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Comment by sdeep27 | Hacker News Reader

Such confidence about "gold standard" is hard to justify without ANY studies on mRNA long-term effects (how could there be > this is brand new vaccine technology and delivery).

I would actually argue it is "safer" to take a more traditional vaccine (which have a long history of safety studies, including longer-term one) than an untested (in the long-term sense) mRNA vaccine, given equal efficacies. So, maybe not the J&J if we can truly compare % efficacies given with the mRNA ones (as others have noted, they might not be comparable as different measures were used), but give what we know I would pick the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine over the mRNA ones.

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The J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines are both also very new technology.

Here's the "platform" for the AstraZeneca vaccine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChAdOx1

They are somewhat similar to the mRNA vaccines, triggering cells in the recipients body to produce the SARS-CoV2 protein, but the mechanism is different, they use a virus to introduce the instructions into the cells instead of mRNA. The carrier virus has been altered so that it can't reproduce.

So they aren't traditional vaccines either.

But the Russian and Chinese vaccines are "old school", right?

It would be fun if the least trusted sources ended up being the more reliable ones.

No, Sputnik V is a Vector vaccine just like AstraZeneca and Johnson&Johnson. There are several ones in development in China which all seem to be based on more "old school" technologies.

In terms of development they seem to be pretty far behind. As far as I know, none of the Russian or Chinese efforts have published serious data about safety and efficacy yet. According to publically available data, the vast majority of vaccinations done so far used European/American mRNA vaccines [1].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

Thanks for the clarification!

Someone said the j&j ones are also new tech as it’s only used in some rabies vaccines.

I think the sinovac one is the traditional one in the sense that it uses the same format as the measles vaccine I took a few months back.

There’s decades of research on mRNA, which we also know is temporary (explaining its fragility and ultra-cold requirement) and never enters the nucleus. Seems intrinsically safer than adenovirus-based vaccines.

This is my thought process as well but currently the J&J and AZ vaccines are somewhat hard to come by and a vaccine is better than no vaccine.

There is no scientifically plausible way for there to be long term side effects. RNA is critical to life, so if there were long term side effects life itself wouldn't even be possible.

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