Sean Rameswaram

speaker

7,113 appearances 119 recordings 4 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 9 Sep

Sean Rameswaram’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 46 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 11.

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Today, Explained · The culture wars turn deadly · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

What are they?

Well, the field is at this trial and error period where they want to do a lot of these small-scale trials to prepare for the big one, once they figure out the right pieces to put into the final product.

I'd say, you know, getting those trials funded remains a huge challenge.

And especially because one of the key technologies that could really speed up this research, namely mRNA, is also under attack politically.

mRNA enters the chat.

Oh, God, yeah.

So it's not just that the U.S.

is pulling out from HIV funding generally, but now we're talking about mRNA vaccines.

And the

The key advantage here of mRNA is kind of the same thing that was the key advantage with the COVID fight.

It's really fast.

I mean, if you want to create a vaccine, you just enter the string of genetic letters into a computer and you can order the sequence and basically manufacture the vaccine very quickly.

Obviously, HIV is not an emergent pathogen like COVID was, but the

The researchers are at this point now where they want to run small-scale trial, do the analysis, learn from it, design the next vaccine, and then run another small-scale trial.

And the mRNA lets you kind of get from one trial to the next really quickly in a way that if you're using other vaccine technologies, it can take a year or two just to manufacture your product for the next trial.

And that would really slow things down.

But of course, we've got

a vaccine skeptic heading our health department and mRNA vaccines in particular have become a part of the COVID fights and the culture wars.

So it's especially fraught as we pull away from not only HIV research generally, but mRNA technology more specifically.

Well, let's do some alternate history here just for fun.

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