• artvandelay@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Vaccines are typically meant to protect against viruses or bacteria. Cancer is neither of those. hiv is a virus but the political will to produce effective treatments was not always there. I think a lot of young people underestimate the homophobia that was pervasive not all that long ago and how it was tied to the aids epidemic.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      There are some promising efforts for vaccines against cancer. It’s teaching your immune system to kill cells that were supposed to die on their own. It’s a relatively recent development, though.

      Plus, as should always be stated with cancer treatments, there is no singular “cancer”. It’s a class of related problems that need to be handled individually. Vaccine against prostate cancer shouldn’t be expected to work against breast cancer. Anything that claims to cure cancer in a blanket way should be treated with great suspicion.

      • legion02@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The mrna vaccines that allowed us to quickly target covid were under development for targeting cancers. We all got super lucky to be honest.

      • Kimano@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I mean also isn’t the hpv vaccine kinda functionally a cancer vaccine

      • ph00p@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Oh boy, that could also go horribly wrong too, what if a cell is a little bit retarded in it’s growth for some reason but would develop into a useful cell but, NOPE body killed it.

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          1 year ago

          It could, but it’s also improving on something your immune system already does. Out of all the trillions of cells undergoing division in your body all the time, a few of them go cancerous each and every day. Your immune system almost always takes them out. It’s the one time out of a bajilion that things go wrong.

  • somewhiteguy@infosec.pub
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    1 year ago

    The best thing for my family was that we were in St Jude with our daughter while the rest of the world lost their minds. I was able to speak directly to Infectious Disease doctors that had nothing to do with anything but researching for cancer patients. They had worked with the original doctors for the Covid vaccine, and how long it had been in development as we learned more about the disease. People were just going off ignorance. Just because you don’t know, doesn’t mean everyone else is trying to lie to you.

    • piecat@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Once destroyed definitely… But couldn’t a vaccine prevent it from getting to that point?

        • piecat@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Well, some vaccines are therapeutic in nature, where it’s beneficial to take it while you have symptoms. Some vaccines are only helpful before you get a symptom, for example rabies.

          I guess the above made it sound like there definitely can’t be a therapeutic vaccine. But unclear about a preventative vaccine.

          • hamid@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Their point is AIDS is the syndrome you get after it is too late and your immune system no longer works. The vaccine would be for Human Immunodeficiency Virus

          • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            It’s more like saying “I miiiiiight be able to cure cancer, that’s a bit tough and would require a lot of luck… I definitely can’t cure death though.”

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      There are some experimental cures that do seem to work at least in rats. But yeah there’s no vaccine you just have to get sick and then get the cure and hope it works.

      And also be a rat.

    • loudambiance@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Technically there’s a vaccine for HPV, which has been shown to be one of the leading causes of cervical cancer. However, it is believed that at least 80% of women will have HPV sometime in their life and the cervical cancer rate is no where near that. Thus the vaccine only decreases the risk, it is not a vaccine for cervical cancer though.

    • BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Also, cancer isn’t one disease but a whole class of diseases. And we actually do have vaccines that prevent certain forms of cancer, like the HPV vaccine.

      • JadenSmith@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        There is also a lung cancer vaccine made in Cuba, called CimaVax (I think).

        There’s some hurdles to getting it though, depending on where you are.

      • Jamie@jamie.moe
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        1 year ago

        I always found the tracking chip conspiracy stuff to be particularly funny. Unfortunately, I never personally met any whackos that believed it.

        The best method for very accurately tracking them was the thing they likely used to post about the COVID vaccine tracking you.

  • hmancuso@lemmy.eco.br
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    1 year ago

    That’s apples, oranges, and …passion fruits. They’re simply not the same. Besides, it’s quite pessimistic to imagine that the effort scientists have put into vaccine development, and all knowledge acquired, haven’t taught us a trick or two.

  • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    I mean there’s been so much research towards AIDS that it’s not the death sentence that it was in the 80s.

    However, there probably would have been even more progress had Reagan not stifled progress

    • gammasfor@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Yeah I was going to say the reason there hasn’t been significant progress on a HIV virus isn’t because it isn’t possible but because for the longest time the bodies that could provide funding for the research thought HIV killing ‘the gays’ was a desirable outcome…

    • Nowyn@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      This goes with being mRNA free that some anti-vaccine people tout around. They did their research well enough not to figure out what mRNA is.

    • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      I remember when the anti GMO, anti pharma, anti vaxx nuts were the fringe of the fringe left and now they’re mainstream conservatism sigh