Regarding the concern that oral vaccines could trigger allergies—you’re not the only person who has voiced that concern. Based on my crude understanding from talking with ChatGPT briefly about this, if the vaccine targets M cells (which this one is hypothesized to do), it induces a systemic and possibly mucousal immune response, not the type of IgE mediated response that causes allergies to develop.
I think what you’re saying about vaccine hesitancy is the conventional thinking, and it’s not wrong—there is indeed a large partisan gap. I guess what I’m saying is that decentralized development of yeast-based vaccines should reduce hesitancy on the margin, given the extreme safety of subunit vaccines in general.
When it comes to messaging a key question seems to be about whether to present the goal as increasing safety or about presenting it as reducing vaccine hesitancy. If you present it as something that’s about increasing safety that might help to get support from the MAHA crowd but at the same time it can alienate mainstream researchers.
One idea that comes to my mind that you could do without alienating too many people would be to run a petition with Jay Bhattacharya as the target to change NIH policy on self experimentation. The administration wants to the amount of science that gets prevented by Institutional Review Boards, so it would be good fit into what they want to do anyway and might be a relatively easy win that might expose the project in a favorable light to the people at the top of the current HHS.
Regarding the concern that oral vaccines could trigger allergies—you’re not the only person who has voiced that concern. Based on my crude understanding from talking with ChatGPT briefly about this, if the vaccine targets M cells (which this one is hypothesized to do), it induces a systemic and possibly mucousal immune response, not the type of IgE mediated response that causes allergies to develop.
I think what you’re saying about vaccine hesitancy is the conventional thinking, and it’s not wrong—there is indeed a large partisan gap. I guess what I’m saying is that decentralized development of yeast-based vaccines should reduce hesitancy on the margin, given the extreme safety of subunit vaccines in general.
That’s great regarding the allergy concern.
When it comes to messaging a key question seems to be about whether to present the goal as increasing safety or about presenting it as reducing vaccine hesitancy. If you present it as something that’s about increasing safety that might help to get support from the MAHA crowd but at the same time it can alienate mainstream researchers.
One idea that comes to my mind that you could do without alienating too many people would be to run a petition with Jay Bhattacharya as the target to change NIH policy on self experimentation. The administration wants to the amount of science that gets prevented by Institutional Review Boards, so it would be good fit into what they want to do anyway and might be a relatively easy win that might expose the project in a favorable light to the people at the top of the current HHS.