Why can't the government or a generic drug manufacturer just produce the Lyme Disease vaccine? It is safe and the patent has expired!

(Also, I have the same question about the poison ivy immunotherapy pills that were common in the US before the FDA.)

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Aurornis 40 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

There is a long, sad history here. Lyme disease is a popular topic into alternative medicine as an explanation for unexplained symptoms. There is a belief in these communities that the standard tests for Lyme disease are not accurate, so people diagnose themselves by vague symptoms like feeling tired or having headaches. It’s a sad situation where people who aren’t finding an explanation for their symptoms get drawn into forums or Facebook groups where groups of people confidently tell them that their symptoms sound like Chronic Lyme Disease and that normal doctors can’t help them.

This has created an intense fear of Lyme disease among people who don’t trust doctors and “do their own research”. That group overlaps a lot with anti-vax groups. You can see where this is going. Some people who got the Lyme vaccine because they saw it as the lesser of two evils and then subsequently had medical issues blamed everything on the vaccine, and it blew up into lawsuits and a belief that the vaccine causes these problems. If there was any real problem we’ll never know because the storm was such a mess that it made actual research impossible and scared so many people away from the vaccine that it was withdrawn from the market.

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lokar an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Vaccination

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vintermann an hour ago | parent | next [-]

All those people who claimed to get autoimmune problems after the vaccine, must have been people who went to quite a bit of trouble to get the vaccine in the first place, so I'm not so sure it can all be written off as health panic.

	▲	maxerickson 36 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's a bit of a stretch to describe These claims were investigated by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control, which found no connection between the vaccine and the autoimmune complaints. as "written off as a health panic". Of course you can just say they didn't investigate it enough or whatever, you aren't trying to make a reasoned argument and thus don't need to exercise reason.
	▲	Aurornis 36 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Lyme disease has a long, storied history in alternative medicine and anti-vax communities. I would not be surprised if many of the people seeking the vaccine early were in those communities and entered with a distrust of vaccines, but thought the risk of Lyme disease outweighed their perceived risk of the vaccine. Once they got the vaccine they fixated on it as the source of their problems. This exact pattern has been playing out with the COVID vaccine and the HPV vaccine. There are communities who are convinced that every medical problem they had since receiving the HPV vaccine is due to the vaccine, even though they’re all having different health problems that also occur in the overall population.
	▲	lokar an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		A problem with vaccines and the public is that when you perform any intervention on many many people, some will happen to (randomly) suffer some issue. To them, it is obviously causation, regardless of what the math (that they do t understand) says.

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KellyCriterion 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

There was a link on HN some years ago which reported entering a phase-III trial for a vaccination created by one of the big pharma.

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cubefox an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

There is potentially a new Lyme vaccine coming out in about a year. The review process in Europe just started.

https://pharmaphorum.com/news/pfizer-valneva-lyme-vaccine-st...