This is great news! I think people forget how anti-skin cancer protocols even as simple as applying suntan lotion weren't as popular as recent as 50-60 years ago. Lots of "sun children" of the 50s and 60s are now feeling the repercussions of only applying baby oil and are getting hit with lots of melanoma.
What’s funny is before the 50s and 60s everyone knew you should cover up and women wore bonnets. That too much sun was bad for you.
Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House fame (I mention this a lot as I read these to my children as an adult, and they’re a fascinating look at 1880s America) has lots of places where her mother says “put on your bonnet! Don’t get too much sun!”. We act like people in the past were ignorant but people in the 50s and 60s were just a very special type of arrogant, all of Chesterton’s fences were torn down during that time period.
They thought too much sun was bad for you because back then tanned skin was considering a mark of being poor and pale skin was a mark of being wealthy since rich people didn’t have to work outside.
They also had puritanical Victorian notions of modesty and covering up.
There was no knowledge linking sun exposure to cancer or negative health effects. People in the past indeed were ignorant on many things.
We developed creams that stopped sunburn, but were still great at getting you cancer. A lot of the ads from 70s and 80s talked about how they stopped UVB but let the tanning UVA through! So yes, they didn't burn, but the long term cancer rates exploded, along with all the skin aging.
So it's not that they ignored the all knowledge. I blame most of it on the rather detrimental tech advancement. Like cigarettes with filters: now safer (except you can smoke more now, and the cancer risk is still a disaster)
> We act like people in the past were ignorant but people in the 50s and 60s were just a very special type of arrogant,
I’d be curious to know if tetraethyllead in gasoline has anything to do with people from that time being cavalier about exposure to the sun, or if the science was just not there to make the connection between sun exposure and skin cancer.
+1. Also, just to call out, it doesn't need to be _warm_ for you to need sunblock. Even when it's cooler / cloudier out there you can still get skin damage. Look for UV rating rather than temperature. Conversely, it being hot doesn't imply high-UV either.
I’ve always wondered about this. I have fair skin, and I tend to burn somewhat easily in very sunny environments like the beach.
However, I’ve never gotten so much as a whisper of sunburn / suntan / anything on an actually cloudy day where sun wasn’t hitting me directly. Is the damage a different type that’s imperceptible? Or is this a public health comms strategy where they assume people will see a single cloud in the sky and decide it’s fine to skip sunscreen, so they talk about how you should slather yourself with sunscreen 24/7, even if the sun is obscured?
I didn't know about the UV index or what it meant until like three years ago. It blows my mind I went that long without understanding. It was actually wonderful to learn that I could just see if I needed sunblock based on a 0-10 scale.
We never wore sunscreen as kids because we didn't burn. I probably have had three sunburns in my life. Learned once I became an adult that that wasn't sound logic...
I think the Apple Watch or the Weather app or something finally taught me UV index about the same time. Has this information always been readily available? Similarly mind blown about it.
> Cutaneous melanoma (CM) accounted for around 331,700 cancer cases globally in 2022
> An estimated 267,353 (95% uncertainty intervals [UI]: 242,818, 278,638) CM cases were UVR attributable globally in 2022
UVR = Ultraviolet radiation
Cutaneous melanoma (CM) is the vast majority of melanoma cases in the US at least:
> The percentages of melanomas that were cutaneous, ocular, mucosal, and unknown primaries were 91.2%, 5.2%, 1.3%, and 2.2%, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9781962/
tl;dr ~80% of Cutaneous melanoma cases are attributable to UV exposure.
Please be careful and charitable in reading others' words, especially as they relate to scientific topics.
OP did not say that melanoma has no sun exposure risk but that it is lower than the risks associated with other cutaneous cancers (e.g., SCC and BCC) and it would seem that's true based on the very short search I performed.
Yes, but OP said that in response to a comment attributing melanoma to sun exposure, in a conversation where nobody had brought up SCC or BCC. It's still a misleading comment, in my opinion.
> Cutaneous melanoma (CM) accounted for around 331,700 cancer cases globally in 2022
> An estimated 267,353 (95% uncertainty intervals [UI]: 242,818, 278,638) CM cases were UVR attributable globally in 2022
UVR = Ultraviolet radiation
Cutaneous melanoma (CM) is the vast majority of melanoma cases in the US at least:
> The percentages of melanomas that were cutaneous, ocular, mucosal, and unknown primaries were 91.2%, 5.2%, 1.3%, and 2.2%,
from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9781962/
Your reading comprehension is way off. The article says "Each year in Australia, up to 420 people are diagnosed with acral or mucosal melanomas. They affect people of all ethnic backgrounds, and are the most common forms of melanoma in people with very dark skin."
That is a discussion of specific subtypes of melanoma. You've turned that into a general statement about melanoma:
> not all skin cancers are caused by sun exposure, and this is more true for Melenoma which occur both more frequently in darker skinned people and in place where there is little sun exposure.
These are "Two rare ... forms of melanoma" not "melanoma as a whole." The article does not say melanoma as a whole is more frequent in darker-skinned people and in places with little sun exposure. Those two subtypes are.
> BCC ... can cause significant local tissue damage if left untreated. Most cases are linked to chronic sun exposure, especially in fair-skinned individuals.
> While it often remains localized at first, SCC can invade deeper tissues and, in some cases, metastasize to lymph nodes or other organs. Risk factors include cumulative sun exposure, a history of sunburns, and immunosuppression.
> While not all skin cancers can be prevented, effective sun protection and healthy habits can greatly reduce your risk for basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and melanoma.
That does not support "most skin cancers are not a big deal"
"Whilst some studies reported an association with improved survival ... others did not find any significant association, and some even reported worse outcomes in patients whose tumors showed regression"
You seem to have read this as "melanoma just goes away and the problem is gone" rather than "the primary tumor can recede, and in that case survival odds are somewhat better by a few percentage points (but actually worse for Stage III patients!)"
Yes, however the trial succeeded. But by "how much", is not yet released. This trial was not against placebo, but the already existing, and effective Keytruda treatment.
Yes, mRNA vaccines are promising for many but not all cancer types, and there are many ongoing clinical trials. There's also a lot we yet don't know about how to design them.
One of the leading problems is that we don't know how to pick the right neoantigens (mutant cancer proteins) which can trigger the optimal immune response.
Moderna used a simple heuristic, "how likely is this antigen to show up on the cell surface?" which makes sense, since an antigen has to show up on the cell surface for the immune system to see it. But there's so much missing from this model, and we just don't have enough data. Failures in clinical trials of mRNA vaccines may well be caused by this problem. (Yes, this is a good problem for AI, if we can get enough data).
Individualized immune cancer therapy has been touted as the next big thing for half a century. It's nothing new, and with few exceptions, such as skin cancer, has failed to yield much. scientists, for decades, have tired to harness the immune system to attackcancer and it almost never works.
Those few exceptions have been monumental in how they've changed cancer treatment. Skin cancer has been particularly well treated with immunotherapy, but other cancers have also benefited from the exact same research and drugs (as it turns out, the specific mutations the immunotherapies like Keytruda target express in other cancers). The reason skin cancer gets so much attention is because it's one of the most commonly diagnosed and treated cancers. (Colon is more common, I believe, but it often doesn't get detected. Get your colonoscopies folks).
It has moved fast enough that I've heard from multiple oncologists that the all 5 year survivability numbers are dated because the treatments are newer than the studies.
We've come a LONG way in a very short period in terms of cancer treatment. It still sucks, but not as much as it once did.
> Individualized immune cancer therapy has been touted as the next big thing for half a century. It's nothing new, and with few exceptions, such as skin cancer, has failed to yield much. scientists, for decades, have tired to harness the immune system to attackcancer and it almost never works.
"Almost never" is doing a lot of work. You may be aware that most drugs fail over the course of development and human trials?
Anyway, checkpoint inhibitor therapy is a massive boon to oncology and was only brought into widespread use over the past 15 years.
Personalized mRNA vaccines are in fact, extremely new, and only made possible by recent advances across multiple fields. This comment reveals a total lack of basic understanding on this topic.
I believe the comment was talking specifically about immunotherapy rather than personalized mRNA. But I'd agree it's still misinformed as immunotherapy has been a game changer across multiple cancers.
I don't know if that counts as the same "trick" or not as it's another antiviral vaccine. Not that I disagree with you.
I read that this mRNA flu vaccine can be more effective then the regular annual flu shot, simply because the time to create it is shorter, therefor the guess at what strains will circulate that year is more accurate.
Would love to see a source for this, but I'm assuming you don't have one and are just spreading FUD due to your political beliefs...
Closest thing I could find was a little over 15,000 people in Europe who got myocarditis (also includes pericarditis: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10746454/). Out of millions (hundreds of millions?) that received the vaccine. Please stop doing what your doing. It's pretty shit.
Yes, and it's worse than that for the parent commenter, the unvaccinated population also got some cases of myocarditis - often after Covid. And they got myocarditis at a higher rate than the vaccinated.
Thank you for making that point. This is the truth. This whole conversation drives me nuts, because all the data is now available. The increase in risk for myocarditis in non-vaccinated people is staggering! (~10x worse risk!)
Example study:
> The incidence of pericarditis and myocarditis in the total population exposed to at least one dose of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines was 5/100,000 (CI95%:3 to 8 per 100,000), compared to 70/100,000 (CI95%: 66 to 92 per 100,000) in those who were not vaccinated.
The study monitored a total population of 536,448 people. This is real data.
I mean, the question is almost always about whether it's economical or not, right? Whether you can find diseases it's efficacious to treat with this mechanism, and prove it (trials are expensive).
not really a huge win. It's going to cost taxpayers significancy and may not improve survival much or total life expectancy . The stock is way overextended, assuming it even works well enough to be a commercial success. History has shown this is seldom the case. I would short it if wasn't so expensive and risky to do so. They would not even specify how much it improved the 5 year survival rate.
> not really a huge win. It's going to cost taxpayers significancy and may not improve survival much or total life expectancy . The stock is way overextended. It's a long way from anything that can be used on patients, assuming it even works well enough to be a commercial success. History has shown this is seldom the case. I would short it if wasn't so expensive and risky to do so.
Buddy, this is a phase 3 trial. This is about as close as you can get to "anything that can be used on patients" without already being approved.
It is clear that you don't have experience in this area.
Huge, uplifting, news, hope the study will bear further fruit. Considering that 90% of all clinical trials fail, it's good to read about a truly promising one for once.
I think the "expected value" was priced in, but regardless of the result, this trial would move the stock price towards that direction.
Biotech is one of the very very very few areas of the stockmarket where specialist knowledge generates alpha.
Trolling through random biotechs, learning about their tech, and investing in the most promising applications of that tech in the most impactful areas is something that happens somewhat on publicly traded markets. With tech, most of that happens pre-IPO.
Even if you were to optimally price in all available information you still have uncertainty of what will actually happen. i.e. A 1 dollar coin flip has an expected value of 50c before it’s thrown and it will collapse either to zero or to one after the uncertainty is resolved.
It was priced in, the share price prior to the news being released was taking into account a probability measurement of the trial succeeding or failing. You can’t price in both options of a binary outcome simultaneously, so part of the equity price was functionally equivalent to a call option on the outcome of the drug trial that only resolved after the trial results are announced.
It’s similar to the situation where a company puts out a public offer to buy another company at say, $50 a share on a day that the acquisition target is trading at $40/share.
If the stock of the target company is trading at $46/share, the market is pricing in the probability of the acquisition not happening. If the market knew the acquisition would happen with 100% certainty, the price of the target company shares would be equal to the buyout share price offer. You can assume the risk of the acquisition not happening by purchasing shares at $46, and if it does end up going through, you earn $4 a share from assuming that risk.
Ever since I first heard of them a decade ago, it seemed that mRNA therapeutic vaccines were going to be the next wave of massive improvements in care. It's taken a bit longer than I had expected, and it's not that mRNA is the only way to make these sorts of vaccines, it's just so much better than the alternatives.
According to Gemini, Moderna uses machine learning to speed up sequence selection and mRNA optimization. After all, this is not a mass-produced vaccine, but a personalized one.
I for one would like to see the data rather than a press release. Is this even serious? A press release with no link to outside twitter?
I feel like everything companies, and presidents, say now is directly geared to triggering AI trades.
The only thing they are looking at with this drug is people living one more month over existing drugs.
THIS IS NOTHING.
"The median PFS (progression-free survival) for KEYTRUDA was 5.5 months (2-week group) and 4.1 months (3-week group) compared to 2.8 months for ipilimumab (HR 0.58, P<0.00001 for the KEYTRUDA groups vs. ipilimumab,"
The median PFS (progression-free survival) for KEYTRUDA was 5.5 months (2-week group) and 4.1 months (3-week group) compared to 2.8 months for ipilimumab (HR 0.58, P<0.00001 for the KEYTRUDA groups vs. ipilimumab, 95% CI, 0.46-0.72 for 2-week group and 0.47-0.72 for 3-week group, respectively). The estimated 6-month PFS rates for the KEYTRUDA and ipilimumab arms were 47.3 percent, 46.4 percent and 26.5 percent, respectively. One-year OS for KEYTRUDA was 74.1 percent (2-week group) and 68.4 percent (3-week group) compared to 58.2 percent for ipilimumab (HR 0.63 [95% CI, 0.47-0.83, P=0.00052] for the 2-week group and HR 0.69 [95% CI, 0.52-0.90, P=0.00358] for the 3-week group). At the time of analysis, median overall survival was not reached in any treatment group.
1. That's not what progression-free survival means.
2. I don't think AI was mentioned once in this press release.
3. This drug was approved for trial in 2014, so if it had something to do with deep learning, that would actually be a massive announcement.
4. The paragraph immediately following the one you clipped talks about Overall Response Rate (ORR) and throughout the release they discuss Overall Survival (OS).
5. This is not "NOTHING" in statistical terms, but even more so to people with melanoma.
Interjecting with a fact. Moderna described the neoantigen immunogenicity prediction algorithm they used to design the vaccines as “a deterministic machine learning (ML) algorithm,” so it may be a small neural network or more traditional algorithm, probably not deep learning.
No it isn’t. They did a test with great specificity and got undeniable P values. Now they can refine the action and start saving people. This is a huge, huge win.
you're also looking at a different, older study. Keytruda is a little strange in that it has a very long tail in survivorship, works best in certain cases, and median PFS isn't a really great metric.
People were assured that COVID vaccine mRNA would disappear within days and the spike protein would short-lived. Yet Yale-led researchers later detected circulating S1 and full-length spike as late as 709 days after vaccination.
They also left the public in the dark about the risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis, especially in young males, many of whom experienced permanent heart tissue damage.
That is a massive gap between what the public was told and what later evidence found. If a technology makes your cells produce a biologically active protein, regulators should establish where it goes, how long it can persist, and what prolonged exposure does before mass deployment.
> People were assured that COVID vaccine mRNA would disappear within days and the spike protein would short-lived
which is still the case, even in the Yale study.
> That is a massive gap between what the public was told and what later evidence found.
there is an even larger gap between basic epidemiology and what the public understands.
Hard science is difficult to communicate on a good day, on a global pandemic with quacks getting tons of airtime and multiple labs finding conflicting results (due to speed to publish and bad experimental parameters) I would say that was communicated by health experts was surprisingly valid and accurate.
+1 the public health apparatuses' actual statements were impressively correct even if you don't account for the underlying uncertainty at the time.
Where public health officials "failed" was not having a megaphone loud enough to drown out the game of telephone that most people (as these comment threads consistently show) were actually hearing information through.
Simplest example: People will say that public health officials told them "masks don't work." But no! Only one person did, and that was USSG Jerome Adams (who wasn't credible nor a major player to begin with). What public health officials said was "we do not know if masks work," which is a more nuanced but completely accurate statement.
I am totally flabbergasted that the most basic tenet here is being ignored: THIS WAS NEVER PROVEN TO BE SAFE! It also doesn't allow for any sort of effects the average Joe might not think of, such as possible medium and longer term longitudinal psychological or neurological effects that could ONLY be associated via longitudinal study. But at the same time people are acknowledging faecal transmission can help with certain diseases (that is, ignoring things such as the FACT
that the gut biome also is involved in things like serotonin and dopamine uptake).
I think you are all simply ripping this apart because your egos won't accept you could be wrong. How disappointing from a group of people I would expect a more scientific and thoughtful approach from. What are the basic tenets of pharmaceutical toxicology and safety? Or epidemiological research? Who cares.
> Hard science is difficult to communicate on a good day, on a global pandemic with quacks getting tons of airtime and multiple labs finding conflicting results (due to speed to publish and bad experimental parameters) I would say that was communicated by health experts was surprisingly valid and accurate.
You should read the emails being released of Fauci, which shows without a doubt that Fauci lied to the public.
> They also left the public in the dark about the risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis, especially in young males, many of whom experienced permanent heart tissue damage.
Not true. This was correctly disclosed in the trial results as a super super super tail risk.
Once they realized that the (minuscule) risk could be even further mitigated by simply spacing out the booster schedule, they adjusted that (Feb 2022).
What's more, they found that myocarditis risk was higher in the unvaccinated population after infection. This information didn't get to the so-called "skeptics," who willfully ignored data that didn't fit their conspiracy theory.
I also get a kick out of people only looking for side effects they think of as side effects, since they are what people think of as side effects for completely different types of technologies.
>In men younger than 40 years old, the number of excess myocarditis events per million people was higher after a second dose of mRNA-1273 than after a positive SARS-CoV-2 test (97 [95% CI, 91–99] versus 16 [95% CI, 12–18]).
From your own study you linked. The first comment I ever posted on HN was regarding a similar study where there was no control group whatsoever for unvaccinated people.
I can’t get over the sunk cost reaction to this vaccine. No one who was not immunocompromised should have ever taken it. Period.
And this is just regarding your study.
Remember how the AstraZeneca vaccine (it was called the “Oxford vaccine” before that bad PR) was taken off the market instantly after reports of blood clots.
Can you clarify that? It saved 100K+ lives even by incredibly conservative estimates, and allowed life to returned to normal at least a year earlier than otherwise.
> allowed life to returned to normal at least a year earlier than otherwise.
Life still has not returned to normal. Supply chains have been destroyed. The global economy has been destroyed. After they gave up on the Covid Lockdowns, they immediately switched over to the Ukraine War. And then they switched to the Iran War and the Strait of Hormuz. And now they are pushing the AI data centers, because apparently they don't care about Climate Change anymore.
You got RFK because half the population thought they were unique snowflakes who could not abide by the same simple rules as everyone else. The price he'll extract is significant impacts on health, wealth and well-being.
Vaccines that have a large impact on transmission and infection are there not just for you but for your community.
The covid shots were good against hospitalization and death in older folks, but they were not great at preventing infection or transmission (despite what you may have gleaned from the speakers blaring ads in every public setting for all that time).
You can fall back to the "flooding the hospitals" argument, that works a little better here.
You're misinterpreting data here. You are conflating the fact that the clinical trials didn't measure infection/transmission (which is very hard to do in a clinical trial) with the distinct claim that they didn't reduce transmission in reality.
The vaccines were extremely effective at reducing transmission during the first waves of COVID, where such an intervention was most valuable. And due to viral growth dynamics, even small reductions in transmission yield big net outcomes.
Later waves made the vaccine much less effective at reducing transmission, but still highly effective at reducing hospital utilization which is (despite your snarky aside), extremely valuable. Fatality rates doubled when ERs hit full capacity.
You're ignoring reality here. Everybody knows that the vaccines did not prevent transmission. The masks were far more effective at preventing transmission.
I can't speak for other people but I was upset to enter a medical era where bureaucrats were forcing medical decisions on me. I was forced to get it or lose my job despite 1) working remotely, 2) having already had Covid and 3) being healthy and not at risk of Covid death but being the largest risk for myocarditis.
Americans are so silly. Resentful of being told to do anything for their own good or the good of others because of “individual liberty”, yet so willing to lick the boot of the police state and corrupt crony capitalists. Good news for you is that Elon went in and set the bureaucrats straight, so enjoy your diarrhea and glass in your food.
"Polarizing" is a word that kind of applies, especially if one is trying to be polite, but really it's one of the most politically disinformed issues in a long long time.
A bunch of grifters pushed fear, uncertainty, and doubt for personal gain, at the expense of the health of the nation. I try not to blame people who got tricked, but at some point we need to treat people like adults who are responsible for their own actions, and hold them accountable for the harm they perpetuate by believing BS and acting on it.
A democracy cannot function when its members are low-functioning, and when bad information dominates. Those who spread disinformation, relish the conspiracy and disinformation because it makes them feel special emotionally, and wallow in the mess of it, are hurting us all.
I don't recall it being as polarizing outside of the US, where there was a larger group of anti-vaxxers to begin with. But that might be my "outside US" bubble.
There is a legitimate discussion of what can be mandated you do to your body.
However, that discussion was largely side-tracked by the massive amount of disinformation (eg, "Plandemic") that circulated online. There are people who to this day swear that COVID-19 was just like the flu and simultaneously claim that the vaccine spike proteins have killed around 20M people. Not just crackpots, but people with reach, like Brett Weinstein on Joe Rogan's podcast.
> There is a legitimate discussion of what can be mandated you do to your body.
But we have already protocols and frameworks on public health.
Also plenty of other medical choices are taken with way less input of experts (see abortion discussions for example)
Not sure, the midst of a global crisis, with almost universal scientific approval is the time to have a long discussion on bodily autonomy on countries like america where 50% of people cant read at a 6th grade level.
> There is a legitimate discussion of what can be mandated you do to your body.
There is a legitimate discussion (dating back at least to Typhoid Mary (1) ) on excluding people from public spaces when the refuse to take basic public health measures. Taking a vaccine for a spreading deadly pandemic is one of those measures.
Doing something so violently anti-social is not simply a "bodily autonomy" issue, and framing it only as such is deeply misguided in a way that seems particular to some USA norms.
In other news, your barber thinks you need a haircut.
Until there is a proven net overall health benefit to this therapy, I wouldn't waste much ink on it. Also, can someone please tell me how one controls the dose for an mRNA therapy ?
If you actually had melanoma (a very aggressive type of skin cancer) you would be glad for one more chance of maybe still being alive a few years from now.
Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House fame (I mention this a lot as I read these to my children as an adult, and they’re a fascinating look at 1880s America) has lots of places where her mother says “put on your bonnet! Don’t get too much sun!”. We act like people in the past were ignorant but people in the 50s and 60s were just a very special type of arrogant, all of Chesterton’s fences were torn down during that time period.
They thought too much sun was bad for you because back then tanned skin was considering a mark of being poor and pale skin was a mark of being wealthy since rich people didn’t have to work outside.
They also had puritanical Victorian notions of modesty and covering up.
There was no knowledge linking sun exposure to cancer or negative health effects. People in the past indeed were ignorant on many things.
So it's not that they ignored the all knowledge. I blame most of it on the rather detrimental tech advancement. Like cigarettes with filters: now safer (except you can smoke more now, and the cancer risk is still a disaster)
I’d be curious to know if tetraethyllead in gasoline has anything to do with people from that time being cavalier about exposure to the sun, or if the science was just not there to make the connection between sun exposure and skin cancer.
However, I’ve never gotten so much as a whisper of sunburn / suntan / anything on an actually cloudy day where sun wasn’t hitting me directly. Is the damage a different type that’s imperceptible? Or is this a public health comms strategy where they assume people will see a single cloud in the sky and decide it’s fine to skip sunscreen, so they talk about how you should slather yourself with sunscreen 24/7, even if the sun is obscured?
We never wore sunscreen as kids because we didn't burn. I probably have had three sunburns in my life. Learned once I became an adult that that wasn't sound logic...
From https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.35463
> Cutaneous melanoma (CM) accounted for around 331,700 cancer cases globally in 2022
> An estimated 267,353 (95% uncertainty intervals [UI]: 242,818, 278,638) CM cases were UVR attributable globally in 2022
UVR = Ultraviolet radiation
Cutaneous melanoma (CM) is the vast majority of melanoma cases in the US at least:
> The percentages of melanomas that were cutaneous, ocular, mucosal, and unknown primaries were 91.2%, 5.2%, 1.3%, and 2.2%, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9781962/
tl;dr ~80% of Cutaneous melanoma cases are attributable to UV exposure.
OP did not say that melanoma has no sun exposure risk but that it is lower than the risks associated with other cutaneous cancers (e.g., SCC and BCC) and it would seem that's true based on the very short search I performed.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5742376/
> Most skin cancers are not a big deal, and even Melanomas can vanish on their own
PSA: don't take medical advice from internet comments
Quantifiably false statement. Incredibly dangerous misinformation to spread—shame on you.
From https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.35463
> Cutaneous melanoma (CM) accounted for around 331,700 cancer cases globally in 2022
> An estimated 267,353 (95% uncertainty intervals [UI]: 242,818, 278,638) CM cases were UVR attributable globally in 2022
UVR = Ultraviolet radiation
Cutaneous melanoma (CM) is the vast majority of melanoma cases in the US at least:
> The percentages of melanomas that were cutaneous, ocular, mucosal, and unknown primaries were 91.2%, 5.2%, 1.3%, and 2.2%, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9781962/
That is a discussion of specific subtypes of melanoma. You've turned that into a general statement about melanoma:
> not all skin cancers are caused by sun exposure, and this is more true for Melenoma which occur both more frequently in darker skinned people and in place where there is little sun exposure.
These are "Two rare ... forms of melanoma" not "melanoma as a whole." The article does not say melanoma as a whole is more frequent in darker-skinned people and in places with little sun exposure. Those two subtypes are.
Let's also quote from https://wasatchdermatology.com/blogs/basal-cell-vs-squamous-...
> BCC ... can cause significant local tissue damage if left untreated. Most cases are linked to chronic sun exposure, especially in fair-skinned individuals.
> While it often remains localized at first, SCC can invade deeper tissues and, in some cases, metastasize to lymph nodes or other organs. Risk factors include cumulative sun exposure, a history of sunburns, and immunosuppression.
> While not all skin cancers can be prevented, effective sun protection and healthy habits can greatly reduce your risk for basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and melanoma.
That does not support "most skin cancers are not a big deal"
> Melanomas can vanish on their own
Your link does not support that statement https://www.nature.com/articles/s41379-021-00870-2
"Whilst some studies reported an association with improved survival ... others did not find any significant association, and some even reported worse outcomes in patients whose tumors showed regression"
You seem to have read this as "melanoma just goes away and the problem is gone" rather than "the primary tumor can recede, and in that case survival odds are somewhat better by a few percentage points (but actually worse for Stage III patients!)"
https://www.merck.com/news/merck-and-moderna-announce-phase-...
Still no actual Phase 3 data presented.
So this should answer the question of "how much better is this with the best we currently have".
https://archive.ph/SQQ97
Here's a great blog post on this, "How to build a cancer vaccine, and whether they will work this time": https://www.owlposting.com/p/how-to-build-a-cancer-vaccine-a...
Here's the blog post I wrote on personalized mRNA vaccines: https://hedonicescalator.substack.com/p/did-paul-conyngham-r...
Moderna used a simple heuristic, "how likely is this antigen to show up on the cell surface?" which makes sense, since an antigen has to show up on the cell surface for the immune system to see it. But there's so much missing from this model, and we just don't have enough data. Failures in clinical trials of mRNA vaccines may well be caused by this problem. (Yes, this is a good problem for AI, if we can get enough data).
Those few exceptions have been monumental in how they've changed cancer treatment. Skin cancer has been particularly well treated with immunotherapy, but other cancers have also benefited from the exact same research and drugs (as it turns out, the specific mutations the immunotherapies like Keytruda target express in other cancers). The reason skin cancer gets so much attention is because it's one of the most commonly diagnosed and treated cancers. (Colon is more common, I believe, but it often doesn't get detected. Get your colonoscopies folks).
It has moved fast enough that I've heard from multiple oncologists that the all 5 year survivability numbers are dated because the treatments are newer than the studies.
We've come a LONG way in a very short period in terms of cancer treatment. It still sucks, but not as much as it once did.
"Almost never" is doing a lot of work. You may be aware that most drugs fail over the course of development and human trials?
Anyway, checkpoint inhibitor therapy is a massive boon to oncology and was only brought into widespread use over the past 15 years.
Related stories:
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/merck-and-modernas-per...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/merck-moderna-say-m...
https://www.wsj.com/health/pharma/moderna-merck-vaccine-succ...
MRNA, as it happens, is the latter.
I don't know if that counts as the same "trick" or not as it's another antiviral vaccine. Not that I disagree with you.
I read that this mRNA flu vaccine can be more effective then the regular annual flu shot, simply because the time to create it is shorter, therefor the guess at what strains will circulate that year is more accurate.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41701031/
But it is yet more validation. mRNA technology is here, get used to it.
Well it did give more than a couple million people myocarditis as a side effect, so there's that.
Closest thing I could find was a little over 15,000 people in Europe who got myocarditis (also includes pericarditis: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10746454/). Out of millions (hundreds of millions?) that received the vaccine. Please stop doing what your doing. It's pretty shit.
Yes, and it's worse than that for the parent commenter, the unvaccinated population also got some cases of myocarditis - often after Covid. And they got myocarditis at a higher rate than the vaccinated.
Example study:
> The incidence of pericarditis and myocarditis in the total population exposed to at least one dose of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines was 5/100,000 (CI95%:3 to 8 per 100,000), compared to 70/100,000 (CI95%: 66 to 92 per 100,000) in those who were not vaccinated.
The study monitored a total population of 536,448 people. This is real data.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38262150/
> The incidence of pericarditis and myocarditis in patients exposed to mRNA COVID-19 vaccines was lower than in those who were not vaccinated
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38262150/
Buddy, this is a phase 3 trial. This is about as close as you can get to "anything that can be used on patients" without already being approved.
It is clear that you don't have experience in this area.
Biotech is one of the very very very few areas of the stockmarket where specialist knowledge generates alpha.
Trolling through random biotechs, learning about their tech, and investing in the most promising applications of that tech in the most impactful areas is something that happens somewhat on publicly traded markets. With tech, most of that happens pre-IPO.
It’s similar to the situation where a company puts out a public offer to buy another company at say, $50 a share on a day that the acquisition target is trading at $40/share.
If the stock of the target company is trading at $46/share, the market is pricing in the probability of the acquisition not happening. If the market knew the acquisition would happen with 100% certainty, the price of the target company shares would be equal to the buyout share price offer. You can assume the risk of the acquisition not happening by purchasing shares at $46, and if it does end up going through, you earn $4 a share from assuming that risk.
I'm very very excited to see what comes next.
I feel like everything companies, and presidents, say now is directly geared to triggering AI trades.
The only thing they are looking at with this drug is people living one more month over existing drugs.
THIS IS NOTHING.
"The median PFS (progression-free survival) for KEYTRUDA was 5.5 months (2-week group) and 4.1 months (3-week group) compared to 2.8 months for ipilimumab (HR 0.58, P<0.00001 for the KEYTRUDA groups vs. ipilimumab,"
https://www.merck.com/news/keytruda-pembrolizumab-mercks-ant...
The median PFS (progression-free survival) for KEYTRUDA was 5.5 months (2-week group) and 4.1 months (3-week group) compared to 2.8 months for ipilimumab (HR 0.58, P<0.00001 for the KEYTRUDA groups vs. ipilimumab, 95% CI, 0.46-0.72 for 2-week group and 0.47-0.72 for 3-week group, respectively). The estimated 6-month PFS rates for the KEYTRUDA and ipilimumab arms were 47.3 percent, 46.4 percent and 26.5 percent, respectively. One-year OS for KEYTRUDA was 74.1 percent (2-week group) and 68.4 percent (3-week group) compared to 58.2 percent for ipilimumab (HR 0.63 [95% CI, 0.47-0.83, P=0.00052] for the 2-week group and HR 0.69 [95% CI, 0.52-0.90, P=0.00358] for the 3-week group). At the time of analysis, median overall survival was not reached in any treatment group.
2. I don't think AI was mentioned once in this press release.
3. This drug was approved for trial in 2014, so if it had something to do with deep learning, that would actually be a massive announcement.
4. The paragraph immediately following the one you clipped talks about Overall Response Rate (ORR) and throughout the release they discuss Overall Survival (OS).
5. This is not "NOTHING" in statistical terms, but even more so to people with melanoma.
They also left the public in the dark about the risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis, especially in young males, many of whom experienced permanent heart tissue damage.
That is a massive gap between what the public was told and what later evidence found. If a technology makes your cells produce a biologically active protein, regulators should establish where it goes, how long it can persist, and what prolonged exposure does before mass deployment.
https://news.yale.edu/2025/02/19/immune-markers-post-vaccina... https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.18.25322379v...
which is still the case, even in the Yale study.
> That is a massive gap between what the public was told and what later evidence found.
there is an even larger gap between basic epidemiology and what the public understands.
Hard science is difficult to communicate on a good day, on a global pandemic with quacks getting tons of airtime and multiple labs finding conflicting results (due to speed to publish and bad experimental parameters) I would say that was communicated by health experts was surprisingly valid and accurate.
Where public health officials "failed" was not having a megaphone loud enough to drown out the game of telephone that most people (as these comment threads consistently show) were actually hearing information through.
Simplest example: People will say that public health officials told them "masks don't work." But no! Only one person did, and that was USSG Jerome Adams (who wasn't credible nor a major player to begin with). What public health officials said was "we do not know if masks work," which is a more nuanced but completely accurate statement.
The emails of Fauci that have been released prove that Fauci lied to the public, and that the public health statements were knowingly false.
I think you are all simply ripping this apart because your egos won't accept you could be wrong. How disappointing from a group of people I would expect a more scientific and thoughtful approach from. What are the basic tenets of pharmaceutical toxicology and safety? Or epidemiological research? Who cares.
You should read the emails being released of Fauci, which shows without a doubt that Fauci lied to the public.
Not true. This was correctly disclosed in the trial results as a super super super tail risk.
Once they realized that the (minuscule) risk could be even further mitigated by simply spacing out the booster schedule, they adjusted that (Feb 2022).
Nobody was "left in the dark"
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...
From your own study you linked. The first comment I ever posted on HN was regarding a similar study where there was no control group whatsoever for unvaccinated people.
I can’t get over the sunk cost reaction to this vaccine. No one who was not immunocompromised should have ever taken it. Period.
And this is just regarding your study.
Remember how the AstraZeneca vaccine (it was called the “Oxford vaccine” before that bad PR) was taken off the market instantly after reports of blood clots.
One can go on endlessly.
Was this knowably true in Q1 2021?
Can you please share the specific, contemporaneously available information that made this knowably true?
If you can't, then it's not "sunk cost" infecting someone else's thinking, it's hindsight bias infecting yours.
Care to share what that is exactly?
Can you clarify that? It saved 100K+ lives even by incredibly conservative estimates, and allowed life to returned to normal at least a year earlier than otherwise.
Life still has not returned to normal. Supply chains have been destroyed. The global economy has been destroyed. After they gave up on the Covid Lockdowns, they immediately switched over to the Ukraine War. And then they switched to the Iran War and the Strait of Hormuz. And now they are pushing the AI data centers, because apparently they don't care about Climate Change anymore.
The covid shots were good against hospitalization and death in older folks, but they were not great at preventing infection or transmission (despite what you may have gleaned from the speakers blaring ads in every public setting for all that time).
You can fall back to the "flooding the hospitals" argument, that works a little better here.
The vaccines were extremely effective at reducing transmission during the first waves of COVID, where such an intervention was most valuable. And due to viral growth dynamics, even small reductions in transmission yield big net outcomes.
50% - 70% reduction in transmission: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2116597
Later waves made the vaccine much less effective at reducing transmission, but still highly effective at reducing hospital utilization which is (despite your snarky aside), extremely valuable. Fatality rates doubled when ERs hit full capacity.
Did we enter a new era or where you not paying attention or affecting you before?
Reminds me of the old adage of:
Q: "Why is no one speaking about this?"
R: "Is no one talking about this, or are you just 20 and its the first time you are hearing about it?"
A bunch of grifters pushed fear, uncertainty, and doubt for personal gain, at the expense of the health of the nation. I try not to blame people who got tricked, but at some point we need to treat people like adults who are responsible for their own actions, and hold them accountable for the harm they perpetuate by believing BS and acting on it.
A democracy cannot function when its members are low-functioning, and when bad information dominates. Those who spread disinformation, relish the conspiracy and disinformation because it makes them feel special emotionally, and wallow in the mess of it, are hurting us all.
A discussion as old as time. Plato considered voting a skill, and if you were shit at it, then you shouldnt be voting
People were holding protests. I know two friends who refused to get the vaccine and downloaded forged documents to be admitted into bars and clubs.
Very anecdotal, but after we went out together they both contracted Covid and had a high fever, while I luckily remained healthy.
However, that discussion was largely side-tracked by the massive amount of disinformation (eg, "Plandemic") that circulated online. There are people who to this day swear that COVID-19 was just like the flu and simultaneously claim that the vaccine spike proteins have killed around 20M people. Not just crackpots, but people with reach, like Brett Weinstein on Joe Rogan's podcast.
But we have already protocols and frameworks on public health.
Also plenty of other medical choices are taken with way less input of experts (see abortion discussions for example)
Not sure, the midst of a global crisis, with almost universal scientific approval is the time to have a long discussion on bodily autonomy on countries like america where 50% of people cant read at a 6th grade level.
There is a legitimate discussion (dating back at least to Typhoid Mary (1) ) on excluding people from public spaces when the refuse to take basic public health measures. Taking a vaccine for a spreading deadly pandemic is one of those measures.
Doing something so violently anti-social is not simply a "bodily autonomy" issue, and framing it only as such is deeply misguided in a way that seems particular to some USA norms.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon