Thought experiment: Regional, local, hyperlocal and/or just-in-time vaccine production

Warning & disclaimer: Please do imagine that you really are going to do this, but please do not actually try this, at least not unless you are a health care practitioner.

I myself, without a pre-med education let alone a medical one, cannot know whether this is a good idea. I'm just a person who has enjoyed reading biomedical research for some years. I do my best to avoid the Dunning-Kruger effect (a cognitive bias rooted in ignorance) and one way is to share my dumb ideas and see what critique I can get.

To better understand something, a thought experiment can be useful. In this case, I was highly motivated to learn by challenging myself to think up ways to improve vaccines. I probably never would have learned as much had I not adopted the goals of making vaccines both more effective and safer. And I'd not have had the motivation to take those goals seriously if I hadn't framed this in the context of a potentially attainable DIY vaccine, made myself and administered to myself by myself. Is this kind of thought experiment a useful task to crowdsource, then?

To improve vaccines, a few improvements seem potentially within reach.

There seem to be several different complications that may cause an present-day actual, centrally designed, commercially produced vaccine to fall short of the ideal vaccine:

1. Contamination: Vaccine contamination with live microbes has occasionally been a problem in vaccine plants. In 2004, the FDA closed a major flu vaccine plant for contamination, but only after it had documented that as a problem at that same plant for five consecutive years already. Was that the last such case? Search the news for vaccine plant contamination, and search the FDA's FOIA Reading Room for its plant "inspectional observations," Forms 483.

2. Strain selection: Each year, vaccine designers have to guess which strains will be prevalent. The result is a compromise. And when a strain appears, whether globally or in any particular locale, it may not have been among those put into that year's standardized vaccine.

3. Immunizing versus tolerizing: Vaccines with pathogens killed or inactivated by formaldehyde (a common method) may sometimes induce tolerance rather than immunity. In some cases, vaccines with pathogens killed by hydrogen peroxide may have the desired effect more often.

4. Preservatives are either necessary or more-necessary in mass-produced vaccines that must have a shelf life, and in multiple-dose containers of vaccine. Preservatives that have been used in vaccines include organic mercury, which is toxic, and which in the amounts used may be harmful to some people. The US government required that organic mercury be removed from vaccines, as of 1999, but years later, it remains in some vaccines.

The US government has a program to pay out money to people injured by vaccines.

Some of these problems might be reduced by producing vaccines on a scale closer to local, perhaps using hydrogen peroxide rather than formaldehyde to inactivate the pathogens.

Hydrogen peroxide is used by white blood cells (leucocytes) to destroy pathogens inside them and break them up into their component antigens.

A therapy in FDA approved clinical trials circa 2011 used an oxidized streptococcus toxin (oxidized streptolysin O) to treat many chronic conditions that may result from strep infection or its immune sequelae.

Could local public health officials and health care practitioners, for example, use hydrogen peroxide to produce vaccines from bodily secretions? Or could primary care physicians help families to produce their own vaccines from family members' secretions, at the first sign of illness (or even before) and self-administer?

In what may be the safest example, one might try a version of this oneself. For example, one could buy 3% hydrogen peroxide, dilute 1:4 with tap water, and rinse one's mouth with it. The harmful Strep mutans bacteria that cause dental caries (cavities) might be at least partly killed, oxidized, and broken up, exposing internal antigens. The resulting antigens might be recognized by one's immune system, whose white blood cells also destroy pathogens with H2O2.

More caveats:

- Without an adjuvant, which the immune system must recognize as a "danger," a vaccine's antigen can produce tolerization rather than immunization, depending on an antigen dose threshold that depends on the route of administration and is individually variable. (A typical adjuvant is an aluminum compound.) What questions does this raise in your mind? Some that occur to me include: "Must an adjuvant actually be toxic in the amount used?" and "how do adjuvants relate to hormesis?" and then "Are some toxins eliminated more consistently and completely than others?" as well as"does it matter whether the 'danger model' holds in full?"

- A lot of these questions were inspired by what I read about the danger model of immunology, which seems to have been partly accepted but perhaps as a framework not as popular as the "self-nonself model."