CDC's top laboratory on STDs is shut by Trump administration

I've been casually watching Moderna's progress towards a herpes vaccine which IIRC was supposed to come out in 2028.

Herpes is one of those things that obviously isn't as big a deal as cancer but it would be nice to be one less thing to worry about when having sexual encounters with new people, and sufferers of it would love to have some sort of relief from infections and the elimination of the stigma around it. It's also associated with Alzheimer's disease so the cost of not producing this vaccine might be hundreds of billions of dollars and years of life and the prevention of so much suffering down the line.

It's really dismaying to know that this kind of stuff might not come to fruition because of the combination of incompetence and intentional chaos.

I have a weird interest in herpes as a casual reader of medical research papers and there's definitely many studies that found links between herpes and neurological issues, I believe it's a much more serious problem than society perceives it as being.

Moderna isn't the government.

I think Herpes Zoster (shingles) vaccine already did a great positive impact on that front.

Though I agree, any advance against simplex would have been a big victory.

If CDC, FDA, ACIP etc. are crippled,

a) it'd be very hard to release advanced medicine

or

b) it'd be very easy to release snake oil as medicine

and both scenarios would be very bad.

Public and private sector science have historically been enmeshed by design.

Public sector medical research has been decimated in recent months, so adverse effects on products developed by private entities is an unfortunate byproduct of that.

"this kind of stuff"

Society over perceives it in fact (otherwise there wouldn't be such strong stigmatism), but there may well be unknown effects.

I believe many infections both sexually transmitted and otherwise have understudied neurological effects. It wasn't until the widespread wrath of long covid that public discussion really kicked off.

Moderna, like all modern hard-science companies, is a tiny house built on the top of hundreds of billions of dollars of government-funded research.

Just flag the 4 word comment that obviously wasn't made in good faith and move on.

ehh, I'll generally assume good faith until shown otherwise. I don't really flag something unless it shows active malice.

In this case, it was a good opportunity to educate others who may also think that the private sector wouldn't be affected by these public sector cuts. That's much better than flagging a comment that may have been simply made in ignorance.

a comment that consists entirely of x != y isn't made in good faith. It just isn't.

You're right about using it as a chance to educate others though.

Keep in mind flagging anything probably increases the chances that the entire submission is sent to purgatory (read: also flagged) via whatever flamewar detection mechanisms exist.

Generally it should only be reserved for obviously egregious things, not mere perceived bad faith.

It was in the news in the past week that the shingles vaccine may reduce dementia risk by 20%. The results also point to it being a causative effect rather than simply correlative, which, if true, is huge.

https://www.business-standard.com/health/shingles-vaccine-ma...