Hacker News Reader

Comment by helloworld653 | Hacker News Reader

No one knows right now, but we will know more over time. I guess we can take comfort in that a lot of people are in the same boat. I would like to better understand how/why mRNA vaccines can't/won't eventually turn into a dangerous prion.

I am genuinely confused as to why there seems to be more side effects/issues with the 'traditional' J&J vaccine vs. the mRNA Moderna/Pfizer vaccines. I would have thought the opposite to have been true.

But then again the Sputnik vaccine seems to be doing ok? So maybe it's just the J&J formulation. Who knows though, the peer reviewed data for this hasn't had much time to go through rigorous scrutiny.

View on HN

Prions are proteins, so that's not much of a risk with the mRNA vaccines. But I do get your general point. As to why J&J seems to have more side-effects, its hard to tell. More than the peer-review step (which is attacked all the time), my sense is that the clot risk is so rare that the number of participants needed to observe enough clots was much much larger than the number of Phase 3 trial participants.

As for the Sputnik vaccine (and the Sinovac one in China), sampling rare events such as these and reporting them is a function of how many people have been given the vaccine + the amount of transparency of the authorities in the countries administering these vaccines.

> I would like to better understand how/why mRNA vaccines can't/won't eventually turn into a dangerous prion.

Why would it? A prion is a specific protein, why would this specific mRNA molecule, which only exists in our body for hours, cause that specific protein expression, when we have hundreds of thousands of other mRNA molecules per cell all similarly experiencing their own self destruction?

Well, he did say he'd like to understand better.

I don't understand why you're so confused about the lack of knowledge from someone who declared their lack of knowledge.

I didn't take it as a genuine request as they are parroting an anti-vaccine claim.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pfizer-neurological-damage...

It was a question, not a claim. I don't know what this crowd is about, so I did not pad my question with a notice of non-affiliation.

Science is about curiosity, not faith. Shaming people for asking questions discourages the former and expects the latter.

You're right, I may have been too dismissive, and you're right, science is about curiosity, but the "just asking questions" approach is a way to demolish perfectly good science. You can't prove a negative, and so throwing doubt after doubt at something is a good way to discredit a perfectly valid point because eventually you run out of answers. That's why I asked why they had that belief.

The user that asked the question didn't further engage, they just threw in some doubt and walked away. That doesn't feel like scientific curiosity. That feels like pot stirring.

The user that asked the question is me. I got the answers I came for, and didn't feel it necessary to add anything else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com