Supposedly GSK created one and marketed it in the early aughts (around 2000) then pulled it from the market because demand was low.
Is lyme disease a disease like malaria or HIV where the pathogen is very tricky and it is hard to find antigens to base a vaccine on, or is it a lack of financial motivation, or is it because lyme is considered something of an orphan disease or what?
There are something like 300,000 lyme infections a year in the US, I would assume those numbers would keep growing. Plus because of issues with unreliable diagnostic tests a lot of people suffer serious injury before they figure out what is wrong. It seems like there should be more motivation to create a vaccine.
It’s not a particularly deadly disease, and antibiotics generally clear it up, so a vaccine is not a priority.
Note, too, that drug companies work on new drugs and vaccines that will give them the greatest profit. This means for new drugs and vaccines, they favor
- chronic conditions
- with large numbers of patients (300,000 is not large in their estimation)
- in wealthy parts of the world.
#3 is covered, but a vaccine for Lyme would not fit 1 or 2, so coming up with another cholesterol medication is going to get priority.
It was my understanding the vaccine GSK created required boosters as it lost effectiveness after a few years. Also that 300k figure is the number of people infected each year in the US, not the total market for the vaccine. The market for the vaccine would consist of the northeast, northern midwest and possibly the rest of the midwest, the south and west coast. Pretty much everything except the plains states. The market is at minimum 100 million people or so in the US, if not much larger.
If a vaccine costs 500 million to bring to market (that $800 million per drug figure is overestimated, but roughly in that ballpark), and each booster cost $100 every 2 years that is $200 million every 2 years if you only vaccinate 1 million people. A market of 1 million people alone would make the drug profitable.
You’re absolutely right, there should be a vaccine and there isn’t, simply because of mundane biotech industry politics.
Add in a good dose of bullshit “vaccine injury” panic to that explanation. All of the “OMG vaccines are killing our children” wingnuts make it extremely difficult to bring vaccines to market. That link explains it was yanked off the market because of people screaming that it was causing arthritis, when no proof existed, and sales fell through the floor.
Our dogs were immunized this year. It wasn’t cheap, but the vaccine manufacturer offers to cover any/all cost associated with treatment for Borreliosis in an immunized dog.
Also, the seriousness of Lyme disease was exaggerated for a while. Some “alternate clinicians,” and even a few doctors, claimed that people could suffer from chronic Lyme infection that caused debilitating conditions, but that turned out not to be the case. Even though it’s a serious disease untreated, it’s pretty easily treated-- more like strep throat than TB. The vaccine was in the works when people were worried about chronic Lyme disease, something that turned out not to be a problem.
FWIW, statistically, a certain number of people who have had Lyme disease will go on to coincidentally develop something like fibromyalgia, a disease that wasn’t even described until about 15 years after the first cases of Lyme, and most of the people diagnosed with chronic Lyme were in the age group, and had other things in common with people first diagnosed with fibromyalgia. It’s sort of like people connecting the MMR shot with autism, or the DTP shot with Dravet syndrome, because the first symptoms of those conditions typically show up around the time of the shot. I’m not saying everyone (mis)diagnosed with chronic Lyme had fibromyalgia-- some probably had psychogenic conditions, and some may have not finished their first course of antibiotics and had a recurrence, while others had some other condition happen to show up at the same time as Lyme. It happens.