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Comment by qz2 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have any non-press infested material about this vaccine? As far as I’m aware this is the first roll out of an mRNA based vaccine.

While I’m no anti vaccination idiot I’d like to understand the risks to some degree.

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The wiki article is a good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNT162b2

Thank you. Reading this now.

My go-to resource for educated COVID-19 coverage has been This Week in Virology[1], which usually has between 4 and 6 virologists reporting and analyzing COVID-19-related news every week.

I've kind of OD'ed on COVID-19 news myself, so haven't listened to them for a while and don't know if they've commented on this vaccine yet, but they probably will, and for a thorough, educated, hype-free analysis, there's no better place I can think of to go to than TWiV.

[1] - https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/

Thanks - this is perfect!

Wikipedia [1] has an overview of mRNA vaccines, including a summary of some potential side-effects/risks. For more technical details, this review of mRNA vaccines [2] appears to be a decent place to start.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5906799/

With regards to mRNA, mRNA is a fragile molecule that is quickly broken down inside the body after injection, so there's unlikely to be much long term risk with mRNA itself.

An immediate "but if it breaks down fast, how can it do anything?" thought springs to mind.

I know what you mean is "not dormant and doing something for months/years", but at the same time, if it can initiate a modification of immune response, it can do "other things".

I believe we must take the utmost of care at this juncture, and make sure assurances are not construed as in a poor light.

For me the most convincing argument regarding safety is that mRNA vaccines essentially do the same thing that the virus does, just extremely limited in scope (producing just one protein instead of a bunch of them, and not reinfecting more cells).

So, even if producing the proteins turns out to be somewhat harmful long term, it cannot possibly be as harmful as the whole virus.

Assuming that covid infection is inevtable without a vaccine, we really have a choice between getting a little bit of mRNA injected into our cells, and a ton of mRNA injected.

I heard recently that there's a surprising amount of our DNA that's made up of old viruses from our ancestors.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160322100714.h...

There are the viruses which can exploit the DNA involved mechanisms, but a mRNA vaccine is not using these, it uses the processes "downstream."

That's an interesting perspective. I've actually had the virus. I'm interested to see what the differential outcome of having the virus and having the vaccination is.

Holy jeeze. This is why we have the FDA.

The extent to which a molecule is active in your body is only slightly correlated with toxicity. There is zero reason why a fragile molecule can't cause damage before it breaks down.

This is how ended up with thalidomide. They tested it in pregnant lab rats, but the window for birth defects is incredibly short in rats. So everything checked out.

In drug development you can't assume anything without data to back it up.

I agree, but there's not much time we can spend to observe side effects over a long duration of time to have that level of confidence.

The FDA at this point certainly doesn't have the ability to analyze that either, so the best we have is a theoretical understanding.

Your answer is phrased in such a way that I can't help but ask: What about the other molecules in the vaccine?

Are there any notable helpers or adjuvants or preservatives?

This particular vaccine is literally just a bit of RNA in a blob of fat. The fat sticks to cell membranes, and the RNA pokes through. There's nothing more to it (this is also why it's possible to scale up production so quickly)

Not sure why you’re downvoted - it’s a legit question.

I don't know much about this subject but i found https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 to be quite interesting. Its from 2018, before all the covid stuff hit, so i think it gives a much more detached overview. However it might not be precisely about the current crop of vaccines.

gov.uk: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-authorises-pfizer-bion...

Isn't there usually at least a 1:100 or 1:1000 safety buffer between vaccination and control to make a vaccine safe? At least for other vaccines that's a common threshold.

what do you mean by buffer in this context?

The relative risk between potentially getting the disease even though the population is already highly herd immunized (compare e.g. measles) and the risk of the vaccine is still 1:1000. This means despite measles already being such a rare disease it is still a clear benefit to get vaccinated.

With a disease such as Covid it might be 100000x safer to get vaccinated than not.

All national vaccination programs must calculate and assess such relative risk and find so much advantage in favor of vaccination.

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