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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Not a virologist or immunologist, but I work in a related field and closely with immunologists who work directly on flu, including H5N1. We discuss this stuff regularly. Not comfortable giving specifics because a relatively small number of people work in it.

    You’re both right, but it just comes down to chance. The amount of evolution the flu can go through in 6 months is equivalent to billions of years for animals simply because of its high rate of replication. Lots of viral replication within a single organism, lots of opportunities to evolve.

    I doubt that any strain that became a human epidemic would maintain a 50% survival rate for long as the more virulent strains tend to be more virulent partially because they are more survivable, but it’s not as simple as that and it could happen if the virus can shed and spread to others much faster than it kills (more likely in covid due to shedding in the incubation period). You don’t need a 50% survival rate to make a disease devastating to a population though. We’ve definitely seen this before. Also, your point about long-term effects despite survival is also a valid concern.

    This shit is always brewing largely because of industrial animal farming and we know it. We teach it in undergraduate evolution virology courses. No reason we can’t take additional steps to prevent it. The typical flu vaccine should provide some level of protection, but a single seasonal flue vaccine is not super effective on its own, particularly against strains not included in that year. This is why it’s vital to get the flu shot every year so you can boost the efficacy through cross-protection (kind of a contentious statement within immunology). This can greatly increase the efficacy of the vaccine by combining your immunological memory of all these different flu vaccines, even if the protection of one of those single vaccines is not particularly high. Note that the current flu vaccine you can get doesn’t prevent infection or spread, it only lessens the symptoms.

    Additionally, there is an adjuvanted H5N1-specific vaccine that is not given to the public. This should provide better protection, but it’s held in reserves and only deployed in the case of a pandemic. I haven’t seen the data on its protection profile (they say 91%), it was before more time, but I’m familiar with the adjuvant AS03 and know that NIAID has been providing grants to research groups to further improve upon this vaccine for H5N1 specifically. Not sure if any new versions have reached clinical trials.

    Some other factors to consider: Do enough people in the US consistently get the flu shot? (Lol, get real.) What about the rest of the world population? Is the virus different enough from the H5N1 species covered in the previous vaccines? There are a lot of unknowable factors influencing a potential outbreak and making a better vaccine specific to each flu strain is very difficult due to its crazy ability to evolve and the difficulties of vaccine development.

    All that said, I’ll take precautions to avoid catching this and I think taking the threat more seriously than the US government is currently is justified. If they aren’t deploying the 2013 H5N1 vaccine to at-risk populations like industrial animal workers, they’ve already dropped the ball imo.

















  • MeowZedongtoMemes@lemmy.mlBut "socialism" is a scary word
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    3 days ago

    I would only suspect anti-Stalin leftists of ignorance as I have yet to find an instance where someone talks about Stalin in this way and it isn’t from a place of ignorance. Never seen it from someone who was informed and purposely pushing anti-Stalin Cold War propaganda…except fucking Trots.

    Not that ignorance is a good excuse for their actions, but the amount of damage propaganda has done to the history surrounding Stalin is very difficult to break through and shouldn’t be overlooked. If someone didn’t grow up in a Western country, it seems they have a serious advantage in overcoming the challenge of looking at Stalin with a critical eye because they aren’t constantly exposed to an overwhelming amount of trash heaped on his grave. Not only can it be difficult to find information that isn’t Red Scare propaganda on your own, but you’ll be ostracized when trying to speak to anyone about the subject from anything but an anti-comminist perspective. It makes having discussions on the subject difficult and I can’t say I would have ever broken through this without the Internet.

    Maybe I’m going too easy on them because overall I agree with you. I also want to give people the benefit of the doubt because I was once where they were and my anti-Soviet, anti-Stalin, and anti-China stances all came from a place of ignorance (and miseducation) that I only overcame once I began looking at the topics with a critical eye and put effort into learning about them from a different (and materialist) perspective.