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There could certainly be a logical error in play here, but considering this is mRNA, and not DNA, it seems like it would be fairly amazing for it to spontaneously form into DNA. Similar to a load of parts spontaneously forming into a bicycle.

That's not to say it isn't possible, but many things are possible but sufficiently unlikely that we take those risks. We eat, drink, and breathe many things every day that we don't fully understand the ingredients or impacts of.

> Similar to a load of parts spontaneously forming into a bicycle.

For the analogy to be more accurate, the parts should explicitly not be bicycle parts.

Spontaneously, yes - fairly amazing. But what if the person treated with the mRNA vaccine happens to be infected with another RNA virus that is producing reverse transcriptase enzymes to convert its own RNA into DNA?

To prevent an immune response and degradation, the mRNA vaccine nucleosides are modified from normal human mRNA. It's possible that RNA virus reverse transcriptase may not be able to work on these modified nucleosides.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243

Retroviruses carry reverse transcriptase which does exactly that: turns RNA into DNA.

Yep. That was her point.

From the responses you’d think I was talking about brain chips injected by Bill Gates, but I suppose this is the result when a layman attempts to explain something unfamiliar to other laymen.

The thing that all biologists fundamentally understand is that none of this stuff has been designed. Every process in the body happens due to chemical reactions that do happen spontaneously. The replies above don't seem to get this and instead consider a human body to be the product of design like a car or something. You can't just throw metal at a car and hope to invent a new type of gearbox. But throwing stuff at living things is exactly how change is driven. If we were immutable we wouldn't be here.

The part about parts spontaneously forming a bicycle is a nice soundbite, but reverse transcriptase (an enzyme) is used by RNA viruses to do just that.

Given that this pandemic has killed millions, shut down the world economy, and caused untold long term damage to children due to lack of stable schooling: yes, it’s because the precautionary principle is too costly.

Edit: sorry, my comment may have sounded snarky, which was not my intention. World-wide vaccinations do carry a risk. It’s just that such a risk clearly pales in comparison to the very known downsides of the current situation. I am in no way a vaccine expert and cannot comment intelligently on why long-term risks are considered to be low.

It killed a million because it's novel. The flu also has killed millions, but because it's been around a while there's a lot of herd immunity to the flu. As time goes on, Covid's severity naturally decreases. Same as it has always been. And kids being kept out of schools despite being 99.999% immune is ridiculous.

Kids are being kept out of school so they don’t get the virus and spread it to somebody else. They aren’t immune, as far as I know. Just less likely to die from it.

You mean million that died, had a positive PCR test at some time. There are still less people dying in 2020 than in 2018 in most countries even though population gets older and therefore more people are dying every year on average anyway.

> is it just a question of the precautionary principle in this case being considered too costly?

People only use the precautionary principle for things they don't want to do.

It's very good for that, since it always results in recommending not to do things.

> Would love to hear more experts discuss why this is considered sufficiently long-term safe to make the decision of vaccinating a billion people after nine months of testing. Am I missing something, or is it just a question of the precautionary principle in this case being considered too costly?

FDA approvals aren't a black and white affair. Some drugs are approved as orphan drugs through trials designed to be much cheaper than Phase 1-3 trials when they treat diseases that wouldn't be profitable for pharma, for example, and there is a path for preliminary compassionate use approvals and accelerated development for stuff like chemo where the disease is terminal anyway. The FDA works with each company to tailor the process to their needs (although, obviously, they stick to a strict standard unless there's good justification).

Likewise, the vaccine rollout won't be all or nothing. We won't even have a billion doses for a long while and the focus will (likely) be on vaccinating those for whom the benefits outweigh the extra risk like front line medical staff and the immunocompromised or elderly. I don't expect the world to get vaccinated at gun point, although the rules for schools and other institutions will quickly accumulate to cover most of the population.

Personally, I'm not going to be taking the vaccine for a while since no one in my family is at risk and we're (mentally) preparing for several years of varying levels of isolation and other precautions. I have faith in the system for the most part since I've worked on an FDA application before (clinical diagnostics, not therapeutics), but the kind of geopolitical and economic pressure its under right now is unprecedented and should keep epidemiologists up at night (hell, it probably does). It's going to be up to each individual to balance their risks and obligations at least until we get more data.

That's the most level-headed response I've heard yet. Most people just equate my worries to those of an antivaxxer and move on.

These new vaccines have a 90% efficacy. It's probably a no-brainer to give them to someone in their 70s or 80s with a high likelihood of having an adverse covid case. But a 20-year-old?

Out of a purely selfish wish of having a more normal world, part of me wants to suppress these thoughts and think "I'm probably excessively cautious, it's a good thing that the economic pressures will probably ensure that most are vaccinated in a year or two". But I do worry that many healthy people don't have a complete view of the potential for unknown unknowns when they decide to take it.

The selfish part of me is thankful that someone else does the dirty job for ensuring that those thoughts aren's spread wider. I'm really hoping that the authorities know what they're doing, and I'd definitely be lying awake at night if I was in that role.

I probably won't take it myself - there, I said it - but rather wait and get more data, or maybe go as far as seeing when one of the protein-based vaccines are ready.

This was one of the questions someone posed during the FDA approval of the pfizer vaccine. I'm paraphrasing here, but you can look up the exact question on one of the youtube videos or read the transcription:

"Suppose someone was infected with a retrovirus, could reverse transcriptase embed that rna into the dna? This could be especially worrisome if we're talking about a pregnant woman and fetus undergoes rapid cell division... etc.."

I would be surprised if I did not mangle up some terms & concepts in the paraphrasing above. Someone who knows more can correct me or just watch/read the fda hearing.

Another thing that was mentioned in the FDA hearing was that pfizer also tested it on HIV positive people. HIV is a retrovirus which also carries the reverse transcriptase enzyme. I don't want to draw any conclusions from this because I don't have any medical knowledge. Maybe someone here with more insight could comment.

> Would love to hear more experts discuss why this is considered sufficiently long-term safe to make the decision of vaccinating a billion people after nine months of testing. Am I missing something, or is it just a question of the precautionary principle in this case being considered too costly?

I think, generally, it has been discussed. There's lots of research on mRNA vaccines going back decades at this point, though they haven't made it to market until now. I see people saying "it's not being discussed" often on this site, but really, anyone saying "no, this is safe" has the implicit support of all that research behind them.

It's not really that many decades of research. This tech is from the 90s. This is the very first mRNA vaccine to be deployed on a mass scale. Does it cause cancer 10, 20 years from now? Does anyone know that for sure? It's not like we have a perfect scientific statistical sampling of people who received mRNA vaccines 30 years ago and we can evaluate those long term effects.

Just a slight correction; as I understand it, these vaccines are prophylactic, not therapeutic.