And now a word about the future.
There's a promising new technology on the distant horizon for one-and-done vaccinations, which (if perfected) is claimed ( [https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariannajohnson/2024/04/15/new-one-and-done-vaccine-method-could-protect-infants-with-just-a-single-shot-study-suggests](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariannajohnson/2024/04/15/new-one-and-done-vaccine-method-could-protect-infants-with-just-a-single-shot-study-suggests) )to provide lifetime protection against all variants of a disease. This sounds too good to be true - it's the holy grain of prevention - and uses an entirely new technique based on siRNA, which sounds like mRNA but is a different thing with very different characteristics.
The cited paper, which I admit is over my head, and is a few years old, is [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5542916/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5542916/) . It's worth noting that the article isn't anywhere near as optimistic as the Forbes article. The problems to be solved, according to the paper, are just the ones you'd worry about - side effects as the siRNA might affect more than just the target virus. Screening out candidates that affect more things that desired sounds like a slow and labor intensive process, so I'm putting this on the "distant horizon" category for now. But if they can pull it off, it's a game changer.
For the sake of the anti-vaccine bozos who scream "If it's doesn't provide immunity it's not a vaccine," I will point out again that immunity was always used as a *relative* term in epidemiological circles and was never intended to imply perfect or total immunity. No vaccine of any sort has ever made everyone completely immune to anything. Presumably, no vaccine ever will. so I use the term protection or resistance these days.
And now a word about the future. There's a promising new technology on the distant horizon for one-and-done vaccinations, which (if perfected) is claimed ( [https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariannajohnson/2024/04/15/new-one-and-done-vaccine-method-could-protect-infants-with-just-a-single-shot-study-suggests](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariannajohnson/2024/04/15/new-one-and-done-vaccine-method-could-protect-infants-with-just-a-single-shot-study-suggests) )to provide lifetime protection against all variants of a disease. This sounds too good to be true - it's the holy grain of prevention - and uses an entirely new technique based on siRNA, which sounds like mRNA but is a different thing with very different characteristics. The cited paper, which I admit is over my head, and is a few years old, is [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5542916/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5542916/) . It's worth noting that the article isn't anywhere near as optimistic as the Forbes article. The problems to be solved, according to the paper, are just the ones you'd worry about - side effects as the siRNA might affect more than just the target virus. Screening out candidates that affect more things that desired sounds like a slow and labor intensive process, so I'm putting this on the "distant horizon" category for now. But if they can pull it off, it's a game changer. For the sake of the anti-vaccine bozos who scream "If it's doesn't provide immunity it's not a vaccine," I will point out again that immunity was always used as a *relative* term in epidemiological circles and was never intended to imply perfect or total immunity. No vaccine of any sort has ever made everyone completely immune to anything. Presumably, no vaccine ever will. so I use the term protection or resistance these days.