This is crazy making. This JAMA article is about how this flu strain is particularly nasty, partly because they didn’t know this would be the predominant one until after vaccines were made & it mentions “respiratory hygiene, such as staying home when you’re sick”, but there’s no mention of prevention.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2843197
This person, this pharmacist (?) in the comments, is the only one in this article to talk about how airborne viruses aren’t inevitable & it would be better to not act like they are.
Then the next comment is some clown talking about how it’s best to let our immune system battle it (rather than vaccines or antivirals I guess).
Anyway, the pharmacist’s comment had some links if you’re interested.
Nicola Boyd, PhD Comp. Chemist | Durham University
“The authors state the concerning but not unexpected behaviour of seasonal influenza viruses – that they evolve and mutate rapidly, causing unacceptable levels of illness every year, prompting a never ending arms race for vaccine developers. It is encouraging that the authors do acknowledge that the influenza vaccines are sub-optimal – ‘I wish we had better flu vaccines that, if you got it, you’re not going to get the flu….That’s not the case’. Beyond this however, in common with much of the medical and public health community, the overall outlook remains confined by a narrow and somewhat blinkered mindset.
The underlying fundamental judgement implied here is that respiratory infections are inevitable, and the only reasonable option is downstream mitigations via relatively poorly performing pharmaceutical interventions.
Outside the medical realm, aerosol engineers have a great deal of understanding about how airborne viral transmission occurs and how this can be curtailed. UVC/Far-UVC air and surface disinfection, HEPA/MERV filtration, and ventilation are technologies that can remove and destroy multiple pathogens simultaneously 'outside the human host'. The importance of this latter point cannot be overstated, as it means that pathogens have no mutational space to explore, thus creating an evolutionary dead end for replicating entities. These truly preventative solutions not only reduce the disease burden, but in doing so will also allow us to extract better value from vaccines and anti-virals by significantly slowing the evolutionary process of such troublesome diseases.
I believe that we will only make significant progress if the medical establishment breaks away from the ‘surrender narrative’ that airborne viral infections are inevitable, and starts to integrate medical interventions with engineering solutions for transmission control and potential elimination, in a truly preventative strategy.”
References:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd9149
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47777-5
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-57441-z
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10933500/
#H3N2 #influenza #JAMA #vaccines
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