Submitted by tonymmorley t3_za6yyq in Futurology
TheGoodFight2015 t1_iyl9ouj wrote
Reply to comment by redrightreturning in Vaccine prompts HIV antibodies in 97 per cent of people in small study by tonymmorley
If you were in the highest dose experimental group, why would you make the conclusion that you are immune to HIV? Are you saying you believe you were likely exposed to HIV virus but that medication ended up not working in the study?
redrightreturning t1_iylaaw8 wrote
No, no one was exposed to HIV, that would obviously be unethical. The way the drug worked was that it was supposed to mimic some of the HIV proteins and cause your body to make antibodies to those. The study was also experimenting with a novel mechanism of injecting the vaccine, using an electrical sock (for lack of a better word) to facilitate the uptake of the vaccine.
*shock, not sock
Louisville_Jason t1_iyli7cj wrote
I'm sorry...using a what?
bootymix96 t1_iyllkh9 wrote
Pretty sure they meant electric shock, which is a phenomenon known as electroporation (Sardesai & Weiner 2011). According to Sardesai and Weiner (2011), electroporation involves a series of “brief electric pulses” administered in conjunction with DNA-based injected vaccines to boost the vaccine’s uptake by our cells through “transient and reversible permeabilization of the cell membrane.”
Ojiambo (2021) discusses the administration process in the context of COVID-19 vaccinations. The DNA-based vaccine is injected, a separate hand-held device is used to generate the electrical impulses at the injection site immediately afterwards, and those impulses induce electroporation and allow the vaccine molecules to break through our cell membranes and increase our immune system response to the vaccine (Ojiambo 2021).
techno156 t1_iylqg4w wrote
Interesting that electroporation works on people. I only expected it to work on bacteria, or to be unsafe for humans due to the whole heart and brain thing.
Just_Another_Wookie t1_iym025p wrote
As long as the path of the current doesn't cross the brain or heart, it's all good!
dromaeovet t1_iym1uqt wrote
Electroporation is one of the principles by which Dolly the sheep was cloned :) They basically took cell contents that could eventually become the sheep, used electroporation to insert it into a recipient cell, and then implanted that in the surrogate.
redrightreturning t1_iymfsy4 wrote
Yes this is exactly what I meant! Thank you for adding your knowledge.
I will say the shocks hurt pretty bad. The first time they told me it would be like getting punched in the arm. Well it turns out I had never been punched before so I had no idea what to expect and almost passed out. Subsequent times I was ready for it and it wasn’t as bad.
MicrosoftOSX t1_iylkd89 wrote
e-sock. like e-mail, but a sock
JebediahKerman3999 t1_iylo026 wrote
If you put a sock over the vaccine, when the virus grabs it it only has the sock
MicrosoftOSX t1_iylovh3 wrote
It is especially effective around the end of the year
teraflux t1_iylm1jq wrote
I use SOCKS 5, great for pirating things
redrightreturning t1_iymfyqo wrote
Woops, I meant an electrical shock. A user below did a good job explaining what the process is and why they used it.
TheGoodFight2015 t1_iyvqox9 wrote
Sorry I didn’t mean exposed in the study, I meant exposed at some other period in your life. But then I see you said they believe they weren’t exposed, so my post was pretty confusing. So you’re basically wondering how well the drug worked for you personally. I’m just still confused because wouldn’t they provide data for the efficacy in the experimental group of that trial? Or are you saying it’s still ongoing?
Pjcrafty t1_iylaili wrote
He means that he got the highest dose of vaccine, so since it looked promising in general he may be immune since he got a big vaccine dosage.
The experimental group in a vaccine study isn’t exposed to what they’re vaccinating for. That would be extremely unethical.
They compare the vaccinated population to the unvaccinated control group in the population and see if the people who got vaccinated contract the virus at a lower rate.
So, for example, you vaccinate 10k people and have a control group of 10k people who get a placebo. Over the next 5 years, 100 people in the control group get HIV but only 2 people in the vaccine group do. That implies that the vaccine works, because ideally your control and test groups are similar enough that the only thing that makes them different is having the vaccine.
Baud_Olofsson t1_iylwdh0 wrote
And as a sidenote, this is why vaccine trials usually take so long: it takes ages for enough people to get infected to be able to draw any real conclusions about the vaccine's efficacy.
With COVID, which was spreading like wildfire, you didn't need to wait long at all - you got statistically significant results within months.
redrightreturning t1_iyleugw wrote
I’m not a “he”. Pro tip: If you don’t know someone’s gender it’s completely bizarre to assume. It’s literally no skin off your nose to write “they” instead of assuming someone’s gender. Do better.
Pjcrafty t1_iylfwlh wrote
I was using he in the “gender neutral” sense, but you’re right that that’s fallen out of favor.
While I do apologize for misgendering you, I think that you could have made your point a bit more politely. That wouldn’t have been any skin off of your nose either.
NotShey t1_iylikz1 wrote
That's an incredibly aggressive and rude way to address someone making an innocent mistake.
[deleted] t1_iylgsht wrote
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redrightreturning t1_iylhka9 wrote
Thanks for engaging. I’m glad you don’t care, and still therefore took the time to write about how much i shouldn’t care. Since you took the time to write, I thought I’d give you the same courtesy.
I think what annoys me is when people assume you are male, it’s like male is the “normal” default. But actually, being female is default for me, and like half of the world. Just like it would be weird for someone to assume I’m Chinese (I’m not) or Indian (I’m not) just because there are a lot of Chinese and Indian people in the world, it’s weird to assume I’m a man. There’s no benefit to assuming my ethnicity, and there is likewise no benefit to assuming my gender. Furthermore, it takes no more effort for someone to write “they” instead of “he”. The only difference is that it means they weren’t assuming things about my identity.
[deleted] t1_iyliie3 wrote
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FormalWrangler294 t1_iylhppz wrote
Don’t assume someone on the internet is a native English speaker. That’s racist, do better.
Whiterabbit-- t1_iylf9xo wrote
fwiw depending on how you learned English, "he" could very well be the non-gendered singular pronoun. "he" is the male or generic pronoun. "she" is the feminine pronoun. what I'm saying is that person may not be trying to insult you. but regardless, I want to thank you for your participation in the vaccine.
nicktheone t1_iylm68j wrote
Moreover, in many languages masculine pronouns are the neutral/undefined gender by rule so it's also possible they are not an English native speaker and used their own grammar rules.
HomoRoboticus t1_iyllu3o wrote
> it’s completely bizarre to assume
I assume this all the time on Reddit. It's not bizarre at all.
It's not right, sure. But it's not bizarre.
> It’s literally no skin off your nose to write “they”
"They" is traditionally a plural pronoun, so, either we knowingly make a grammatical mistake and introduce possible confusion there or we just take a 50/50. My English prof, a very snooty old white dude with a lot at stake in such trivial grammatical affairs, suggested using "he" half the time and "she" the other half - on different essays/posts of course so as not to be too confusing.
Whatever side you come down on this - and there is no objective right or wrong here - the one thing we can all agree on is that it's trivial and only pedantic cretins like me (and apparently you) worry about it.
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