For those interested, I would suggest checking out Spillover by David Quammen. It goes into detail on why eradicating/eliminating zoonotic diseases isn't really feasible without also eradicating the host populations. I stumbled onto it and read it early on during SARS-CoV-2, it will give you a new perspective on the management of disease in general.
As for eradicating host populations/mosquitoes, it's not the greatest idea. Ecosystems are complicated and don't generally benefit from that sort of interference. Maybe if it's a recently invasive species, sure, as long as other species don't get inadvertently by-caught. Drastically simplifying - birds need to eat too, and they tried to do this style of ecosystem management in the past and it has had brutally adverse effects for ecosystem stability.
I think that this is an incredible development, but also seems kind of destabilizing. It's hard to say without seeming or being callous, that it seems good now, but we need to try to predict outcomes far into the future. That is to say - people think they are smart to have done it, and yeah it's doable, but is it really such a great idea to throw such a series of proverbial monkey wrenches into our proverbial biological engines?
I've yet to hear a single ecologist equivocate on eliminating aedes aegypti, the primary vector for the worst vector borne diseases, and have heard many endorse the idea. Even so, things like Wolbachia give a means of effectively inoculating the vector.
The sheer amount of human and animal* suffering caused by mosquito-borne diseases speaks strongly in favor of mosquito eradication. Over half a million people died of malaria in 2022 alone, over three quarters of them children - even if there are ecological risks, they need to be weighed against allowing that suffering to continue.
*: e.g. heartworm in dogs
It's crazy that eradicating missiles would do way better. It could even fund vaccination against mosquito-borne diseases without /figuring/ around and finding out if the chain reaction started by killing all the mosquitoes has big consequences or not.
why are you bringing this up? It's irrelevant to the topic at hand
I agree it's sort of unrelated, but I think that people are getting nerd-snipped into thinking/discussing about a complicated improvement while there's easier ones right in front of us and it's kind of sad that while easy on theory, everyone seems already defeated by our apparent inability to do something about it.
---
I guess the political turn is what seems it be off place, but if people were discussing how to make a program 0.5µs faster it'd be ok to discuss a way to shave 3s out of it, even if it was a completely different approach on a different part of the program. It'd mean that the effort is maybe being made in the wrong place.
I bet those same ecologists that endorse eliminating Aedes aegypti have taken their fair share of mosquito bites, too. Not that it takes anything away from their credibility.
Wow, the Wikipedia article on Wolbachia is absolutely fascinating, thanks. I guess now they will push Wolbachia into Anopheles and use it as another control against malaria.
I also endorse that, they've somehow made way in Europe. They are active during the day and are very aggressive.
See also, Debug:
https://verily.com/solutions/public-health/debug
It's a Verily project that causes population collapse in mosquitoes like aedes aegypti by rendering the males infertile.
> Aedes aegypti mosquitoes carry dengue, chikungunya, Zika and yellow fever diseases which have a large and growing impact on human health. They live almost exclusively in close association with humans, don’t fly very far compared to some mosquito species and are particularly difficult to attack using traditional methods, such as pesticides and source reduction of breeding sites.They’re also extensively studied in many labs around the world. We hope what we learn with the Aedes aegypti in the field will be helpful in developing new ways of tackling other mosquitoes and the diseases they transmit.
> As for eradicating host populations/mosquitoes, it's not the greatest idea...birds need to eat too
This is a false dichotomy. Malaria is transmitted by only specific and very small subset of mosquitoes. There would still be plenty of mosquitoes if you eliminate the ones that cause unimaginably massive population harm.
False equivalency, perhaps? Big assumption that all mosquito sub-species affect their environment in the same way.
We know that they share predators. We know that they share environments. We know that they share impact patterns. We also know that more than half a million people die from malaria every year.
Certainly we must be missing some factor from this analysis
> Certainly we must be missing some factor from this analysis
This is like saying nobody should ever take any medicine ever, even after years of study and analysis, because there might be some unknown harm that we haven't yet identified from it because we aren't looking in the right places. And yet we have collectively decided that taking medicine when we are sick is actually a good thing to do, because being sick in known catastrophic ways is objective and true while the unknown unknown is purely hypothetical and unfounded.
Well millions upon millions of people are dying, objectively and truly, and we can stop it. And what you have to say against a proposal that has had substantial risk analysis already done, where the harms have been determined to be nil, is something completely unfounded without a basis in any known mechanism in the real world.
It has been analyzed to death. At some point it becomes important to recognize that further objection on the same basis that has already been rebutted time and again is no longer clever and is just obstructionism with a willfully catastrophic cost.
> This is like saying nobody should ever take any medicine ever, even after years of study and analysis
Surely no-one would argue against the benefits of antibiotics, and yet after decades of successful use we're only now discovering that in using them, we're breeding resistant bacteria that we have no way to deal with. We're clever monkeys but we should remember that however hard we think, we can always miss something important, especially when we're talking about large complex biological systems.
If we can develop effective vaccines then I personally don't see the need to start deliberately exterminating species, even the truly loathesome ones.
Antibiotic resistance was foreseen pretty much from the start. And this is hardly a cautionary tale. Antibiotic resistance just makes antibiotics less effective, and you’re still better off than you were without antibiotics.
A better example would be something like tetraethyl lead, which poisoned (indeed continues to poison) huge numbers of people for relatively minor gain. Even then, the problems were known, the profit motive just won out over the don’t-poison-everyone motive.
> Surely no-one would argue against the benefits of antibiotics, and yet after decades of successful use we're only now discovering that in using them, we're breeding resistant bacteria that we have no way to deal with
People have been constantly arguing against all kinds of medicine, including antibiotics. And we have solutions to resistant bacteria. It's a social problem of developing expensive new antibiotics while restricting their market to the last line of defence. And finally, the analogy breaks down: we did develop and deploy antibiotics, and have been able to see the consequences and adapt as a result.
We're mindlessly eradicting species all the time. There might be a trolley problem in intentionally nuking one. But that's, again, socio-philosophical. If the first ecosystem we eradicate in collapses, against the predictions of practically every expert in the field, we can stop. In the meantime, we avoid a useless debate that costs millions their lives.
> If we can develop effective vaccines then I personally don't see the need to start deliberately exterminating species, even the truly loathesome ones
Again, a social problem. It's easier to get rid of the diseasse by taking out mosquitoes than it is to continuously convince populations to get vaccinated into perpetuity. (To say nothing of vaccines' adverse effects.)
> ... the analogy breaks down: we did develop and deploy antibiotics, and have been able to see the consequences and adapt as a result.
Not sure what you mean here; I was replying to this:
> Certainly we must be missing some factor from this analysis
> ---
> This is like saying nobody should ever take any medicine ever, even after years of study and analysis, because there might be some unknown harm that we haven't yet identified from it because we aren't looking in the right places.
...my point being that we are now facing previously unknown harms despite the best research available at the time (maybe antibiotic resistance itself was foreseen, but did anybody warn about hospital run-off and agricultural usage creating reservoirs of resistance-breeding via competition and horizontal gene transfer inside sewage systems? This is the sort of unforeseen consequence I'm talking about).
> We're mindlessly eradicting species all the time. There might be a trolley problem in intentionally nuking one. But that's, again, socio-philosophical. If the first ecosystem we eradicate in collapses, against the predictions of practically every expert in the field, we can stop. In the meantime, we avoid a useless debate that costs millions their lives.
This is exactly the kind of hubris I'm arguing against.
The fact that we're doing it all the time anyway is not an argument to do more of it. It's a compelling reason to do less.
Ecosystems don't generally exist in total isolation from each other, and don't just collapse when we poke them. Far more likely is that we will cause a problem that takes years or more to manifest, by which time it's out of our control and much more difficult or impossible to fix.
The debate is not useless when we're meddling with things that we don't fully understand, with unknown consequences for the environment that we live in. This is the trolley problem - do we save people from malaria now at the cost of potentially worse problems in the future? Since we don't know for sure what effect our intervention will have on a grander scale, what can't know what if any damage we're doing further down the line. I think it's OK to consider that carefully; in the meantime, vaccines are still our best option, and social problems are generally easier to quantify and address; we're pretty good at human psychology these days.
As I understand the situation with mosquito eradication, there are highly specific places where mosquitos are a critical source of biomass (I think the Arctic tundra was one example). In all other places they are completely and utterly worthless. Blood-eating (never mind species that are parasite vectors) are also a tiny percentage of the overall biodiversity, the nectar species could easily fill the gap.
Female mosquitoes bite to produce eggs, male mosquitoes feed on nectar and pollinate plants. Some orchids can only be pollinated by mosquitoes.
So no one misunderstands, there are over 3000 species of mosquitos, but most biting species of mosquitos only go after birds/amphibians.
Only a small number of species (single digit percentage) go after mammals. And even less than have been found to be vectors for disease.
The basic point is that yes, we can wipe out selected mosquito species via eradication programs (like sterile mate release) with zero consequence outside of healthier people, because human hazardous mosquitos aren’t unique to the ecological niche they fill.
The problem is that you might only find out they're important after you wipe them out, at which point it will be too late.
Will it be too late? We could move region by region and give a few years to see any changes. It's a two-way door that way.
I think collapsing the ecosystem of one region is already bad enough.
I mean that certainly sounds unequivocally true.
But "collapse" is not what I'm saying. If you were to remove mosquitos in a localized region and observe the effects on the region's ecology, you could witness the problems, reintroduce the bugs, and revitalize the region (probably it'd recover anyway).
Mosquitos are fairly localized. Their range upperbound is 7 miles. Some just fly 300 feet and breed around your house. There are plenty of ecological phenomena that are managed in "a few miles" ranges, like fish populations, forests, etc.
I haven't heard a compelling reason in any of these threads to believe that it's actually dangerous to remove them from a few sq mile area.
There's no reason to be absolutist about problems we can manage, just based on unobserved worst case solutions with no risk profile attached.
The point is that if an ecosystem needs to be "collapsed" to effect beneficial change for the humans living there in order to not die of illnesses, then so be it. Even referring to removing mosquitoes as "collapse" is not understanding the core argument, because not all collapse is bad and not all preservation is good; there is no value judgment in saying collapse but you are adding one there inherently.
If the foodchain collapses it's much worse for humans living there than malaria.
What part of the food chain is foundational on mosquitos? These are hypotheticals not rooted in any concrete argument.
I realize this is a dumb starting point, but ... Cows don't eat mosquitos, Feed corn is not pollinated by mosquitos, Orange groves do not require mosquitos. What, specifically, are we afraid of?
Sure, but it's unknown whether it will or not, that is what is being discussed.
> birds need to eat too
There's a big difference between eliminating all mosquitoes and eliminating just malaria-carrying mosquito species. IIRC studies show that if you eliminate malaria-carrying mosquito species that other mosquito species very quickly take over this ecological niche.
We have already thrown and will throw a lot of wrenches into the works. We have extensively reshaped the planet to the benefit of some species and the detriment of many others.
It's a risk, but it's not worse than the thousands of other risks we've already taken. Given the absolutely insane amount of death and suffering caused by mosquito-borne diseases, it's probably also a justifiable one.
I don't believe mosquitoes are a keystone species in any ecosystem... I remember hearing this, not sure if it's true.
But could the potential disruption to the ecosystem be as bad as the 600,000 deaths per year from malaria?
I had this idea when I was 7. I would spend all day outside and get tons of mosquito bites, but also sometimes I would go to the doctor to get shots. They seemed to me to be not entirely different things, so I would wonder why they couldn't just put the shots into mosquitos, since they didn't hurt as much.
And it turns out, you can!
They're not putting shots into the mosquitos. They're modifying the parasite the mosquito injects that lives in your liver.
When you were 7, did you yearn for modified parasites?
To be honest yes, lots of super hero stories about them. Though to be fair they're called symbiotes when they're helpful.
I could not read the whole article because It wanted me to create a account, but it seens very Unethical, inoculating people without their knowledge... .
Informed consent is an essential pre-condition to providing immunization.
> Informed consent is an essential pre-condition to providing immunization
Why does the consent need to be collected individually? We don't even require collective sign off for the factory fumes we each breathe daily. It seems reasonable for a government to consent on behalf of its governed for something like public health.
You may want to look into the Doctor's Trial at Nuremberg for why governments cannot be trusted to make decisions for citizens in the name of "public health".
> may want to look into the Doctor's Trial at Nuremberg for why governments cannot be trusted to make decisions for citizens in the name of "public health"
The Nuremberg trials are about why governments and people cannot be trusted, period.
This isn't about trust. It's about what requires individual consent, and for what groups can consent collectively. When medicine is individually administered, best practice is informed consent. But when substances are collectively administered (or removed), and this ranges from water sanitation to fluoridation to mandated fortification to factory pollutants you get to breathe, we have deep precedents that say it's fine to ask the group together and skip individual consent.
That doesn't mean this is fine. (The risk-reward seems skewed to the left when eradication of malaria-carrying species is on the table.) The argument is simply flawed. We simply do not get individual consent every time an artificial substance is introduced into peoples' bodies.
> It seems reasonable for a government to consent on behalf of its governed for something like public health.
Does it? How can you guarantee that your government's interpretation of "public health" matches yours?
> How can you guarantee that your government's interpretation of "public health" matches yours?
There are no guarantees in social systems. This is true for governing legitimacy as well as concepts like consent.
Sure, being part of a democracy means I'm giving implicit consent for the government to do things like raise taxes. It does not mean I'm consenting to the government injecting whatever they want into my bloodstream.
> does not mean I'm consenting to the government injecting whatever they want into my bloodstream
By precedent, it does. Your blood contains all kinds of artificial compounds, originally ingested or inhaled, that came out of regulated factories or government programmes. You have no say around whether you are exposed to these substances individually. In the case of inhalation, you have little to no control.
> By precedent, it does.
Nope, it doesn't. The fact that I have those things in my blood does not mean I consented to them.
But I'm surprised you'd give up your bodily integrity so easily. Do you trust the government that much? Or are you just resigned to it?
> fact that I have those things in my blood does not mean I consented to them
That’s the point. You didn’t. You didn’t have to. That’s the precedent.
> I'm surprised you'd give up your bodily integrity so easily
I actually don’t love it. But the argument that such measures are problematic because they sidestep an individual consent that we don’t bother getting in other analogous situations makes it moot. I’m not disagreeing, I’m saying the reasoning doesn’t hold.
> I’m not disagreeing, I’m saying the reasoning doesn’t hold.
Fair enough
> But the argument that such measures are problematic because they sidestep an individual consent that we don’t bother getting in other analogous situations makes it moot.
I guess this is where we don't agree. If I'm understanding correctly, your point is that existing contaminants in the food and air are analogous situations to these mosquito vaccines, and since we already don't give consent for the former, we shouldn't bother with the latter. I disagree: the fact that we have no control over these contaminants entering our body is not a reason to give carte blanche to the government to go even further.
> your point is that existing contaminants in the food and air are analogous situations to these mosquito vaccines, and since we already don't give consent for the former, we shouldn't bother with the latter
Not quite. Contaminants as well as substances we intentionally introduce into our food and water for public health purposes. (Including biologics [1].)
And not that we shouldn't bother. But that the argument for individual consent in a case where we've ample history of not bothering with it, often for the best, isn't a great argument.
> not a reason to give carte blanche to the government to go even further
Sure. But it's not "going further." It's business as usual.
One could go full R. F. K. and argue against the whole enterprise. But that's a fringe position. A proven losing argument. To argue against this (and other specific wrongs at the far end of the spectrum) you need arguments as to why those cases are different. Because going from N = 10,000 to 10,001 isn't qualitatively "going further," it's doing the same thing.
And what happens if a genetically modified parasite mutates again in the wild?
> what happens if a genetically modified parasite mutates again in the wild?
It would likely turn into the status quo: a bastard disease spread by mosquitoes.
It seems to me the people here don't live in malaria infested countries. I think the victims would be gladly bitten by a vaccine than a deadly virus.
It seems to me the people here think it's a good idea because they know they won't be dropped on them, they'll be dropped in other countries.
The countries they live in are malaria free because they eradicated the disease-carrying mosquitos and developed their healthcare system.
Developing the healthcare system of a country helps with more diseases and keeps consent. It also doesn't open you up for a potential biological weapon if some entity decided to misuse it (Russia, CIA, etc.)
Not for that much longer. I believe that our Southern States are starting to see malaria mosquitoes (again -they used to be here, before).
There's a few types of malaria, not all are deadly, but none are fun.
But in the Climate Change Sweepstakes, Malaria has the winning ticket...
Yes, Florida for instance recently had their first documented cases of malaria in decades - immediately following the launch of a GMO mosquito manufacturing and distribution lab.
Not to worry: the scientists at lab promised the two events were totally unrelated.
The vaccine misinformation has created entire groups of people irrationally terrified of them. :( And those people are only going to cause more death and suffering because of their ignorance. :(
There's a big difference between intentionally exposing a single consenting person to a modified pathogen for the purpose of giving them resistance and intentionally releasing a modified pathogen into the environment and allowing it to spread by its usual vector to the consenting and unconsenting alike without any regard.
If this were a virus created using gain of function research we would call it a biological weapon. But because the intent is different we're supposed to be excited and accepting of it?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
> If this were a virus created using gain of function research we would call it a biological weapon.
Except it's the literal opposite of gain of function: it's the subtraction of function from a pathogen which already exists in the environment and already infects people on a regular basis in the environment, turning it from a deadly killer into something that dies quickly and without reproducing when it meets the human immune system.
People take actions every day that affect others, some negatively and some positively, and don't receive consent for each one. We don't need consent to put exhaust or other harmful chemicals into the air, and those are an explicit negative. Something like this could be a huge positive, potentially saving millions of lives. If the projected benefits to risks are sufficient (and I'm not saying they necessarily are, but if that turned out to be the case based on further testing), there is a point at which it would be worthwhile, despite it not being possible to get individual consent.
Yes, you’re supposed to be excited and accepting of things that save millions of lives, not decry them just because they have vaguely the same shape as something evil.
HN is having a real hard time here with the concept that mass death is actually bad and something that’s nice to prevent.
Although I agree that medical consent is important and the road to hell is so paved:
> But because the intent is different we're supposed to be excited and accepting of it?
One could say that it's the intent which varies between a heart transplant and an Azrec blood sacrifice.
> One could say that it's the intent which varies between a heart transplant and an Azrec blood sacrifice.
Heart transplants are from consenting donors that have recently diseased, not living victims murdered solely for their organs. Blood sacrifices do not involve taking the heart and saving a live either. So no intent is not the variance there.
That sounds as much "intent" as what I replied to.
Which is why I gave that exact example.
> One could say that it's the intent which varies between a heart transplant and an Azrec blood sacrifice
I would say that consent is the key distinguishing factor and intent follows afterwards.
> vaccine misinformation has created entire groups of people irrationally terrified
I am terrified of them but I'm fairly certain it's rationalized. The medical community decided it's more important to bully their patients into compliance than to listen to their concerns and work with them. The vaccine absolutely had side effects for some individuals and they were treated very poorly, in particular at the beginning of the pandemic, due to this attitude of "fighting misinformation." Our medical institutions were put to propaganda purposes rather than healthcare purposes and the results were absolutely horrific.
> to cause more death and suffering
This is predicated on the belief that "herd immunity" is valid and universal to all vaccines and that, again, bullying people who are afraid into choices they're not comfortable with is somehow justifiable due to it. As if letting a for profit institution inject random goop into me is a natural thing to _not_ be generally wary or afraid of.
Just because you think you have "the science" doesn't mean you get a free pass on "patient rights."
It’s sad to see this kind of nonsense in a place that so prides itself on rationality. If a bunch of technophiles can’t even accept the idea that vaccination is the first or second most effective medical technology in history (sewers potentially taking the #1 spot) then the whole thing seems completely hopeless.
I’m really not looking forward to the return of measles and polio as common first-world diseases, but that seems to be the trajectory we’re on.
You appeal to rationality then immediately abandon it. The COVID vaccine was not a traditional vaccine and the definitions were changed after it's release to match it. It relied on an entirely novel technology and novel delivery technique that was a part of a military strategy goal for a decade for no practical reason. The goalposts were constantly changed and "boosters" added to measurably diminished returns.
Which is all bad enough, but for people with your sort of "rational" to then decide that vaccines are _all_ uncritically "good," and any questions or any sort of reservations that I've just covered were thus uncritically "bad" and those having them deserved to have their civil rights stripped from them, is what made this a horror.
Finally, we have sanitized water and sewers and we live in first world conditions, the precursors to the diseases you mention are almost entirely absent from our living conditions, and those vaccinations use time tested and proven technologies which haven't ever been in question. Perhaps some of the popular adjuvants are worthy of concern, but in your version of rationality, this is apparently an evil thing to even consider out loud in the presence of the vaunted "technophiles."
You completely fail to maintain rationality in the face of a very narrow and specific critique.
"Vaccine" is a category of products, each one is unique and the safety and efficacy of one has no bearing on any other. The reason they have such good standing is selection bias. Before COVID, only vaccines that passed years of rigourous testing were used and those are the only ones people know to exist, giving the impression that anything called "vaccine" is safe. That's wrong.
Do you? People in malaria endemic areas understand that there is some base level of resistance that develops among the locals over time, the exaggeration about harm goes in both directions
Being downvoted a lot, I guess people don’t realize it’s a thing? Suggest you research it
Man, the conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day with this news, but I think this is great! While I'd still prefer we just eradicate the disease carrying mosquito population entirely, this keeps our enemy in the ecosystem where they can be some other critter's breakfast while still helping to mitigate one of the worst harms they cause us.
> conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day with this news
From what I've been able to tell, conspiracy theorists are hosts unto themselves. If you have the chance to talk to one deep in the weeds in person, it's fascinating how you can throw out literally any assertion, back it up with negative evidence ("can't really go into that"), and see the pick up. (It's best to do this outside your own context. As an American, it's easier to see the nonsense abroad.)
How is it great? It's the equivalent of someone coming up to you with a needle full of something and stabbing you with it (that they already stabbed other people with) without your consent.
I just don't see how injecting people with genetically modified parasites without their consent is "great".
The entire problem is that we can't stop someone (namely Mr. Mosquito) from coming up to us with a needle full of something and stabbing us with it (that they already stabbed other people with) without our consent.
I'd much prefer we got rid of Mr. Mosquito, but if we won't (or can't) we can at least make sure that what's in that jerk's needle stops killing people every day.
That'd be Ms./Mrs. Mosquito.
from https://www.cdc.gov/mosquitoes/about/about-mosquito-bites.ht...
- Female mosquitoes bite people and animals to get a blood meal.
- Most female mosquitoes cannot produce eggs without a blood meal.
- Male mosquitoes do not bite people and animals.We can get rid of disease-carrying mosquitos, many countries do it.
You can modify them to not reproduce if you're modifying them already for this instance.
If it's a matter of "won't" then we should ask "why not", instead of allowing someone to do this.
> We can get rid of mosquitos, many countries do it.
Curious to know where I can find no mosquitoes, other than Iceland and Antarctica.
Maybe not mosquitos, but the US maintains a screwworm wall that keeps them from eating anyone anything north of Panama.
Thailand and many asian countries have eradicated the troubling mosquitos (not entirely but with great success, especially in urban areas)
The US has also had great success in their eradication and mitigation programs.
They're more likely to give you dengue than malaria, but one thing Thailand has definitely not eradicated is the likelihood of getting bitten by mosquitos with great regularity...
Yes and you still get bit in the US but malaria is a thing of the past.
The point is not to get rid of all mosquitos, just the disease-carrying ones.
Aren't all mosquitos that bite humans potentially the disease-carrying ones? In the US we've just been fairly lucky but it's not as if mosquitos carrying West Nile/Zika/Chikungunya/Eastern Equine Encephalitis aren't infecting Americans
you think there's ... less risk with genetically modifying a species to die out?
Yes, we've been doing it for awhile in the US.
Thailand has also done it with great success.
You hold a very simplistic and naive view.
The person he's replying to has a simplistic view, his view is "injecting parasites into people without their permision bad" a very fine view to have. However we're discussing a situation where these parasites are infact symbiotes, were alternatives are more deaths.
We're also not doing it from a position of "mosquitos couldn't be used to spread human selectable things to kill humans before and now people suddenly can spread genetically modified killer parasites".
The one thing this research does is add the ability to spread immunity to malaria through mosquito population it doesn't change anything else about what could be spread by mosquitos before. People have been using animals to spread disease as a weapon of war since medieval times this is not a new vector that will suddenly be exploited.
This can only be a good thing unless you view the vaccines as a danger worse than the disease (which with such a widespread and deadly disease would be rather unlikely in any objective sense) or to be simplistic you believe in the inalienable right to be a vector to spread diseases to those around you.
You're welcome to contribute anything to the conversation besides blindly throwing out insults with no explanation.
The same thing ordinary mosquitoes do already?
Yeah and some animals kill humans, does that mean it's okay to kill humans too?
Right now you can consent to get a malaria vaccine, no covert parasite needed.
If the counter that it is for poorer populations, I'd still say you may want to ask them if they want to be injected with a genetically modified parasite. If one single person doesn't want to be in the area, you shouldn't do it. Would you support them dropping these in your neighborhood?
I don't live in malaria country, but yes, absolutely. While we are at it, something just like this for Lyme disease and TBE would be the icing on the cake.
Alright, now go ask all of your neighbors if they want a genetically modified parasite injected into them. If everyone is okay with it, then proceed.
I already have to breathe in pollutants released into my neighbourhood by other people without my consent. I have to deal with the aggregated effects of bad economic decisions made by others. Getting infected with a malaria vaccine instead of actual malaria via a mosquito bite without my consent would be the most benign of this type of problem.
Oh, and this already happens with the attenuated polio vaccine. People can catch the vaccine from those who have been immunised, in a similar way to how they could catch the virus. Delivering the vaccine the same way the pathogen spreads also allows people to opt out by following the same techniques they would to avoid the actual disease. You can use mosquito nets, mosquito sprays, etc., to help avoid both malaria and the mosquito-delivered vaccine.
Seems like you just described mandatory vaccination. Which is indeed great in case of many vaccines.
People are already infecting other people without my consent. How do you think I got COVID, the flu, etc.?
A few years ago I found myself chatting to a guy who had worked as a software engineer-turned malarial epidemiologist at a well known UK university. He told me he had "run away screaming" from that field and switched a different one because he was so shocked by what he saw in the field of malaria research.
As he explained it, the big problem is the field's dependence on funding from the Gates Foundation. Philanthropic funding isn't bad per se but the issue is that Gates specifically wants a legacy. That means he's not really interested in funding mitigation, he's only interested in eradication. A lot of researchers in the field think eradication isn't practical, but they keep their views private because you have to be gung-ho about eradication if you want access to the BMG Foundation funding stream. He said the result is a lot of grant proposals that are deliberately either vague or deceptive so money intended for eradication efforts can get spent on more useful stuff.
Beyond creating a culture where researchers routinely misrepresent their work and views, he told me the bigger problem was that it caused them to take extreme risks. Prototypical example: blanket spray an area with anti-malarial drugs. If it works then hooray, you eradicated malaria from that area. Until it returns, that is. But if it doesn't work then you just bred a new strain of malaria that's resistant to all known medications. It's the same problem as over-use of antibiotics.
A malaria vaccine delivered by mosquito sounds like the exact problem he was talking about, except times a million. One problem that can occur with vaccines - that gets drowned out and censored by the public health lobby and its allies - is that they can cause displacement rather than eradication. In other words you successfully vaccinate against one strain of the pathogen, but then it mutates under selection pressure to dodge immune systems that are "overfitted" to the prior strain. When invaded by the new strain the body doesn't recognize quickly enough that its antibodies no longer dock correctly, and so it spends a lot of time creating those when it should be trying to find new antibodies instead.
This problem is sometimes called immune imprinting, OAS or some other names and it's especially nasty because it misleads researchers doing drug trials. They develop a very targeted test against a pathogen (PCR or so), they make a vaccine against it, they vaccinate a trial population, the test drops to zero so they roll it out to the wider population. Success! Except then some years later some assholes point out that mortality didn't actually drop in that targeted population. All that happened is the pathogen mutated to the point neither the test nor the immune system recognize it, and so people are just getting sick with the variant instead. Unfortunately, awareness of this problem is very low because anyone who points it out is immediately targeted for cancellation and censorship for being an "anti-vaxxer" (they aren't anti-vaccine, they just want vaccines that are broad spectrum enough to actually achieve mortality reductions). Also public health institutions, having rolled out a vaccine, are loathe to admit in public it was all for nothing as they fear that it would lower compliance in future campaigns.
All this is a long way of saying THIS IS BAD DON'T DO IT. The risk is real that it backfires in ways that break existing anti-malarial drugs, the funding situation creates strong incentives to ignore this risk, and there's a history of it happening and then being swept under the rug.
> Unfortunately, awareness of this problem is very low because anyone who points it out is immediately targeted for cancellation and censorship for being an "anti-vaxxer"
I'm aware of it, I didn't have to go hunt it down or anything, if you just read on any basic vaccine info or news website they will teach you about vaccine imprinting, it was like all over the place during Covid vaccination.
I'd argue, if there's anything that hurts being able to talk about those nuances more openly, it's the anti-vaxxers that jump at anything to shout demon. There's a ton of challenges, and issues with vaccines, or with making a car for that matter, there's a million ways to do it where it is harmful, deadly, dangerous, etc. That's almost the case for every single invention ever made. But the anti-vaxx just latch on, like we can't make anything that has risks into something that ends up justifying it's use because you can minimize the risks enough to warrant it being a net positive. Again, same as cars.
What you are talking about in terms of the methodology and the current environment for research is not great, but in all honesty, it's always like this, any field of research or engineering, and yet somehow inventions and innovations to come out of them ever so often, and progress is made. If you peek under the cover of everything we ever invented from the past, it'll seem just as dirty and broken.
> Except then some years later some assholes point out that mortality didn't actually drop in that targeted population. All that happened is the pathogen mutated to the point neither the test nor the immune system recognize it
Seems the incentives are such that you would want to make a virus PCR test using a narrow range of epitopes that you were targeting with the vaccine. That way, if/when you get breakthrough infections you can just say "well I don't see any virus!"
See bug, create unit test, fix unit test, no more bug. User complains bug still happens, you ignore because your unit tests still pass.
Yes. Well it's not an incentive issue, PCR is just incredibly specific when used correctly.
All cause morality is pretty underpowered and you should still see the causative agent in sequencing. I don't think what you are suggesting has ever happened.
Can you give a tangible example of a vaccine that was evaded to the extent that there was no improvement in mortality from that disease?
He's speaking of research programs, not commercialized products. It's totally believable that some researchers would deploy a prototype somewhere, collect and tweak data to show it's effective then never check again. I worked in a field far from medicine and it was the same exact way of doing.
His description of funding theatre is also fitting what I've seen in academia. Your question is a cheap way to try to devaluate the credibility of the post (probably on an ideological background), but what is written is hundred percent credible for anyone with experience in research. I've a friend working on pathogens for her PhD, funded by the Gates foundation and when I asked a question about it the answer wasn't exactly positive.
I’m not trying to “devaluate” anything, I’m asking for more information as someone who is fairly familiar with public health research. Thankfully Mike was kind enough to provide a substantive answer.
Respiratory virus vaccines can suffer this issue because of how quickly those kinds of viruses mutate.
Flu vaccines are notorious for not reducing the mortality of the elderly whilst being reported as highly effective. They can even increase mortality from the flu due to late response caused by overfitting. The problem is twofold here: the vaccines cause displacement so they look good in trials, but then they also look good in observational data because the sort of people who sign up voluntarily for flu shots are just paying much more attention to their health in general so there's a selection bias effect. This paper tried to fix the selection bias and:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2728831/
"We found that flu shots reduced all-cause mortality among elderly Kaiser Permanente members by 4.6% during 9 laboratory-defined flu seasons in Northern California. Other researchers have reported that flu shots reduce mortality by much greater amounts."
Overfitting can exacerbate the problem by causing displacement to a variant that's worse. Here's an example from 2009 where Canadian authorities investigated the effectiveness of the trivalent influenza vaccine on swine flu:
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/51/9/1017/292207?login=...
"An outbreak investigation in British Columbia during the late spring of 2009 provided the first indication of an unexpected association between receipt of TIV and pH1N1 illness. This led to 5 additional studies through the summer 2009 in Canada, each of which corroborated these initial findings."
The reason there's so much controversy around vaccines in general is that the techniques used can easily look as if they're working well whilst they actually don't. Mistakes are understandable, but the incentive is then to cover things up because public health officials and researchers are terrified of doing anything that might support "anti vaxx" narratives (e.g. admitting to mistakes).
https://www.cdc.gov/dengue/vaccine/index.html
> In children who have not already had dengue, the dengue vaccine increases the risk of hospitalization and severe illness if the child gets dengue after vaccination.
The mechanism is most likely that wild-type dengue has optimized itself a bit to infect better when covered with vaccinal antibodies (antibody-dependent enhancement)
Either you went back to those chats in order to write this post down, or you have studied the matter yourself, because man that's a lot of detail for something your friend talked to you about a few years ago.
I'm not being skeptic, rather saying it's actually impressive.
He wasn't a friend, he was a guy who reached out to me because of stuff I'd written about COVID. We communicated over email and I encouraged him to write down a document with some of his experiences in it. The stuff in my post is a tiny fraction of it.
I'd love to hear more about it!
We mostly discussed coding issues in epidemiological modelling. Science has big problems with bugs because scientists tend to assume programming is easy (they don't get exposure to professional standards and they rarely test their code). He'd been at the forefront of damage control and had lots of stories.
> As he explained it, the big problem is the field's dependence on funding from the Gates Foundation. Philanthropic funding isn't bad per se but the issue is that Gates specifically wants a legacy. That means he's not really interested in funding mitigation, he's only interested in eradication. A lot of researchers in the field think eradication isn't practical, but they keep their views private because you have to be gung-ho about eradication if you want access to the BMG Foundation funding stream. He said the result is a lot of grant proposals that are deliberately either vague or deceptive so money intended for eradication efforts can get spent on more useful stuff.
Sounds like a major downside of a philathropic monopsony, which is a something I hadn't previously considered.
> I found myself chatting to a guy
Can you provide some reliable sources for this?
What was once a conspiracy theory is now longer one.
The attenuated polio vaccine has already worked this way for more than 70 years. People can catch the vaccine like how they can catch the virus. This has had positive effects on boosting immunity in developing countries where the parents may be unable to take their children to be vaccinated, due to work commitments, expenses of travelling to the nearest clinic, etc.
Eventually we'll be able (as in it will be possible) to pinpoint some "contrarian" gene, then make something that only kills these individuals, and put it into mosquitoes.
Now if it's possible to do then obviously some government somewhere will do it (eventually), and no one will notice anything, say it's something that gives you a heart attack, and say we see a spike in heart attacks in 2050, it won't even be that significant since contrarian individuals are few, and just like that after a year the population will be a lot more docile.
It's still a sci-fi scenario now but it's scary to think about what the future will hold.
We can do basically this today. I could probably do it, if I decided to throw my entire life away (which, if I'm considering killing, is the minimum bar anyway) – though, not reliably and not without side effects. For an organisation of significant size, it's a question of how sophisticated they'd want to be.
The main obstacle to your sci-fi scenario is that, to date, no such "contrarian gene" has been identified. In fact, most traits you'd want to genocide away seem tenuously related to particular alleles, at best. Unless we start seeing fanatical HERC2 purists, or the people making bioweapons decide they don't care about collateral in the War Against Redheads, we're probably safe from genetically-selective mosquito-induced heart attacks.
I think contrarian just means high IQ lol. Also hard to test genetically. No offense!
> I think contrarian just means high IQ lol
We could start fixing the reversal of the Flynn effect if you killed yourself.
Very intelligent response, good job!
So no say at all, as to what goes into our own bodies? Really?
It's not talking about releasing them in the wild. It would be how you get your shot, because apparently it resulted in better protection when delivered through a bite for some reason.
But I get your general sentiment. It's a scary thought, not just this, but the idea that we are now in a place where someone could use mosquitos to deliver chemical weapons, kind of scary.
Also, I'm no expert, but I'm not sure that is a right, if I understand Roe vs Wade reversal, it means the constitution is no longer interpreted to assume bodily autonomy as a constitutional right. And even if it was, that's just in the US, there's many countries where this wouldn't be the case.
It also begs the question, many things enter our bodies, all pollutants for example, radiation, and so on, and we tend to have no or very little say into that as well, what makes it into our waters and air and food, and so on.
Anyways, I think it's an interesting topic, and a good one to discuss.
Malaria carrying mosquitoes already deliver a malaria vaccine. It's just that that vaccine has a terrible side effect: malaria.
> So no say at all, as to what goes into our own bodies? Really?
Right? Everyone has been kindly asking malaria to stay out of our bodies for ages now! Malaria has no respect at all for our rights!
The difference is that Malaria can't gather consent from us. Unlike medical researchers, who have routinely been required to get consent before conducting research or before spreading synthetic materials into our bodies. Without consent you're essentially acting like Josef Mengele.
We don't put malaria into mosquitos to spread it.
If we did we could just stop doing that, but sadly, we don't have that option.
It’s like the trolley problem but one side of the track is clear. But the concept is now so deeply engrained that some people still object to the idea of pulling the lever.
It's not quite that.
If this was a trolly problem, one side would have several million deaths, there's a lot of switches we can activate at any time, and we're not entirely sure how many people are on each of the other tracks just that there's not many before the bend in the line that takes it through a thick dark jungle of our ignorance.
The trolley problem is not for assesing ends vs means discussions, or greater good discussions. It's for asessing how people interpret responsibility.
End circumcising first and we can talk about other types of bodily autonomy movements.
Using mosquitoes to deliver mandatory COVID "vaccines" (which do not prevent infection or transmission) was considered a "far right" conspiracy theory in 2022.
The next step is there.
Wait until the anti-vaxxers hear about this. The anti-mosquito movement is gonna be wild. "The government is controlling bugs!!!"
The concept and rumination over delivering bio-weapons in similar fashion is not unheard of.
Just the top of my head - Unit 731 plague-infested fleas and "Operation Cherry Blossoms" in Japan, Operation Big Buzz" (1955) and "Operation Drop Kick" (1956), "Биопрепарат" (1974) in the USSR, and history of chucking plague-infected corpses (flying dead cows anyone?) in siege warfare.
Yeah let's not do this. I'd rather we eradicate the mosquitos themselves.
What could go wrong with nonconsensual, covert, forced mass injections.
Today it's used for malaria, tomorrow?
When releasing these mosquitos, will they be getting consent of everyone in the area?
The "today x tomorrow y" argument doesn't work, as the villains of tomorrow don't care about any success of x.
For all x and y.
Do regular mosquitos ask for consent before biting you?
Do you think it's okay to kill a human because other animals kill humans?
Just because nature does something, doesn't mean it's okay to allow humans to do it.
This is not a regular mosquito anymore.
Imagine the following: we found the part of the brain that's making you love everything done by the authority. We developed a genetic vaccine against it and we are deploying it via mosquitos.
You wouldn't say the same thing.
>I'd rather we eradicate the mosquitos themselves.
And you know the extent of this on the whole eco-system?
Do you know the extent of injecting modified parasites on the human population?
And yes, many places have eradicated mosquitos with no shift in the ecosystem.
It's pretty much the one creature that all animals would love to have eradicated or at the very least mitigated.
> And yes, many places have eradicated mosquitos with no shift in the ecosystem.
I read that the tropical rain forests are unlivable by humans because of mosquitos and that limits the amount of deforestation that occurs.
Whether that's really true or worthwhile I'll leave it to others to argue over.
I mean, Indonesia has 280 million people living in a tropical rainforest climate ... that's 80% of the US population, on a a bunch of tropical islands.
Deforestation is an issue, as those 280 million people do need to be fed. Mosquitoes don't really get in the way of deforestation. Insect repellents and pesticides do work. And when an area is deforested and either converted to urban or agricultural land, mosquitoes don't really linger in that area anymore.
Mosquitos are a food source for some reptiles, fish, birds, and other insects and male mosquitos also serve as pollinators, of which many a species are already in danger.
When people talk about mosquito eradication programs, they're talking about subspecies that suck blood and carry the major diseases like malaria. Not all mosquitos.
That line of reasoning neglects the fact that there is very little control in such systems that differentiate between the subspecies.
CRISPR for example has been hailed as surgical tool for slicing DNA, and works well in controlled environments because we set up methodology and environment to guarantee it.
This has lead many outside the related fields to believe that the tool alone has more control than it does. In reality, any changes with these tools must be formally verified through plasmid sequencing. This is Plasmidsaurus business model, and they are quite good at it.
Even afterwards though, outside very specific conditions (which are often involved in keeping it cold and below certain safety thresholds), unstable changes can occur, the effects of which we will never know beforehand. A shift by 1 base (3 bases per codon) may alter an entire sequence, but the molecular machinery would continue running until it is stopped.
It may result in death of the mosquito, and/or provide material (shedding/ingestion) that may be taken in by other unrelated species with unknown consequence.
Who is to say what impacts that might have, and with each additional node (mosquito), the chance of such outcomes increase greatly. To my knowledge, there have been very few studies that cover the topic of genomic stability with regards to CRISPR and its related tools. This is an area with extremely low visibility to potential consequences.
The very last outcome we want is for animals to attain a defiant pupil, along the plot line of Zoo.
Not really true.
Mosquitos are an important part of the ecosystem, they (especially their larva) are important food sources for other creatures.
However, most species of mosquitoes do not bite humans and not all of those are capable of spreading disease. What you are probably referencing is experiments in extermining specific disease carrying species. I don't think those studies have claimed "no shift in the ecosystem."
I mean, the paper's been published. The cat's out of the bag. If a sufficiently motivated villain wants to use this technology for villainy, they can now.
It's sad to see the censorship of opposing viewpoints on HN.
Regarding the topic at hand: IMO we should not go down this path, it seems really really stupid.
What exactly was censored?
Every single viewpoint that doesn't align with the interests of those playing around with bleeding edge of dumb ideas in the name of science and perceived future shareholders.
hey buddy, you're not alone.
the problem comes from the fact that this community, and silicon valley in general, is targeted for woke propaganda. obviously this is an important community, so obviously those with power and capital will seek to control it.
in a large part the problem is silicon valley itself, and in particular Stanford and the surrounding area.
don't be sad. get mad.
Thanks man, its refreshing to see some signal through the noise here. This website has some cool content but discussion is heavily influenced / steered by PR firm(s).