccination-inhalation-0319

And several others are looking at CoV too: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33749491/

I guess nasal vaccines have been around for a while but the inhaled thing is still pretty new(ish) and from what I could read on some scattered short mentions in other reading, it's not really very widely used? I may be wrong on that, and can't find a great citation.

[derbOac]

An open source inhaled vaccine was one of the first vaccines to be publicly promoted. I've always wondered how it would fare in RCTs, as it would be interesting if an open, unregulated vaccine design proposed relatively early in the pandemic became a model for coronavirus vaccines going forward.

[Confiks]

Publicly promoted, DIY-vaccine indeed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23983756

[xiphias2]

What is the main reason that inhaled vaccines are not in use today for flu for example? Is there some new technological breakthrough for delivery that was needed?

[kwantam]

They are! Inhaled flu vaccines are generally live attenuated virus, which isn't recommended for everyone but is perfectly effective for a large segment of the population:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/nasalspray.htm

[ageitgey]

Nasal flu vaccines are widely used. For example in the UK, all children in school are offered a nasal flu vaccine every year [1].

[1] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/child-flu-vaccine...

[consumer451]

From a lay person's point of view, I am trying to imagine if there would be significant extra mass required to distribute a billion inhalable vs injectable vaccines. It seems like there would be additional mass and volume. Could that be one reason?

[dang]

Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments. It leads to worse threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[petsounds]

There are ~10k people dying of COVID every day since Omicron was detected, sounds like we could use a better one

[kwantam]

It's a tempting sound bite, but it's wrong.

First, a real vaccine is designed to be much safer than the disease it protects against (compare extremely rare incidence of vaccine side effects with extremely common incidence of hospitalization for infection). What would be the point otherwise?

Second, in the case of COVID variants prior to Omicron, infection is 5x less effective than vaccination at protecting against future infection: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s1029-Vaccination-Of...

[schmorptron]

I hear it has some pretty sick side effects though

[belltaco]

A pretty terrible one if so, since it's killing thousands just in US every day.

[vmception]

I get it, because the similarity is that it is a weakened version of the virus, just like how our non-mRNA vaccines have been structured

[onion2k]

This is what they put in chemtrails.

;)

[sschueller]

Just mix it into the tear gas canisters at the protests. Problem solved, either the anti vaxxers stay home or get vaxxed.

[sleepingadmin]

Does it prevent infection? If not, it's not a vaccine.

[rsfern]

A vaccine doesn’t necessarily need to prevent infection to be called a vaccine, prophylactic vaccines are a thing.

Here is wiki in 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20130516001246/https://en.m.wiki...

The whole “they revised the definition” thing is itself revisionist history

[prohobo]

This shouldn't be downvoted, it's true.

There's nothing wrong with creating good drugs and therapies, and this looks cool, but if it doesn't stop transmission it's literally not a vaccine.

EDIT: I'm wrong. I would have been right for the wrong reasons in 2018, but now vaccines are "any substance that generates antibodies that produce immunity to disease".

[sjg007]

Maybe in your world. In the real world, however: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/imz-basics.htm

[loceng]

Under the updated/changed definition of vaccine, I think it fits; not saying that's good.

[lern_too_spel]

You're redefining the word "vaccine."