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Comment by elicash | Hacker News Reader

There will likely be non-mRNA options, assuming they're also found to be safe and effective.

I personally will be getting whatever comes first for the general population, on day one. But it'd be dishonest if I didn't admit having concerns over safety we might not be aware of at the time this is administered that would only be known many months or years later.

That's overridden by the fact that I lost one family member to the virus and another who survived it but is already seeing long-term effects in her lungs from when she had the virus. She was just hospitalized again for those effects. If folks have more info about measuring long-term impacts of a vaccine, I'd love to hear it for the peace of mind. Again, I'll be getting the vaccine regardless, because of very clear long-term effects of the virus.

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I guess this is as good a place as any to ask: Do we have any other mRNA vaccines in circulation? If so, which ones? If not, how do we know that they're generally safe after only a few months of testing?

No other mRNA vaccines in circulation as far as I know, only research so far in using them against fly and Zika (and probably others)

So how have we deemed them safe after only a few months of tests?

So how many months you want and why that many?

Not the person who you're asking, but I'd personally prefer as many months (or years) as is needed. I have no idea if that's a few months or years and would love an answer grounded in science.

Could somebody just explain how scientists know decades-long effects after only months of research? I'm taking a vaccine, 100%, no matter what. I'm pro-vaccine. And even if we're unsure, what we know is the massive numbers of deaths we'll have without a vaccine.

I'm asking because I want more peace of mind about it.

A vaccine is "nothing" more than a way to tell your body what it needs to fight before it actually has to fight it. Whether that's via mRNA, DNA, dead virus, live virus, whatever. The method used to do that is less important than your body getting the message. If the vaccine causes decades-long effects, so will the virus itself. We're damned either way.

> If the vaccine causes decades-long effects, so will the virus itself. We're damned either way.

Any long-term effects from a vaccine seems unlikely to be as bad as the virus itself.

But still, is that really the answer? That there's no way to know about long-term effects until it's been out there for decades? I was kinda hoping there was an answer like "what we know from other vaccines is that any bad effects almost always show up in first few months -- never, or almost never, many years down the line."

I'm a reasonable man, what's your offer?

>If not, how do we know that they're generally safe after only a few months of testing?

Afair mRNA and DNA based vaccines are being studied since about 1999 without ever finding side effects that stem from the method itself.

The way it works is actually safer than "traditional" vaccination via dead pathogens, mostly because only a tiny and harmless part of the actual pathogen is used.

The testing is done mainly to make sure that it actually works and the "harmless" bit is actually harmless...

So while a Phase 3 trial is still sensible to make sure that all assumptuions hold, I would argue that the expected side effects of these kind of vaccines are close to zero.

And honestly, even traditional vaccines have very little side effects... Neutering pathogens so that they stay neutered is a pretty well understood technique, and these new techniques basically do that on a genetic level by removing the neutered parts altogether.

That's encouraging. Traditional vaccines are well-studied and very widely deployed, so we know pretty much exactly what the side effects are and how rare they are. I wouldn't be nervous about getting a traditional vaccine, but I'm nervous about one that hasn't been deployed to people before...

no, these are the very first vaccines to use mrna technology successfully. same with the vaccine delivery technology -- lipid nanoparticles.

that's why there is a lot of concern about their potential long-term side effects. in animal models, one of moderna's older vaccines (not for covid) was found to cause severe liver damage... likely as a result of the nanoparticle formulation they were using, rather than the mrna itself, but who knows.

personally, given the data that i've seen so far, i'd be more comfortable with taking the pfizer mrna vaccine than the moderna one. especialy when you add in moderna's reputation for peak sleaziness and non-transparency, it seems especially risky to be one of their guinea pigs in the general population.

I'm uninformed about the Moderna issues, can you provide a few pointers.

ps I didn't downvote, and upvoted because downvoters didn't identify the reasons why they did.

Why was this downvoted? If there's something wrong, please clarify rather than just downvote.

> Although mRNA vaccines have entered clinical studies, there are currently no RNA vaccines approved for human use. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine

afaik the ebola vaccine is mRNA based too, which was deemed safe...this year?

There are mRNA ebola vaccine candidates I think, but both that are approved are rDNA vaccines.

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