I guess I need a reality check. I see a drug moved from development to FDA approval at unprecedented speed. I see drugs about to be distributed at unprecedented worldwide levels. I’m the odd man out by being nervous?
have you looked into how these mRNA vaccines work compared to other vaccine types and the known and the unknowns?
The New York Times has a very layperson-friendly description: How the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 Vaccine Works - The New York Times and there are certainly some non-hysterical articles on risks like this one at Vox Covid-19 vaccines: A doctor on 9 things that could go wrong - Vox
I got the following from the little bit of reading I’ve done:
mRNA is already made and used by your body. It goes into a cell and prompts the cell to make proteins as part of DNA transcription (though it doesn’t ever combine with DNA)
The vaccine mRNA is designed to prompt your cells to make spike proteins from the coronavirus, which are proteins that are only associated with organisms penetrating cells. Your body doesn’t naturally make any proteins like this’
mRNA doesn’t last long and each mRNA strand is only going to go into a single cell, provided it survives long enough to encounter a cell (increasing the survival of the mRNA was a big part of the vaccine development). That’s why two doses are best. Most people will need a second dose to assure that enough proteins are made to rev up your immune system.
Long term effects aren’t known, but there are very few that seem to be possible. The mRNA and the proteins don’t replicate and are cleaned up as you cells die (naturally). So months after the injection (let alone years), there is nothing from the vaccine left. The only long term effect people worry about is that the proteins (or the brief mRNA exposure) might cause some sort of immune system malfunction, resulting in an auto-immune disease. But it is hard to come up with a mechanism (that is not homeopathic) whereby this type of thing would occur years after everything associated with the vaccine is completely gone (hence the homeopathy explanation). However, there may be some concern for people who already have an autoimmune disease)
Finally, I saw an article that gave the rate of anaphylactic reactions to one of the vaccines. It was 0.62% in the vaccinated population and 0.5% in the placebo population. So, beware of the placebos!
All of this was from about 30 minutes of searching and reading, so if you are worried, do some research (and treat the above with the weight it deserves based on the amount of research I did)
No. As @Riemann explicitly acknowledged, we don’t know for sure if the vaccine is without risk. But also, the assumption that
is simply foolish. The vaccines have, in extensive trials, been shown to be safe, and to not carry excessive immediate side effects. True, there may be—in the sense that it’s logically possible—future ill effects: but we simply don’t know that, and have no reason to believe it. Indeed, since the stuff used is just stuff that’s around in our bodies at any given time in abundance, it’d be surprising if it did. But of course, ‘surprising’ doesn’t mean ‘impossible’.
What we do know, however, is that the vaccine alleviates the risk from COVID-19. That disease has already killed one out of every thousand people in the US. (Not one out of thousand who got the disease, but one out of thousand period.) The vaccine, on the other hand, has been tested on many thousands of probands, and (to my knowledge) not killed a single one of them.
Moreover, just as getting the vaccine may have (again in the ‘it’s logically possible’ sense) unforeseen future consequences, so does getting COVID-19. Indeed, if anything, here we have more reason to believe that it will, since it’s a serious illness with potentially deadly outcome, which can, to use the technical term, fuck you up long-term. Moreover still, we’ve already seen reports of long-term damage to the respiratory and even nervous system due to the virus.
So, the risk calculation here is a no-brainer: both the virus and the disease could have unknown long-term consequences, with us having every reason to believe that the virus would be more likely to. The vaccine has little to no immediate risk; the virus’ immediate danger, by comparison, is huge. Taking the vaccine thus exchanges a small risk of something unknown might do we don’t know what at some point in the future for a large risk of widespread death and just the same, if not more, of something unknown in the future.
Just as a side note, everything else being equal the Moderna vaccine may become more prevalent because it has less stringent cold-storage requirements than Pfizer, making it easier to transport and store without specialized equipment. The Pfizer vaccine has to be maintained at -70 to -80° C, Moderna at only -20° C.
Both Pfizer and Moderna, however, require two shots, at intervals of 21 and 28 days, respectively. Maybe by the time I’m able to get it there will be a one-shot vaccine available. Apparently I’m not quite old enough to be in a high-priority group.
This is a bit of humor, but it has a serious point to make.
Absent any efforts at a vaccine of any kind, soon enough substantially every human will have had COVID. Some to die from it, some to be crippled by it, some to be subtly damaged by it, and many, many more to be apparently none the worse for the experience. So far.
Now let’s relabel all the bad things that happened from all those 7 billion infections as “side effects” or “adverse reactions”. Then compare the results of all those naturally acquired COVID infections versus the adverse the side effects and adverse reactions from inoculating all of humanity with the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.
I believe as a matter of statistics, not mere arm-waving opinion, that we’d still find that COVID was far, far worse unless those two vaccines set new world records for bad consequences, none of which were discovered until after the last dose was given.
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I live near a major urban area. We have lots of hospitals, universities, and research labs. Many of those already own a freezer that can store the Pfizer vaccine. We also have the population density to completely use an opened batch. If distribution is rational (it won’t be) we will get a disproportionate amount of the Pfizer vaccine, because we have the infrastructure to make use of it.
Even so, I expect all the Pfizer vaccine to go to people closer to the front of the line here.
I think the answer is time will tell. However it is also very difficult to get a new class of drugs authorized, and sometimes just better to go the standard route that has a approval history over a class that has never gotten approval.
This also factors into the R&D money, which drug is going to get the resources, one that is easier to get approved, or one that is harder? And during testing if the new class of drug has about the same success rate as conventional methods, it looses because of the extra hurdles needed to get approval, for something that a known track record method works equally as well.
So yes we are stepping into uncharted waters here, it could be a long term disaster, or it could be a great breakthrough for us, as we understand the genetic code more and more, we may be able to produce vaccines very quickly, even one day like we see on Star Trek where one is deployed to the entire crew by the end of the episode.
About 18k got the Pfizer vaccine in the final trials.
It’s certainly moved fast, but not QUITE as fast as it immediately appears. Several of the new vaccines leverage work that was done for a SARS vaccine. Work on the SARS-1 and MERS vaccines were stopped because there were no more people to test them on, not because they ran into theoretical difficulties. I forget whether I was reading about the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine (they are very similar) but it was developed by taking the not-completely-tested SARS-1 vaccine, tweaking the RNA strand based on the info published about SARS-CoV-2 in January, and beginning animal tests from that.
(They also looked at the natural immune responses of people who fought off covid, and checked to see how that compared to the response from the vaccines. But the backbone of the mRNA vaccines is not quite as brand-new as you might have thought.)
I know that’s true but how many drugs spring out of the ether? New drugs build on earlier research on similar drugs/diseases.
I am not making doomsday predictions. But this drug has been tested on about 20k people and within months it’s going into millions of people’s arms. I don’t think apprehension or concern should be waved away as fearmongering.
You all might want to take a look at this: reactions. Wonder if this changes anyone’s thinking.
Naw, I’d already seen this:
You can be allergic to pretty much anything. It’s not surprising that a few people have a serious allergic reaction to a thing that’s intended to provoke the immune system. That’s a risk with any vaccine. (My cat had to be treated for anaphylactic shock after her first rabies vaccine)
It’s not that I think there are no risks from the vaccines, it’s that my best guess is that the risk of the vaccine is a lot less than the risk of not getting the vaccine.
How about for a 30 yr old generally in good health?
This is a really, really bad precis of your own quote. It is absolutely not true that the technology “has never been found to be safe or effective for humans…” It is true that mRNA vaccines have never been widely used, but that’s like saying that nuclear weapons are not effective because they’ve never been widely used.
Please specify what your specific objection is.
The Wiki quote stated that “most finding that the side-effects of mRNA insertion were too serious” and “mRNA vaccines for human use have been developed and tested for the diseases rabies, Zika, cytomegalovirus, and influenza, although none of these had previously been adopted for widespread use.”
So there are known potential dangers of mRNA insertion, and in the case of vaccines specifically no one had ever adopted one for widespread use. I think that amounts to “never been found safe or effective for humans”.
It’s not remotely comparable to nuclear weapons, since if you detonate a nuclear weapon on some island there’s no reason to think anything different will happen if you detonate one in a city, while that’s not true at all in the case of drugs. Difference being that in the case of nuclear weapons, what immediately happens any one time is expected to immediately happen virtually every other time, while in the case of drugs the issue is about what may happen in some percentage of cases and over a longer period of time.
In any event, if you object to something specific, please clarify.
I have a specific concern that I have not seen addressed anywhere. I’ll try to lay it out simply. I do feel the need to point out that I have a relevant doctorate directly in this space and have been working on the immune system for 20 years.
Vaccines provide an antigen for the immune system to look at and be on the look out for in the future. In this case, the spike protein of COVID. But, the antigen is not enough, because the context matters. If you just provide an antigen to the immune system, it will look at that antigen and say, “Hey, here’s this protein we’ve never seen before, but it doesn’t seem to be causing any problem, so let’s make sure we never respond to this in the future.” That’s actually the premise behind some of the treatments for things like peanut allergies; increasing amounts of peanut antigens are introduced in a non-dangerous context and the immune system tolerizes to it.
So, generally, vaccines are provided with “adjuvant” which provides a danger signal to the immune system that puts the foreign protein in context where the immune systems ays, “Holy crap. Here’s this protein we’ve never seen before and it is causing problems. Let’s make sure to form memory so that if we ever see it again, we respond quickly.”
mRNA vaccines have no adjuvant. Ultimately, they will provide the antigen spike protein, produced by your own cells, but there is no reason that will be viewed as dangerous to the immune system. I worry a bit that we might be priming a regulatory (sort of an anti-immune response) response in the long term.
I feel like I’m screaming into the wind on this because I’m willing to hear why this is different, and admittedly RNA vaccines are not my direct field. I haven’t even seen anyone bring this up.
Is there any way your hypothesis could be true, and yet still see 90%+ efficacy rates for these vaccines? Judging solely from your description it sounds like just the sort of thing that would have been evident immediately when they started testing.
Yeah. The flavor of the memory response gets sort of determined as the antigen is cleared. I can imagine scenarios where the initial injury is cleared, but ultimately a population of memory regulatory T cells develops afterwards.
But, admittedly, this is likely the best argument against my hypothesis. I just want to see some immune phenotyping of immunized patients over time. I’m not saying this is a huge concern. Just something I would insist on doing if this were my program.
I agree, an immunogenic response and tolerance are opposite and mutually exclusive outcomes. So the most important answer here is that the trials are directly addressing this risk.