Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines
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Now states are combating such hesitancy by drawing lottery for vaccinated folks.
Like, having this magic, absolutely mind boggling potion that prevents serious illness and death *isn't* already the lottery win of our lifetime??
People in India and elsewhere are dying because of lack of vaccines and here we have educated, first world countries struggle to get their citizens vaccinated.
Unfortunately shaming such people will only push them further into antivax territory.
What about me, should I risk shot number two now that I've seen a flame heme show up on a routine retina scan just yesterday and am reading that this is one of the things they are seeing increase from the AZ vaccine? Will I be limited in travel and employment if I don't?
Also suddenly we care about how much tax revenue we spend?
I find that Black Mirror level dystopian personally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_requirements_for_i...
So as per your wiki article no country is requiring them. So really not sure what you’re talking about. There are absolutely some vaccines required for travel, but COVID is not one of them. Just like influenza and a whole host of other vaccines.
The EU one I think allows for immunity from catching covid so if you are anti vax and want to go that route you can.
At the time vaccine rollout began we weren’t sure of this effect, but the evidence from places like Israel is showing it pretty well.
The idea isn't remotely new, and is nothing so odious as critics claim
I think schools and colleges requiring vaccination are also offering accommodations (distance learning, etc.) to avoid legal fights, while if the vaccines were fully authorized they would not.
This is only a technical, legal distinction. They have been administered rapidly to a significant fraction of the population; their specific legal status is mostly irrelevant at this point.
They are GA in practice, the release has been cut and people are running it. Paper pushers slapping an ass-covering "beta" on the splash screen are behind the times.
Only in 60+ patients with co-morbidity.
The bug is statistically less dangerous to that group, but it is still pretty dangerous.
> Only in 60+ patients with co-morbidity.
That's false. See [1] for data on deaths by age in the US. There's about 115,000 deaths in the age groups < 65 as of May 2021.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
Digging into the <60yo cohort, it's shockingly uncommon to find one who wasn't obese.
A year of largely ineffective masking hysteria and not one noteworthy public health figure suggested putting down the donut to reduce the risk of death from COVID-19.
We shuttered gyms and discouraged outdoor activity instead.
Great point. The overweight should have just lost 50 pounds in 30 days.
A lot of it boils down to people not trusting what they're seeing. Frankly, governments have done the world a disservice by speaking before they really had all the information at the start of the pandemic. In Canada at least an insane amount of what was said turned out to be completely false, or worse harmfully false (ie: no masks, isn't airborne, ect). As a result, lots of people see what looks like the "story changing", and distrust anything coming out of their government, and experts, at this point. I think if we approach the problem with that in mind we might win more people over than telling them "listen to experts", since for the past year and a half experts have been wrong almost as often as they have been right.
The archetype of a current anti-covid-vaxxer is one who had no problem getting their kids vaccinated for polio, for DTAP, the chickenpox, and usually had no hesitation about getting the annual flu shot.
These people are categorically different, and much more numerous, than the tinfoil-hat-vaccines-cause-autism crowd.
One should surmise that the motivations are also categorically different, and I think you'll find if you actually speak to them, that distrust of the enormous governmental and institutional pressure is a significant factor.
Really? At least around here, flu vaccination rates aren't very high. I don't have data, but there's plenty of potential for overlap between anti-covid-vaxxers and people who don't get flu shots (most of which are perfectly normal).
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/coronavirus/study-one-age-...
Note: I'm fully-vaccinated with Pfizer, but got severe palpitations for days after the first and second shots (which are symptoms of myocarditis), my wife had the same plus a pretty rapid heartbeat for 3 days, and I also got some never seen before skin issues (extreme dryness of certain areas of the skin.
Fully-vaccinated people still an spread the viruses, just not as well as unvaccinated, and people who went thru the course of the disease probably should not get vaccinated as they get a better protection (immune to more than the spike protein), and should spare the doses for the billions still unvaccinated. The drive to vaccinated people who had COVID-19 was an economical and political, not scientific. Removing the face mask mandate early is also non-scientific, but political and economical. So, why should we blindly trust authorities? The vaccine manufacturers have no liability, their practically have emergency use authorizations, not approvals either.
Using certified masks (like in some European countries), getting adequate Vitamin D3 (along with vitamin K), and zinc with zinc ionophores should have been #1 priority, but this basica and benign prophylaxis has been totally underplayed, which also contributes to the lack of trust in the government.
I think you nailed it on the head there. Really the number one priority should be to stay the hell out of the medical system. Once you're in the medical system, you know you've fucked up (or just had an accident, whichever). My wife is a triage nurse now after 20 years bedside, and spends her days trying to talk people, who are calling their doctors to get a magic pill, into changing their lifestyles (diet largely) so that they don't require a pill. Most often, these people are not interested in a no-pill solution. They are happy to keep treating the problem, especially since most of them seem to be highly uninformed by the negative long-term health consequences of the meds they're taking. We have a close friend whose long-term doctor just prescribed her statins, for a flutter which was noted by her Apple Watch. She and her family, has no history of heart or other health issues. Actually, she's in her 60s and has never even had the flu or as much as a cold, until Cov19 got her in Feb. of 2020. They did not draw any blood work, but she had an echocardiagram which came back clean. When she asked the doctor why he would prescribe statins without doing any blood work, or having any other evidence, he said "this has become our standard procedure for anyone reporting a flutter or palpatation, plus those Apple Watches are very accurate!". I shit you not. This is the medical establishment we're all trying to stay healthy despite of.
Changing and updating our beliefs as evidence comes in is a fundamental ability that underlies numerous activities from scientific research to debugging software to driving on a congested road network. Why is it a problem for public health officials to update and change policy as we learn more about the virus?
Would it really be preferable if policy remained frozen to whatever people thought best on day one?
Perhaps if our masters in government had heeded the story of "the boy who cried wolf", then things might have been different.
The only thing students get is material presented as the truth that they have to faithfully accept. They are almost never taught how to deal with unreliable material. It made sense in the pre-internet age where finding information was the hard part, but now, it is the opposite: too much information. So we should focus more on how to filter it.
We had a "general knowledge" class in college and it was an important part of it. We had to make essays and presentations about random subjects and we were judged by our ability to synthesize and verify information. Copy-pasting was actually encouraged, and long as it was from a good source and presented in a way that isn't misleading.
The unfortunate thing is that we should have done exercises like that in primary school and not wait until college.
It is taught in schools, and taught young. The people who understand the scientific method have been doing it every year since the sixth grade. They did science fair projects, etc.
I just looked up modern educational standards, and kids are taught in grade six the scientific method and how to execute experiments using it.
The problem is, lots of people suck at school. They didn't care about it and their parents didn't care about it, so they didn't retain anything. There are an awful lot of adults in society that couldn't pass a fifth grade math test.
You don't even need to follow a 'scientific method' for that.
The ability to embrace uncertainty is hard to learn, but one that we all should strive for. One that should be praised and lauded.
A politician, leader or CEO making a bad decision on a wrong premis, and publicly acknowledges the mistake (and learns from it), is now often end-of-career. This is toxic. Because such mistakes are a fact of life and the best teacher.
I think the inability to accept uncertainty in the world is, unfortunately, a big reason conspiracies thrive.
Too frightening to grok that a random virus can emerge and maybe kill us all or at least turn society upside down? There’s a conspiracy that makes it an easy “good guys vs. bad guys” story for you.
I’m not saying that’s what I believe, but if you’re admitting that we’re “changing and updating our beliefs as evidence comes in”, that also implies that we didn’t — and may still not — have all the data in front of us to make decisions.
We surely don’t - but we have more data than a year ago. And a year from now we’ll have even more
We have to make the best decision for ourselves and the society around us based on the best knowledge we have. Yes science always allows for things to be disproven, but if we follow your logic we’d not use any medicines or treatments. Come on.
Just saying that we can’t be too hard on the folks that are a little hesitant with the vaccine as things evolve. Simply have a bit of empathy, at least for folks that are simply uncertain about how to handle things for themselves and their family (vs. those trying to stop the world from getting vaccinated).
I’m fully vaccinated, but I know some that I wouldn’t consider “antivaxx” but are just not sure about this one for them/their families, and I’m trying not to be judgmental of them.
I would also like you to consider, that many of the anti-vaxx community, as virologists by profession. Many find the risks associated with vaccines (not just Covid19 but all), as often outweighing the benefits they purport to provide.
My family and I won't be getting the vaccine for many reasons (we have several professional medical practitioners in the family by the way). One being, we know someone directly involved in creating a mRNA-based vaccine at a large gov-funded biotech co.: their job on the project was based on proving that their employer did undertake the burden of attempting to get the compound that surrounds the mRNA bits and keeps them stable inside the solution, to pass through the human or other mammalian system. Here's the kicker, they can't, and everybody in the business knows they can't (at least not yet), as they've been unable to get this compound out of the blood and organs once introduced. It is synthesized largely from plants, so they consider it "natural". :-D But the truth is, we don't have any data on long term exposure and retention of this compound inside of our blood stream, organs, and other tissues. The mRNA-based vaccines would not have passed scrutiny had they not been granted emergency approval, and yes they've been working on them for a decade+.
They didn’t lie, they made a mistake. And when it became apparent they changed the advice.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
Let's take the current debate over the "lab leak" hypothesis as an example. A large amount of the evidence, both for and against the lab leak hypothesis dates back to March/April/May of 2020. Yet, when the lab leak hypothesis was raised around that time period, it was immediately and vociferously dismissed by the media as a racist ploy to distract from the government's shambolic handling of the pandemic. When the hypothesis was raised again, this year, it was treated as a serious possibility that deserved a full and thorough investigation.
What changed? It wasn't the evidence -- the evidence has been present all along. What changed was the political environment that suddenly made it possible to speak of a lab leak without sounding like tinfoil-hatted crackpot. As a result, now this previously unmentionable hypothesis is now getting its due consideration by the media.
However, the media isn't admitting that a change occurred. Instead, what the average person is seeing is mainstream media outlets shifting seamlessly from, "The lab leak hypothesis is a racist lie," to "The lab leak hypothesis is a serious allegation that deserves a thorough investigation." It's like the scene from 1984, where the Inner Party representative switches seamlessly mid-speech from discussing the ongoing war against Eurasia to the ongoing war against Eastasia.
We saw a similar phenomenon take place last year over masks. There were warnings about the virus being airborne as far back as January of 2021. As late as March, you had Time magazine saying that wearing a mask was "superstitious behavior" [1]. Over the next two to three weeks, the advice rapidly shifted, from "masks are a sign of unreasonable paranoia" to "masks are mandatory, and anyone not wearing them is putting everyone around them in danger". Was that due to a shift in the evidence? No. As noted above, there was ample warning that the virus was airbone, and many people were taking appropriate precautions even in the absence of official guidance. What shifted was the political environment.
Moreover, then, just as now, no media outlet ever admitted that it had given incorrect advice. There were individual journalists who (to their credit) admitted a certain level of responsibility, but, as far as I know, no major mainstream media outlet has come forward and said, "You know what? We screwed up, and we apologize." Instead , we see silent corrections that rewrite the past without admitting any kind of fault. Heck, just compare the headline on the Time article today [2] to the headline on the archived version. The headline was silently updated with a much more moderate point, and a caveat about changing CDC guidance was added. But there was no formal correction published anywhere that said, "You know that article we printed last week about masks being bogus? Yeah, that was wrong, and we're sorry."
Honestly, after seeing the performance of the media in its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, I'm surprised that more people aren't as cynical about the "official story" as the cashier in the sibling thread.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200305052928/https://time.com/...
Now, maybe its reactance, but i believe the zoonose more likely.
Similarly, the presence of the "furin cleavage site", which supposedly makes the virus ideal for spreading in humans is less significant than it appears. There are numerous other coronaviruses which have the same feature, and it's plausible that SARS-COV-2 picked up the feature via recombination somewhere on its way to becoming a virus that spread primarily among humans.
But all that is beside the point. The point is that many voices that took on the air of authority during the pandemic changed their view for no reason other than shifts in the broader political climate. It has made people suspicious and frustrated with the experts, which then leads them to embrace crackpot theories peddled by those who (correctly) point out that the authoritative sources in the media have been lying to them.
The solution, as I see it, isn't that the media should get its facts and story right the first time. That's impossible, especially in a fast-changing situation like the early stages of a global pandemic. What the media (and by "the media", I mean major newspapers like the New York Times, and major news outlets, like CNN) ought to be doing is stating clearly when one of their stories contradicts a story that they've published in the past, and stating clearly the reason for the contradiction. "We were wrong about masks, because we misinterpreted a directive to preserve masks for emergency workers as meaning that masks were ineffective," would have gone a long way towards helping convince mask skeptics about the need for masks when the media suddenly reversed its advice.
Not only did they take an air of authority, they also actively censored contrary opinions. Twitter, facebook, youtube...
"Lab-leak" is non-sensical in all forms which don't begin with "lab evolved/bioengineered" and while not completely implausible, the methodology for selective rapid-evolution of a virus requires the exact same conditions as are trivially recreated in the population and human-animal contact regime of greater China.
That's exactly the allegation circa March 2020 though: scientists collect various bat-borne coronaviruses (e.g. RaTG13) in Yunnan province around 2013, evolve one of them at the Wuhan Institute of Virology though gain-of-function research, and then due to lax safety protocols end up accidentally leaking an evolved virus in late 2019. For example, see this podcast from a year ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug
> ... no media outlet ever admitted that it had given incorrect advice... Instead, we see silent corrections that rewrite the past without admitting any kind of fault.
As I read this I was overcome with the realization that I have more discipline editing my 2-3 point HN comments--labeling new remarks, striking out original text instead of deleting it outright, and so on--than do professional journalists from the New York Times or Washington Post editing national news stories. Unbelievable... and unforgivable.
Because when it comes to persuading hundreds of millions of people, it is often better to be certain than to be right or to flip-flop. That's a fact of leadership, regardless of whether you or I as scientists like it.
Also, they didn't just revise their statements with new information, they actively lied (the no masks thing) in a paternalistic way to deceive people into thinking they didn't need masks (so the masks would stay available for front-line medical staff).
That plan obviously backfired terribly.
The moment a governor goes in front of cameras saying "no need to hoard toilet paper" is the moment right when everybody rushes and hoards toilet paper. So they tried saying "toilet paper does not work". (Not literally, but I'm using it as a metaphor for masks, obviously.) That strategy backfired a bit, but worked better than outright saying "Don't buy masks cause front-line workers need them". Had they said that then next day front-line workers wouldn't have gotten any.
The only alternative I see is to remove the necessary supplies from the free market and put them under government control so that front line workers get them no matter what the mob does. But in freedom land, the free market is holy, so that doesn't work over there.
That's not the problem. Arrogance is the problem. We were led to believe that X was established scientific consensus one week and ¬X the next. Real science has error bars and confidence intervals. If you're projecting from a small amount of data, the responsible thing to do is to disclose how uncertain your conclusions are.
(Edit: maybe the real science did have confidence intervals; the public communication certainly didn't though.)
Secondly, we had many clear contradictions over the past year. How can it be dangerous to attend an outdoor soccer game but safe to attend a BLM protest? How can it be shamefully unsafe to walk past someone in a corridor without masks and 6ft of social distancing but totally fine to sit and eat in a restaurant for an unbounded amount of time?
Also it really doesn't help public trust when for example Fauci openly admits that he lied to the public about mask efficacy to preserve supplies for hospitals, but of course now you can trust him to be telling the truth on this other thing here.
And the experts haven't been wrong for a year and a half, the experts were working with bad or incomplete data for a few months. Their advice for the past year, wear masks, socially distance, get the vaccine, has been correct.
What happened to the Precautionary Principle?
If people used masks properly, I wouldn't have much of an argument, but they don't, so I do.
You have just chosen to believe some idiotic conspiracy theory and are grasping at some vaguely plausible objection to continue holding that belief.
The "environment that the masks are designed for" is the same Euclidean 3D space containing the same air as all other environments.
Stories of children either passing out or dying because they were required to wear masks during track outdoors. Or hell, walking my normal pace (quite fast), I breathe pretty heavily and the amount of oxygen my body takes in with a mask is markedly reduced versus when I'm not wearing one. It is a stark difference, and one I hope I never have to experience again due to disproportionate government and private business mandates rooted in paranoia around the most absurdly low risk levels for the majority of age groups.
Do you have any citations for these events, because they seem to be absurd misinformation.
The country I'm in (Singapore) has legally required masks in public since last year (as have many other countries) so everyone is wearing masks, and so far, I have not heard of a single case of people suffering due to wearing masks.
In fact, I even wear my mask when I go running and I have never felt any significant issues with breathing, even after hours of vigorous exercise.
If masks could reliably cause breathing issues in any significant way, given the number of people in the world who are wearing masks every day, we should expect a statistically significant number of such cases, not just a few cherry-picked anecdotes.
(2) After Multiple Deaths, Officials Call for No Masks in Gym Class https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1005609/after-multiple-deaths...
(3) Oregon high school junior breaks 800-meter school record and falls face-first at finish line as mask restricts breathing https://twitter.com/covid_clarity/status/1387212971399540737
(4) New Jersey driver crashes car after passing out from wearing N95 mask https://nypost.com/2020/04/24/driver-crashes-car-after-passi...
(5) Medical Doctor Warns that “Bacterial Pneumonias Are on the Rise” from Mask Wearing https://www.globalresearch.ca/medical-doctor-warns-bacterial...
Enjoy! :)
Your initial answer does not disprove or refute their more nuanced response, which very much does matter on this subject.
They were doing the best they could to manage a crisis that it was their job to manage in an unprecedented situation. If people expected them to have perfect answers and solutions, they had unrealistic expectations.
I was educated to fear more those who are never wrong.
The expected value of getting a vaccine is very high, but people choose not to anyway, presumably due to misinformation or miscalculation.
Lotteries here are exploiting miscalculations of expected value to incentivize behavior (0.1% of saving my life? phaw, but $100 expected value?!).
It feels a bit like patching a security bug with its own vulnerability.
Of course we ideally should also take into account the community benefits, but even on a personal level it is a net plus.
COVID-19 being old news makes the risk appear much smaller than it is.
No, because a lot of people trust their friends or personal gurus more than any scientist or research. It doesn't matter what crap their social bubble is filled with, they can relate more to it.
I was at a loss of words...
Why do people still have to attack religion?
Because religions are still dangerous animals, if you would indulge this metaphor. Just because we managed to declaw and tame one (values of Enlightenment supplanting values of Christianity), it does not mean that we can treat all of them imprudently.
I suggest that you are arguing from the point-of-view that "my $ANIMAL is well-behaved and has not and would not hurt anyone". Is that true?
With all but one preaching peace, and not hate, please explain.
Oh ffs evidence plz.
Hmm yes that's a time the catholics created that most don't agree with. It's widely considered a time when evil ruled the religions. And biblically there will be religions that do not follow what is preached. Which is what I said. Nowhere in Catholicism or Christianity does it preach hate or war. Now how people interpret things are up to them.
> Ahlam Tamimi bombing
This would be that one religion preaching that if people don't convert, kill them.
> wars of suppression against Bön
I have not read the Bonop canon, so can't speak for this. This could either be a group not listening to their faith, or yet another preaching hate.
Just because you aren't evil doesn't mean the rest of us will happily accept that you can argue from a position where everything bad a religious person said or did is held against us while simultaneously nothing bad that non-religious people did can be held against you.
Choose one option.
I know this is hard but this isn't young atheists debate club.
We are real humans and some of us have experienced too much good to just let you or others try to tear it apart.
Removing religion completely has been tried in a larger scale experiment in the Soviet Union and the results were very much worse than the most barbaric religions.
When arguing about religion one shouldn't forget that they have a number of good attributes as well.
Otherwise you are just fighting against a straw man and then it is no wonder why you win every single time : )
Besides:
> Just because we managed to declaw and tame one (values of Enlightenment supplanting values of Christianity)
This is putting the cart before the horse.
It wasn't enlightenment that ended blood revenge, brought herbs and fruits and medicine and and and to Europe.
It was monks.
Enlightenment grew out of the fertile soil of literacy and surplus and relative peace and quiet that this created, not the other way around.
What am I supposed to say here? "Good thing I'm not Stalin"? Just because he's against religion, too, does not mean I want to use his methods.
> When arguing about religion one shouldn't forget that they have a number of good attributes as well.
I've heard that often, but that argument isn't very good. When the $ANIMAL mauls the offspring, one does not reminisce about how well it plays fetch, this does not counter-weight or undo the damage.
It is entirely possible to have the good attributes (let's say social cohesion or introspective peace of mind) entirely divorced from the gods-and-religion business (let's say by joining the local ping-pong club or taking up a meditative practice). I posit there is no attribute that uniquely belongs to religion and cannot be had otherwise.
> [monks] ended blood revenge, brought herbs and fruits and medicine and and and to Europe.
That result is a function of smart and persuasive people, not a function of belief in and worship of Yahweh. Mentally substitute the monks for hypothetical missionaries adhering to Voltaire/Smith/Kant &c., we could imagine the result is similar, just without the gods-and-religion business.
> Enlightenment grew out of the fertile soil of literacy and surplus and relative peace and quiet that this created, not the other way around.
I did not say that this fertile soil grew out of Enlightenment. I said that values of Enlightenment supplanted values of Christianity.
Absolutely, and I hope you can recognize the price that society has paid as a result.
Maybe you should then extend the same courtesy to us who have religions too then? After all most of us aren't Spanish inquisitors.
> Mentally substitute the monks for hypothetical missionaries adhering to Voltaire/Smith/Kant &c., we could imagine the result is similar, just without the gods-and-religion business.
Yeah and if cats were dogs they would bark.
Mentally substitute Nelson Mandela with Hitler and South Africa wouldn't have a Nobel prize winner.
> I didn't say
No, but you said:
> Just because we managed to declaw and tame one (values of Enlightenment supplanting values of Christianity)
I'm pointing out that the peace came with Christianity.
There was no need to "declaw" Christianity.
1 Corinthians 14:34
1 Corinthians 11:5-9
I don't know, why do people still have to do that?
Next question, why are you spot picking the negatives for females but not males?
Final question, do you know at all the story as to why these restrictions are in place?
Then explain how religion is not used to control (read: enforce moral standards).
God himself throws a temper and kills entire cities when they don't obey him, like any good dad would do, am I right? Murder their kids if they misbehave... (Sodom/Gomorrah).
Cause that’s the whole story right? Both of those cities weren’t destroying humanity at the time right? Have you read the part about cutting off your hand if it causes you to sin? Do you understand that saying your human body is who you are is equivalent to saying your name defines you? Do you understand religion at all other than some minor studying you’ve not really done?
> Assume for a minute that you don't believe in God. Then explain how religion is not used to control (read: enforce moral standards).
Is this how you also explain laws? As control? What about discipline? Is this also control? Clearly both are. Do you now understand how control != bad? What argument are you trying to make exactly? Anarchy? But you'll also note, in religion it's said you will try to not sin and fail. And always be forgiven. So there's no punishment here. None. So you're arguing against discipline, laws, morality and civilization in general.
From the viewpoint of a healthy young person, the risk/reward ratio of taking a vaccine is bad.
Even for healthy young people, the risk of the vaccine is orders and orders of magnitude less than the risk of the virus. This is true almost by construction, because it's strictly less spike protein.
Absolutely false. The disease can and does have severe and sometimes long-lasting impacts on young healthy people. The mRNA vaccines don't have any impact worse than a sore arm.
And we aren't getting to a herd immunity level of vaccination if young people are unvaccinated.
Even vaccines provide reduced protection from new variants. I read today that most effective vaccine only provides a ~70% chance or so of protection from the Delta variant in the UK. Hence the talk of booster shots before the initial vaccines were rolled out.
Herd immunity comes from vaccination. It's not really feasible for it to occur naturally because the virus will continue to mutate and reinfect people indefinitely.
Lets not go too far with statements like that. People with history of allergic reactions are told to not take it, and the Pfizer–BioNTech mRNA has a rate of about eleven cases per million doses of vaccine administered.
As with any medicine, there are a risk/reward aspect to it. If you take a over-the-counter pain pill there is a small but detectable risk of getting a serious side effect. Most people still take it because the reward out weight the risk.
I would rather go with the carrot then the stick when it comes to getting people vaccinated. Getting a vaccination protects against some of the really unlucky consequences of covid, including permanent injuries like decreased lung capacity. The risk involving the vaccine is to my understanding much lower, so the math comes out in favor of the vaccine.
Then they should not get the vaccine and be shielded by herd immunity. There are also several other illnesses which are not compatible with vaccinations but the number of those people are small. So healthy people should partake in the vaccination as for them, the risk-reward ratio is definitely worth it.
How can you make this decision for someone else?
Do you know everybody’s medical condition? Are you a physician or nurse in any way? You’re just regurgitating Fauci’s ramblings without regard to individuals concerns demanding they get the vaccine. How many people do you think you’ve convinced to get the vaccine?
Does a layperson know about how his/her condition is relevant to vaccination? No. They will ask a doctor about that - who will give them an answer whether they can or can’t get the vaccine. And I’m not even living in the US, I’m just not crazy and know that it is the only way to protect ourselves and our community.
Hmm, maybe this is what you do, but do you really thing everybody goes to the Dr for everything? Some people are well within the means of deciding for themselves, some not. And when you have the “top” Dr in the nation failing to build trust by opening his mouth before he’s sure then all sane people have is themselves. It’s insane to me how many people blindly trust the vaccine when we have new information nearly weekly about how it effects different cohorts differently. But we’re sure it’s safe right? No, the reality is people don’t care if someone gets the vaccine and dies, “just do your duty”. I’m good.
The context that we were discussing was "achieved herd immunity, epidemic goes away". In that context the healthy young people do not get any severe and long-lasting impacts, because they don't get the disease at all, thanks to the herd immunity provided by mass vaccinations.
> And we aren't getting to a herd immunity level of vaccination if young people are unvaccinated.
This is true. If you were to say "it's your responsibility to take a vaccine, even though the risk/reward ratio is bad", then that would be an argument that I would respect. However, that's not the argument you're making. You're trying to claim that the risk/reward ratio from a personal standpoint is good, which I disagree with.
> The mRNA vaccines don't have any impact worse than a sore arm.
This is false. I personally know people who have had considerable side effects from the vaccine ("getting sick").
That said, I'm personally taking the vaccine today.
This is just logically untrue. The absolute most you can claim is that "these vaccines don't have any impact worse than a sore arm, that we know of, within the 18 month period that they've been available". Neither you nor anyone else can speak to long-term effects until we wait it out and see, nevermind true "unknown unknowns".
Not taking a vaccine if you’re young and healthy is a purely selfish move. Not taking a vaccine should be reserved for only those people who cannot take a vaccine: those who are far too young, or who are immunocompromised. Everyone else should vaccinate to protect the truly vulnerable.
Why does this always resort to force and control? Do you really not understand how that just turns people off?
It's crazy to me that I see more insane opinions on HN about this than on reddit. Always considered HN a more rational crowd but I'm very disappointed by the users in this thread.
I wish that was the point, but it's not. You can see in this very thread people who are disingenuously arguing that the personal risk/reward ratio of these vaccines is good, as opposed to arguing for moral duty.
By potentially harming myself? Who exactly charged me with this duty and was it by my choice?
Do you assume that HN harbors the same groupthink that reddit does? Do you not want discourse? Do you assume all others believe what you believe (that we have some obligation to potentially harm ourselves for the good of the many thing)? That’s exactly what I love about HN, that thing called diversity.
Also your attempt to shame me into alignment of your believes failed.
I fully agree! So be honest and make that argument! Don't say "taking this vaccine is good for you", be honest and say "taking this vaccine is not necessarily that good for you, but we all have a responsibility to do it, and then we all benefit from herd immunity".
You are right, all those children 60 years ago shouldn't have gotten the polio vaccine, look at them now, being disabled and whatnot, that vaccine was super risky /s
Funny that you say that, I had the same thought when buying groceries last week. The cashier started telling me she'll never get it because it's being mandated to cull us and there's some secret database of deaths yada yada yada. Mind you I didn't ask. I felt sorry for her, even worried. She's a kind enough middle aged lady, she's been at the same grocery store for years. Somehow she's convinced that she's privy to some super secret knowledge only to be disclosed to a chosen few. It's like a nigerian email scam or Q thing.
I was a little worried because she could've gotten herself fired for talking like that to the wrong person who would get mad and tell the manager. I just smiled, nodded, spoke in a low tone and said "I used to think so too but THEY want us to think that way because it weakens America if people here keep getting covid while they're over it and starting to beat us economically. Our vaccine works the best so they're spreading propaganda to scare us from getting it" I have no idea if it helped but she at least seemed intrigued that I didn't roll my eyes or scold her.
People who get suckered into this stuff are in some imaginary role-play where they're the hero of the story, this article explains it. https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analy...
I hope it works. I've done some similar on reddit comments. It's hard not to want to hit them over the head though...
90-95% reduction of risk.
Maybe even greater reduction of serious disease?
Most common side effect people seem to talk about is something like fatigue and fever for a day or two after a shot?
That's a pretty good tradeoff. Especially when you consider that getting large populations vaccinated pretty much ends the pandemic.
We welcome any better suggestions. Have you ever tried to have a respectful, adult discussion based on facts with antivaxers?
The flu vaccine very very rarely causes vasculitis and almost all cases resolve favorably. One meta study of the literature identified 65 cases ever.
Meanwhile it's not unusual to see 20-60k annual deaths in the United States.
Statistically not getting a flu vaccination for fear of vasculitis is like not wearing a seat belt in case one wants to escape the car quickly in case one happens to get out quick in case you decide to drive into a lake today.
You have misunderstood the figures on flu vaccinations. It's commonly 30-60% effective at preventing infection. If this was just true about the under 65 it would still mean fewer under 65 able to spread it to 65+ but fortunately it isn't true.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/vaccine-benefits.htm
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Being a pompous ass might feel good, especially when you think you are (or you actually are) smarter than your opponent, but it won't sway anyone. In fact, it does quite the opposite. If you're seriously trying to convince someone they're wrong, you need to be kind, be patient, and have a calm, productive discussion -- explaining how traditional vaccines work, how mRNA works, how DNA works, and so on.
Yelling at someone on a mailing list will undoubtedly push them further into their comfortable anti-vax bubble. Linus is absolutely wrong to behave this way, but then again, emotional intelligence isn't really his (or HN's for that matter) forte.
No, the rough equivalents are "anti-vaxxer" or "crazy," there's even an "insane" right at the top of the Torvalds email. And they don't tend to complain about being silenced because that's a treatment they are often advocating for others and rarely if ever see applied to themselves.
I am pro science, but science doesn't claim that all vaccines are safe.
And let's not forget that pharma co's have tried very hard to make vaccines mandatory, to the point of bribing academics and officials, forming unaccountable PR groups, and in the not so distant past they've done truly horrific and inhuman things.
After the lab-leak theory has gained traction recently, after being told for a year by Lancet and politicians and academics that it was "impossible", I would have thought that the idea of there being some "pro-science" monolith would have lost ground.
Indeed. But science does claim that Pfizer, Moderna, etc COVID-vaccines are safe and you are un-scientific if you claim otherwise. They went through proper trials, and were accepted independently* by many countries.
* not completely independently I’m sure, but my point is that even if you don’t trust your country at all, several other ones decided univocally that it is safe
The FDA and other bodies dictate what kind of testing and certification must happen before allowing the sale of such products. And in very rare cases will offer emergency approval that bypasses quite a lot of the trialing or cut short the standards that must be met.
To claim any treatment is safe and that any skepticism prior to long-term trials is unscientific... flies in the face of all reason.
Did we learn anything from: cigarrettes, Fen-Phen, Valdecoxib (Bextra), Pemoline (Cylert), Bromfenac (Duract), Levamisole (Ergamisol), Rofecoxib (Vioxx), Isotretinoin (Accutane), and many many more.
All of these products were FDA approved, a feat these vaccines are yet to achieve.
No they haven't. They were approved for emergency use only. New vaccines usually take 6-7 years to complete clinical trials.
Not necessarily. The yearly updated flu shot doesn’t for example. This case is similar, the novel technique itself was in development for a decade now with different parts having been clinically tested.
At this point in the pandemic, people really ought to know better, it's assumed they are bad actors. knowing that, It's hard to "be kind, be patient, and have a calm, productive discussion."
I am doubtful someone spreading anti-vax nonsense can be convinced they’re wrong. (Emphasis on spreading, not just believing or questioning.)
What one can do is inhibit the spread of their misinformation. For that purpose, given the stakes, being direct to the point of roughness can be warranted.
Getting angry is easy.
Persuasion is the hard part.
Imagine that internal monologue - "Am I insane? I'm smart? I'm an analytic person. Why is he calling me insane? HE'S the insane one!"
Because Linus thinks this is a logical fight. But it's not.
Information is _not_ all that's needed to be persuaded. And if he really care about the vax effort, his efforts would be focused on pulling others over to the vax side, not drawing the line thicker by belittling comments.
You're assuming the goal is convincing the original poster. Given that goal, you are correct.
The counterargument: OP doesn't matter. Their effect on third parties is key. Reasonably engaging with OP validates their thinking. (Which, to reiterate, is nonsense.) Yes– calm, patient rhetoric has a higher chance of succeeding with them. But it's also likely to leave bystanders neutral or open to OP's arguments. Excoriating OP guarantees they'll hate you. But it increases the chance that third parties get the message.
You're a good soul. You care about OP. We're...well, we're bastards. To us, OP is beyond saving. What matters is the people around her. The people on the internet, who might passively read her drivel and believe it and skip vaccination. There are more of them than there are her, and they–unlike her–didn't choose to be in their position.
He just belittled. An abusive response. Hes smart but at the same time emotionally inept.
The kind of guy who can’t determine whether he’s moving the line forward or back.
He’s sad. He’d have zero placement in sales, therapy, or anywhere else where persuasion takes place.
Upvoting wasn't enough. Linus reaction is perfect. Even if it was just driven by emotions I completely understand it.
It only stands to redirect the effort. They may stop posting on the list, but Linus has done none of the hard work of persuasion, so they will post elsewhere.
Again, he does the movement zero favors. All the privilege in the world to bring someone over, and he pisses it away.
I think this was the best result we could achieve.
Rude and uncalled for, even after your edit.
Patient discussion is ineffective on people who are acting in bad faith. It is counterproductive.
There is no debate to be had. No one is genuinely trying to learn anything here.
By giving con artists and dangerous vaccine conspiracies a space, you legitimize their line of questionning.
LKML is not a place to send anti-vax emails or to be "just asking questions". Deplatforming works.
I was just correcting the term in the edit, but I agree I'm being a bit inflammatory.
> Deplatforming works.
No it doesn't. The entire history of Western Liberalism—since the Magna Carta onwards—teaches us that censorship is quite literally never the answer.
There is basically almost no precedent to todays problem of misinformation spread, so historical examples are near useless. Censorship is a trivial problem to overcome in the modern world contrary to the last century’s vision, one can’t really hide anything on the internet. The censored information itself will be available in some way. What is much more effective in preventing information flow is the other direction, obfuscation or overloading of information.
A great example of it is an older Russian voting fraud, where video footage leaked of a man repeatedly throwing in ballots. It got quickly shared over Twitter with the name of the town in hashtags — there was no chance of censoring that. The solution was to spam twitter with unrelated bullshit with #NameOfTown, effectively putting out the flame.
And unfortunately bullshit like antivaxx, anti-climatechange, and political campaigns do use this technique very effectively to counter the usually more complex scientific arguments. People prefer taking only a few logical steps instead of the whole “we create the replica of parts of the virus by injecting the …”. Unfortunately I don’t know what would be a solution to this. Perhaps better education..
I’m sorry but what?!?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation
The only difference these days is everybody has a printing press. So what you’re advocating for is removing someone’s first amendment right.
And you’re wrong again, there’s even a story in the Bible about the tower of babel. Same exact thing. When humans, all humans, can communicate easily and quickly it’s dangerous.
It’s relevant because the reason the languages were confounded was for the exact same problem we have today. Too many people with a megaphone. Too easy to spread information, good or bad.
Please point to where I’ve mentioned either facebook or youtube. No idea where this is coming from.
What do you mean by "works"? Deplatforming seems to work if it's goal is to simply limit the spread of a message. Whether or not that's good or bad is a separate question. Do you think Alex Jones has just as big of a viewership as when he was on Youtube? Are there just as many people who know what Trump was talking about last week, now that he's gone from Twitter? Big platforms give those with followings an opportunity to reach even more people.
Deplatforming seems to work if it's goal is to simply limit free speech and control the narrative. There fixed that for you.
> Alex Jones has just as big of a viewership as when he was on Youtube?
Alex Jones got his youtube viewership from his radio show, he’s still quite active. All this did was prove those that believed him that he’s correct. It will still spread as it did before youtube.
> Are there just as many people who know what Trump was talking about last week, now that he's gone from Twitter?
And how many people you think are upset by this? Do you think that the left can just shut someone like Trump off from the every platform and everything’s just gonna be hunky dory? This one action alone is one of the major contributing factors to this anti vax movement. The left blew the divide up.
You're still perfectly free to spew your crazy, you just don't get to stand on my lawn to do so.
Good, old-fashioned conservative value that. You have never had a right to use someone else's infrastructure like this, and hopefully never will, as that is a scary precedent that doesn't respect the rights of creators and owners of such platforms.
You seem to be repeating the current right wing grievances. If you’re not on the right then... ok.
Got it, so if we don’t agree with how something is used we shut it down. Republicans attempted this before with bakeries, so I guess this means it’s ok now?
And the inciting violence thing, you realize that’s a left belief yes?
Not sure what your point even is here any more.
Kittens and sweet tea?
Some people will listen to (perceived) authority. Linus has a large following. It's fair to say that a non-zero number of individuals may be persuaded by his strong stance. I doubt the person that he was replying to will listen to anything, but if anyone else does, it's a win.
If someone is claiming that a person is "shedding" mRNA, the point of education is gone. It's ok if someone says they are unsure about this 'new' technology - you can then sit down with them calmly and explain how all of this works.
However, if they are just parroting anti-vax talking points, they should be shutdown and quick. They have long stopped listening to reason, and are on the "vaccines cause magnetism" territory. They are actively trying to spread even more misinformation. This should be contained just like we contain viruses.
It's not really up for debate. Don't like a particular vaccine? Try to get another one if you can. Don't try to prevent others from getting it based on superstition.
This is the original definition of "meme" rooted in evolutionary biology. Disinfecting with liberal doses of reason, frequently, and vehemently is certainly warranted.
Here we are again with the force and control. Shutting down “misinformation” means you must be able to define what “misinformation” is. We’ve made mistakes on this many times historically and we still have groups of people running around and saying “shut up and listen”. nothing will get accomplished like this.
> Don't try to prevent others from getting it based on superstition.
This I actually agree with.
One thing I'd add (or hypothesize anyway) is that in these kind of debates, I don't believe the crux of the disagreement is a misunderstanding of the technical points of why it works. It's more a natural reaction to people being told they have to do something, that causes an adverse reaction in many people (for clarity, being told causes the reaction, I'm not talking about the vaccine). So people end up pushing back, which includes aggressively and sometimes even ridiculously questioning the underlying facts.
The same holds for climate change for example. People get caught, often untenably, in the minutia of the technical arguments, when it has much more to do imo with a debate over wealth redistribution or rolling back standard of living. Decoupling the political aspects about what we should do as a response, from the scientific aspects of cause and effect would go a long way. The problem though would be in that case, politicians would lose the "science tells us" rhetorical device, and actually have to have an adult conversation with their constituents about how we move forward
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/16/misinfo...
1) You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
2) Lots of people do not have the brain power to understand vaccines and they will simply follow the herd.
Part of the reason anti-vax gets such a boost is because it is considered an "acceptable" position to follow by "respectable" people like the "natural is the only good stuff" dipshits in Marin county (who regularly give us Measles and Pertussis outbreaks).
Yes, you can try to reason with individuals. However, you also need to make stupid positions socially unacceptable so that the part of the herd who don't have the capacity to understand don't go following people willing to lead them off a cliff.
The first part is definitely true though. Calling somebody an idiot is probably one of the worst ways to get them to agree with you, even if they are spouting idiocy. I won't pretend I have a solution to anti-vax beliefs, but simply calling them stupid won't make them disappear.
1) remove the person's comments 2) let the person's comments stand unchallenged 3) engage in a lengthy, potentially endless discussion with this person who is highly unlikely to change their mind
None of these seem like great options.
Linus probably recognizes that he has virtually zero chance of persuading this person's opinion. He probably also recognizes that a reader who comes across these outlandish claims unchallenged may get the wrong impression that these views are somehow being embraced by the community. As such he is absolutely correct in briefly explaining that the vaccines are safe and effective.
And being a pompous ass is kinda Linus' thing. :shrug:
This is very tame, all things considered, and he does take the time to try and educate the individual on the matter. I for one appreciate him doing this.
I agree that the ideal approach is talking like grown-up, educated people and not just shouting in face, but it also depends on who're you talking to and how firm their belief in something are, too. Some require a good beating with virtual baseball bat a few times for them to start listen.. :p
Also, I got the vaccine, so if you interpret this as some sort of veiled anti-vaccine comment you are part of the problem.
Because I don't. I do see a lot of reasonable objections making headlines or having a large impact. E.g. side effects halting entire campaigns for weeks, or large articles highlighting the dowsides of various vaccines, debates on particle sizes and fluid dynamics on national TV and so on.
The ones who you could argue are at the lowest risk level – those that will have an asymptomatic infection and might not take precautions because they feel fine – are actually presenting the highest risk to every vulnerable person they encounter.
I'm looking for an educated answer, I'm not anti-vaxx, far from it, I'm just curious about it.
That time is however not zero.
Furthermore, you can carry the virus outside your body.
Also if you compare a population of 100 million people who mostly have that 20x protection with one that doesn't and infect one person the the end result is one or two infections in the first case and about 100 million in the second.
Additionally, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, but with e.g. the Spanish Flu, the morbidity was not from the flu, per se, but the immune response to it (cytokine storm, which I believe is implicated in Covid somewhat, too). If that's the case, could the proteins coded by the mRNA potentially have kicked off such a response? I know we see that it doesn't, but could it have?
Why would they?
And more specifically, why would they cause lung issues? Because that's the main problem with COVID. The virus like to bind to cells that have a specific receptors, with the vast majority contained in lung tissue.
You would expect to see major damage near the injection site if your cytokine storm theory had weight, but not much else.
If there is a mechanism that will cause side effects on mRNA vaccines, then such mechanism will also be presented in the virus. Except it's a localized, self-limited amount, as mRNA cannot replicate. Viruses can.
You're forgetting about the lipids the vaccine mRNA is put into.
One big reason it took so long to create mRNA vaccines was finding a suitable lipid mix. They need to have a specific property, they need to be electrically charged in a certain way, and pretty much all lipids with that property are extremely toxic.
The equivalent lipids in the virus don't have this problem because they come from the human cell membrane and they use the spike protein to fuse. Since the vaccine doesn't have a spike protein, it needs that special charge property to be able to spill it's mRNA.
The question now is, if it took sooo long to find those lipids, just what the safety margin on them is?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27433582/
https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/drug-delivery/Without-li...
The conclusion of the article is that these lipids are safe, with a recommendation for further study. The article is from 2016, no ill effects were found since then
And btw, there is no difference between lipids we can make and lipids that our cells make. It's the same chemical composition.
Well, hence my question about cytokine storm, since by definition that's an out of control feedback loop prompted by other cytokines and not the underlying virus any more. My question was about whether it's possible that just the spike protein could conceivably have induced that effect.
Good point about the localization of it. Though, I do feel like I read somewhere you see the Spike proteins mostly around the shoulder and in the liver, so it does travel through the blood somewhat.
Also, I was under the misunderstanding that cytokines were part of the adaptive immune system, and hence produced – I think? – in the bone marrow. If that were true, it wouldn't matter so much where the antigens were, since the B/T-Cells (getting confused on which is which) are produced elsewhere and have to make their way there anyway. And if that's the case, they'd be visiting the lungs. And, being adaptive, I thought it was something about the shape of covid and hence the antibodies that kicked off the storm in the lungs, and not necessarily the quantity or prevalence of the antigen in the lungs.
But, turns out it's part of the innate immune system, and seems like cytokines are mostly produced near the infection itself.
That said, I personally believe that the benefits outweigh the potential side-effects. If I weren't already vaccinated this news would not have have changed my decision to get a mRNA vaccine.
"Heart inflammation in young men higher than expected after Pfizer, Moderna vaccines -U.S. CDC" - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/cdc-heart-inflammation-case...
The treatment being offered is unlike any other mainstream protocol, has not completed the FDA approval process that every other vaccine that's given to the general population (in the US) has gone through.
Add to that counter-intuitive advice being given by medical professionals. When I was young, I had chicken pox. I was never offered the vaccine that my children have received. However, previously infected people are being urged to undergo this treatment. I could do the primary research to determine _why_ that is the case, or those urging everyone to participate can explain clearly why it's different this time.
I don't like the language chosen, which, to me, obscures the idea that what is being offered is like a yearly flu vaccine or any other dead/disabled/controlled viral vaccine. I've read that there are vaccines for SARS-CoV2 that are similar to what normally comes to mind, but they are not available in my country.
mRNA research is awesome. The technique is very cool, but beyond the theoretical best case scenario, what are the failure cases for these treatments? What if the mRNA is damaged along the way. What if there are unknown issue with the delivery mechanism.
Ultimately, I am the primary income for our family and in a not-at-risk category if I were to get infected. At this time, I've decided that is a safer position for my family. I'm hoping that as FDA approval is granted and longer term affects are well known that I'll be comfortable going forward, but at this point I am not.
I'm not anti-vax, but not keen to be an early adopter for new treatment option when I'm not at danger of what I'm being protected from. There's the additional argument about protecting those that can't be vaccinated, but I'm happy to follow other hygiene protocols that have been used in practice for much longer.
0 - https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history....
That most recent one says there was a voluntary recall and no health problems were reported. Doesn't sound too concerning to me to be honest.
And because you mention long term effects a couple times -- how long would be long enough for you to feel okay about the safety of the vaccine, and how did you come up with this number?
It’s not about an arbitrary time, it’s about following an established protocol that has been used for every single other injection I’ve been given. (I’m currently going through allergy therapy, so I get a fair number of injections every month.)
Only Pfizer, IIRC, has even submitted a request for approval, and that was just last month. Minimally FDA approval takes ≈6 months, but it could also take several years.
As mentioned above, the vaccines being offered in the US are unlike any other that have been approved previously for use in the general population. I don’t think other vaccines (except the Ebola vaccine for specifically J&J) are reasonable analogues.
0 - https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-...
Why would you take the higher risk of choosing the experimental virus over the experimental vaccine? It seems to me you're holding the vaccine to higher standards as the virus?
Also, there is 12 months more data for the virus than the vaccines. Based on available data, I’m not in an at risk group and have been tested every time I’ve knowingly had contact with anyone who has been infected.
The available data appears to show the virus is much more damaging than the vaccine. For every age group.
Sorry for being pedantic, but it’s the same as “you don’t die from being shot, but from the resulting blood loss”.
Also, we did absolutely have clinical trials — only some aspect of it was allowed to begin sooner than it otherwise would have due to the urgency. Also, the mRNA tech was in development for a decade now.
I think I wasn't clear then.
With the Spanish Flu, the virus took hold in the host and multiplied. As part of the immune response, the body released cytokines, which normally help with the situation. But for reasons I don't understand, the Spanish Flu often prompted a "cytokine storm", which is an uncontrolled and excessive release of these molecules, even after the virus was cleared. Ultimately, it was these cytokines, not the virus, that overwhelmed the body and killed the patient. So what we saw with the Spanish Flu was that younger people with stronger immune systems, died more than older people with weaker ones.
But the relevance here is that the mRNA vaccines inject a ton of mRNA to induce the body to produce Spike protein, a piece of Covid, in order to teach the adaptive immune system to recognize it and produce antibodies. And so my question is, could it have been the case that these Spike proteins would induce a cytokine storm? (We see now that they don't, but I'm not sure that was clear a priori.)
In other words, I think it's important to draw the distinction between the "gun shot" and the "blood loss". With Spanish Flu, a lot of the mortality came from the blood loss. However, with Covid, it appears the "gun shot" does more damage (i.e. patients who die form Covid, continue to have high viral loads; it's not a case that the immune system is what kills them).
But none of this was clear in advance.
> Also, we did absolutely have clinical trials
Yes, I said that.
But then I clicked the link and realized that it was a classic Linus rant! As much as I support codes of conduct and Linus curtailing his asshole behavior regarding technical matters, I think there should be a loophole for anti-vaxxers and other nut jobs who don't care that they might transmit a deadly disease to the immunocompromised or children.
Also, you generally support Linus curtailing his asshole behavior, but you want to make an exception for anti-vax people? Why? You want them to burrow down harder into their anti-science bunkers? Why? Is that going to make the world a better place somehow? Do _you_ care?
Rather, it's to prevent further radicalisation.
Agree.
I know some and at least two are genuinely good people, the kind that would literally and metaphorically take a bullet for for a good cause.
One of them is a qualified nurse, the other an engineer.
I think it is because they have listened to Q.
That is of course bad, but we should ask ourselves: why do good and reasonable people end up there?
Can it be because politicians and media has been caught lying and covering for each other for so long that people don't trust them anymore?
Just yesterday Glenn Greenwald published a detailed walk through of how "Trump used tear gas to remove peaceful demonstrants to take photo in front of church" has been debunked.
It is not the first. That's just another one.
How can people know who to believe?
My latest approach to this has been a very logical one:
say - for the sake of the argument - that doctors and scientists in Europe and US are in the pocket of big Pharma.
If we can agree that Iranian doctors and scientists are not, can we then agree that something else is the reason why Iran still hasn't conquered COVID-19 despite having access to Zink and vitamin D and all the cheap generic pills that are supposed to fix COVID-19 so much more reliably than the vaccines?
(i.e. there are some things one can reasonably believe even if the one who tells it to you are a known liar, but you have to judge.)
I haven't got one since I've had a positive last year. And I was afraid because it's new technology and too fast in delivery. However as time goes I'm not afraid of it anymore and am planning to get one.
However my country only provide sinovac or AZ. I prefer pfizer biontech or moderna.
Vaccines actually do edit the genetic code, but only of some select B-cells. And so does any other antigen that your body develops antibodies for. The process is very complicated and beautiful, and is pretty much exactly the same as in plenty of other multicellular life forms.
If you've ever wondered what's the "storage format" for all the recipes for all the different antibodies that your body produces, that is how does your body even remember infections from years ago - it's DNA, and the recipes are generated via a massively sped up internal evolution, mediated by T cells. The process of maturing B-cells is kind of similar to machine learning. The matured B-cells are then safely stashed away in the bone marrow. Really remarkable stuff.
(I understand that Linus meant that the vaccine mRNA is not reverse transcribed into the host DNA, and that is of course the case. Also, a side note: the human genome is littered with viral genetic material accumulated over time, god knows if it's for good or for bad, we're still too dumb to answer such questions)
And all the molecular machinery in our body is much more complex than any software system.
But, I don't think some software systems are far off, particularly if you are a bit more permissive with the boundaries of a "system". I don't know really how to compare such apples to oranges, but the genetic material of a human is just a single gigabyte. Now i know that a gigabyte C++ program is not on par with a gigabyte of DNA, but a terabyte of code? Maybe? We're definitely at the terabytes of code range if you look at the internet as a whole. You can also add the deep ML models, they're easily in the gigabyte ranges.
Of course the complexity in the protein-based lifeform comes from the massive parallelism of the code execution (every single cell and every single ribosome!) and the massive amount of noise that the environment constantly throws at the lifeforms. Compare with the nearly pristine conditions that the sets of customized silicone crystals that we call computers operate in.
Give me volatility and time, and you'll be stunned, eventually. Let's see what's next in this book :)
And it wasn't planned, but evolved. No plan, no developer. Hard to imagine.
> the genetic material of a human is just a single gigabyte
Indeed apples and oranges [*]. As long as we don't know all functions of this molecular machinery (and there is a very good chance we will never know all those functions) all comparisons with programming languages are pure speculations. Some "subsystems" seem to be representable by "programming languages" (as long as one ignores many unknowns and special cases). But the complexity not only happens on molecular level.
> comes from the massive parallelism of the code execution
A very daring comparison.
[*] EDIT: mind that the genetic material e.g. assumes all the laws of physics and chemistry (also those we do not yet know) which are not explicitly encoded.
Explains all those bugs and bad design choices, doesn't it.
If there is any choice at all in natural selection, it is only in the choice of the reproductive partner. Apparently, the result of the selection process is not so bad, otherwise we would not have survived. Of course, we still have the chance to go extinct.
It's like saying a virus rewrites antivirus programs. Yes, the databases get updated for every new virus, but it's not the virus doing that directly.
I think, the correct way to phrase it is: an immune reaction, be it against a vaccine or an infection is expressed in genetic changes of some cells. But this is how the immune system works, nothing specific to vaccines. Vaccines are just a safe and efficient way to trigger the immune response.
In some cases, we know too, e.g. synctin-1 [1] is a viral protein coded by a gene integrated into the primate germ line some 25 million years ago and repurposed by our bodies to facilitate cell fusion in the development of the placenta.
>But dammit, regardless of where you have gotten your mis-information from, any Linux kernel discussion list isn't going to have your idiotic drivel pass uncontested from me.
I dont know why I cant stop laughing.
I see Linus still hasn't changed much.
>But dammit, regardless of where you have gotten your mis-information from, any Linux kernel discussion list isn't going to have your idiotic drivel pass uncontested from me.
He hasn't lost his fastball!
1) After an injection of mRNA (inside of lipid nanoparticles, if I understand correctly) into the body, which cells will the mRNA enter?
2) The mRNA will cause the synthesis of the spike protein that will be displayed on the surface of these cells and initiate the immune response. Since the cells expressing the spike protein will be treated as infected by the immune system, will it result in the death of these cells? If so – and depending on the answer to the previous question — is this cell death dangerous at all?
3) Following question 2, what are the chances of the development of an autoimmune response?
4) Why do some vaccine recipients seem to develop thrombotic events?
5) Is there a reason to believe that the spike protein itself has cytotoxic properties? If so, is there a reason to believe that the spike protein expressed by the cells transfected with the mRNA can get detached from their membranes and enter the bloodstream? If yes, is there any danger to that?
Edit: I've phrased these questions in the most neutral language of a basic medical immunology textbook, yet, judging by the instant downvotes, I managed to upset someone. I'm not siding with the author of the email to the Linux kernel discussion list; I am merely wondering how much precisely is known about the mechanism of action of mRNA vaccines beyond the basic overview that Linus outlined.
You are probably asking questions to which we don't have answers. Someone with medical credentials once told me "You are asking questions they don't have answers for. That's not how medical studies work." and I think people get cranky any time you ask questions the studies aren't designed to answer. For many people, it likely smacks of "You are just being a smartass." and "How dare you make the authorities look dumb!" or something like that.
4) Why do some vaccine recipients seem to develop thrombotic events?
My assumption would be that this is related to the fact that the infection itself seems to cause blood clots and my general impression is that what it does to the blood system is a significant issue and a large part of why it is deadly.
I am not a medical professional. I'm just a random internet stranger who reads and is making conversation on the internet.
I've been pleasantly surprised by the qualifications of people who post on Hacker News. Who knows; perhaps there's a stray immunologist among the visitors.
What depresses me quite a bit is that discussions in public forums regarding vaccines never seem to move past a high-school science lesson in physiology and cell biology. Which tends to leave people with a rather superficial understanding of what a vaccine does, yet with a high degree of confidence in that they understand how it works.
This trend of social and political issues having to be discussed absolutely everywhere ad nauseam is the most deranged thing.
Would you give alpha version to people you love? Why is this concern downplayed? I understand statistics but we have no clue what could go wrong in an early version of a new technology and no data on long-term impact. It's all a big experiment.
I wouldn't say alpha testers and probably not even beta testers. They did clinical trials for these vaccines in 2020 with tens of thousands of volunteers long before these were approved by the FDA and other regulatory bodies! And as I will explain in a second, these clinical trial patients were actually more like beta testers than alpha testers.
The short version is that mRNA vaccines have been around for ~40 years with pretty well identified side-effects and risk profiles. The use of an mRNA vaccine for COVID is a new application of existing technology. One comparison might be the flu vaccine. You get an annual flu vaccine that has <1 year of testing for that specific vaccine because the flu mutates every year. But the underlying technology is the same across all major flu vaccines, so you don't need multiple years of testing to ensure the safety and efficacy of it. You really only need to make sure that certain risk profiles aren't exacerbated and that the efficacy remains within reasonable expectations. In short, the mRNA vaccine that powered the COVID vaccine has already been well-tested, and the testing Moderna, Pfizer, and others did in the last 18 months were more about testing the safety and efficacy of the specific version of the vaccine than the overall technology.
Another comparison for the HN crowd might be that it's more like the difference between the iOS 14 and iOS 15. That is, the vast majority of the OS hasn't changed that much and has been thoroughly tested, and most of the testing is focused on the new features/major changes. You don't need 5 years of testing to uncover every bug in iOS 15 -- one year should be plenty to find the major offenders. When Apple releases iOS 15, they do so basically saying "based on our testing, this is stable enough to be a benefit to >99% of our users and we think you would be best served by upgrading from iOS 14 to iOS 15." They are not promising no bugs at all, but rather saying that the major vulnerabilities and side effects have been patched/mitigated. Similarly, the pharmaceutical companies and the regulatory bodies like the FDA are suggesting "this is safe and effective, with the risk of side effects A, B, C, D..."
(Source: my wife is a microbiologist who works on vaccines for pharma companies)
I'm having trouble reconciling your statement with Wikipedia's claim that the Pfizer vaccine is "the first mRNA vaccine to be authorized for use in humans"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID-...
If the alternative is a O(1%) chance of dying from the disease? You'd better believe I would (and did).
Drug development is usually serialized because it's so expensive. Why produce a bunch of drugs if it's going to be thrown away? Operation warp speed said let's just throw money at the problem so we can parallelize as much as possible, knowing that if it doesn't work out (effective, safety) then we as a country just ate the cost of trying. My understanding is the clinical trial parts weren't any different than would normally be done.
AFAIK vaccine safety is usually determinable within a few months. That is to say, if anything bad happens, it'll happen soon and not years later. Because enough months had past with larger and larger groups looking ok, plus extreme effectiveness, then emergency authorization was passed.
You could say emergency authorization is alpha/beta. But that alpha/beta has now been rolled out to hundreds of million of people and the safety profiles haven't changed from the clinical trial modeling. And if the failure probability is all up front, and we've already passed those milestones, then are we really still in alpha/beta territory?
mRNA vaccines are also not a new technology. They've been used for years now.
> Would you give alpha version to people you love?
If the option is an alpha which is passing all the 'unit tests' so to speak, or let them get covid and have far higher risk of dying or permanent disability, I'd for sure choose the alpha.
Absolutely I would.
What's the alternative?
Waiting 3 years for data whilst the virus continues to kill indiscriminately and desperately hoping that you or your loved ones don't get infected?
Someone else in these comments summed up my feelings about the whole thing pretty well:
> Are they safe? Almost certainly. Do we know that for sure yet? No. Do the benefits outweigh the risks? For me, yes.
I honestly don't know what to think about all of this. I've seen a lot of censorship and stifling of speech. Reading Fauci's emails also makes me hesitate. I think trust in the experts will really take a hit going forward.
I did get the AZ vaccine a few weeks ago. Yesterday I had a flame heme show up on a retina scan at the eye doc. Was it the vax? Perhaps, the Oxford UK study said these kinds of events are slightly more likely from what they've seen.
Which ones, specifically?
I keep seeing people say this. There are thousands of pages in the PDF and no one seems to be able to quote anything actually concerning.
The messaging on masks should have been that only n95 or better are worth the time. One email to a friend pretty much said that.
Which is simply rubbish.
Masks of all kinds will prevent transmission albeit with varying levels of efficacy. And most importantly they impact human behaviour in ways which prevent transmission.
Not to mention that N95 masks are more expensive which would have reduced its use by people who are poorer and are far more likely to spread the virus i.e. they are more likely to have multiple jobs, travel further for their job, work longer hours etc.
Maybe these will help:
Wish you had read the studies you posted
The data didn't prove it out though, they report this in their analysis: "We did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility"
But any mask is better than no mask. Which is what happens if you mandate a far more expensive and harder to get N95 variant.
I know it’s all over the web; I skimmed quite a few pages. You’re claiming concerning stuff lurks within - support the assertion.
is completely relative to the observer. a piece of shitty fabric over your face won't stop n95 levels of transmission but it is better than nothing. To some of us, it's "worth the time" to be less likely to spread even if by a very small margin.
Read the conclusion, what their study actually found: "We did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility"
I haven't seen anything positive about those drugs in COVID-19 in human patients. For example, the RECOVERY trial showed no benefit (and non-significant numerical harm) for HCQ: https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2022926
This expose on the suppression of ivermectin is telling: https://covid19criticalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/T...
Lots of studies referenced in it.
The RECOVERY results for HCQ were definitely negative. Personally I'm neutral on its effectiveness, but HCQ proponents would probably say that HCQ's postulated antiviral mechanism is not effective on already hospitalized patients, since most of them would have already cleared the virus by the time they showed up to the hospital.
https://twitter.com/AbdenurFlavio/status/1398717229366235141
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/fauci-emails-reveal-damag...
The article also assumes that the paper was withdrawn because of some sort of political pressure. But fails to actually point to any real evidence. I think it's more likely that they made extraordinary claims and failed to produce the extraordinary evidence.
It's not. It is a supplement to the vaccine for people who are already hospitalised.
Both were completely wrong. Ivermetctin/HCQ has being actively used around the world for over a year and it has not "solved" the issue of deaths due to COVID.
You don't want to treat a disease (especially with drugs that have their own problems), you want to prevent it from happening in the first place. Vaccines help prevent it, and so would still have gotten authorized.
That being said, absolutely none of those medications you mentioned are targeted drugs. Its not a good idea to take those drugs for years as a prophylactic, especially broad-spectrum drugs. The only reason to use them is if the disease is worse than the side-effects. We know their mechanism of action, and they're well known to interfere with other functions in the body.
Our body already has a targeted defense mechanism and vaccines are the primary means to leverage it.
Why not go for herd immunity? maybe we should be releasing (suitably tested) live vaccines
Herd immunity in the general population will probably be impossible unless the areas that reach it choose to lock themselves from the rest of the world https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/opinion/herd-immunity-cov...
I scanned most of the Pfizer trial and was wondering why we expected the immunity after the vaccine to last longer than natural immunity. A typical infection can last for several weeks, so your immune system is presumably exposed to the virus for a similar period of time. And after a natural infection I hear 6 months being thrown around as a typical window of immunity. But I was hearing claims of vaccines lasting for years, when they were only in the trials for less than 6 months. Why is this?
Fortunately I know a lot of people in the medical field. I asked a nurse who had been in a COVID ICU ward since this began. No idea, he said. Good question. I asked a few others: same answer. I asked several anesthesiologist friends: they did more med-school after all. Mostly no idea. One suggested that the vaccine might be more targeted and get a more potent response, maybe?
I tried casting a wider net on Facebook, and got a few nastygrams about how I was spreading uneducated FUD. I asked if they knew the answer but I was told to listen to the experts and read the science, whatever that means to these people. One friend did send me a link to a quote by the Moderna CEO that implied they have machines that can count antibody concentrations and they tracked it over time - I had no idea about that, so that was cool.
Eventually someone referred me to their cousin in nursing school who referred me to their brother-in-law who is actually an epidemiologist, and he told me it was a good question and explained all sorts of things about the various types of cells involved in the immune response and how the vaccine delivery invokes a very specific response that is, as one of the doctors suspected, much more targeted at something less likely to change, and how those immune cell types produce longer-lasting immunity. Now I was satisfied and learned something.
But those people in the middle think of themselves as being pro-science but they're really not. And the more they engage with anti-vaxxers the more ammunition anti-vaxxers will think they have and the more they'll dig into their beliefs. It's not good.
It’s like asking a car mechanic about steel production. Entirely out of their wheelhouse, even if they deal with the steel daily.
(Both could comfortably tell you masks don’t cause hypoxia or pneumonia, though.)
The point is that the nurse and the car mechanic are at about the same starting point on the subject.
Being willing to learn is great, but they have minimal extant knowledge from their profession.
My point was that the less educated someone is in the medical field in general, the less willing they seem to be to entertain a genuine question, and this is the opposite of being "pro-science". It's only a step above being an anti-vaxxer because they choose better experts to listen to.
> Eventually someone referred me to their cousin in nursing school who referred me to their brother-in-law who is actually an epidemiologist...
This could've happened if their cousin was a car mechanic who had a brother-in-law with an epidemiologist. The nursing aspect of the story was irrelevant to the end result.
Medical professions, the ones you interact with as a patient are essentially highly specialized mechanics for the human body.
My point is more that these people have far more medical education than the average person I interact with on social media, and didn't look down on my question but also wanted to know. People who knew less than them and knew even less than me were mad that I would dare even ask.
I don't work on operating systems but I had a CS education, so I know enough about the kinds of things it needs to worry about that I could answer about the building blocks of a kernel in a way that I feel would be largely correct.
But a neat thing about HN is that there are people here who've been to med school and can presumably chime in.
What I can tell you personally is that vaccinology seems to involve a lot of centrifuging of rabbit poop, which is something I don't think they do a lot of in med school.
Getting the perspective of the software engineer is a reasonable step, and certainly better than basing your beliefs on the rankings of the insane person.
Of course, if you have access to a vaccinologist (is this a recognized profession? I checked two dictionaries and neither contain the word), you should ask them. Or you can look up their opinion online [1]. Most will agree what the doctors and nurse said.
[1] https://health.mountsinai.org/blog/esteemed-vaccinologist-we...
Now I see where you’re coming from with the suggestion to go straight to a qualified source instead of asking a bunch of random people.
Point being, it's not that straightforward unless there's someone you already know that is willing to share their contact information and they actually have the time to talk to you.
I totally see the point about going for second-best first until you know you have a question worth their time and not something that's obvious. (Although the answer in this case did seem obvious to me as a software person, or at least I'd have guessed they can see the amount of anti-covid-stuff dropping at different rates.)
Contact the department of health education of the ministry of health. You already paid for it with your taxes, might as well make use of it.
It's a feature of engineering and scientific education that there is a corpus of knowledge that every person in a discipline (say EE, or medicine) is expected to have learned (if not retained). I imagine all doctors learn quite a bit about the immune system in medical school.
Given that a "random software engineer on the street" may have a CS degree, an MBA, a 6 week bootcamp, or be totally self-taught, the example isn't analogous IMO.
If most of the whole world came to a screeching halt for the better part of a year and the solution turned out to be GPU drivers, I as a software engineer would become intensely interested in understanding them and would not at all be surprised if my less technical friends asked me for some pointers.
In the end, my point was that people who aren't even software engineers were telling me to stop trying to understand GPU drivers because GPU drivers are a solved problem and I should just trust NVIDIA.
A) can come across as a statement in the form of a question (e.g. "no we don't these vaccines are rediculous" etc) B) even if it doesn't, if you ask that and no one knows and other people see that, it can cause them to have unscientific doubts about vaccines, even if that wasn't intended.
Dissent to the dominant opinion in any scientific field is always tricky, but that is a self-defense mechanism. Over time opposing viewpoints are integrated into the body of knowledge and may or may not replace or amend it. HOWEVER when we consider anti-vax or flat earth people they are acting in bad faith and their nonsense steals bandwith. It does not reserve respect and kicking them out harshly is a very necessary defense mechanism. Call it a memetic immune response with inflammation.
The dangerous thing about expertise in a very narrow area (which most medicine is these days) is that is bolsters confidence so much that you imagining yourself an expert in an adjacent area... not realizing that you might be missing very important fundamental knowledge.
You see this often in e.g. Nobel Disease[1], but also in more mundane settings.
Most people I know are pro-vax, have all their other vaccinations, but are leery of new technology being distributed under the same label. I think that's reasonable. I'm one of these people. I don't plan on taking any mRNA vaccine until we have a few decades worth of safety data on LNPs, although I think the technology and its development is very interesting. [1]
Does the net health benefit provided by mRNA vaccines probably outweigh the consequences of Covid? Probably, even almost certainly. But I'll stick to more conventional biotech for now.
In general, I think the average person hugely overestimates how much we know about biology and how much experts really know - they know 100x more than me, but still 0.00001% of what there is to know. We have a lot of hubris when it comes to science and technology.
[1] https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/drug-delivery/Without-li...
Edit: oh, the irony of going -3 for this comment on this article...what's wrong people, lay it on me
The media as always has sensationalized every new strain found and their behaviour is cause for concern, but researchers have not been sounding the alarm over possible vaccine escape - the evidence points to the spike protein being highly conserved, and the mRNA vaccine antibodies have remained effective.
The picture isn't nearly as rosey as OP makes it sound, unfortunately: sort of a gish gallop about knowing the rate at which we can expect buffer overflows in C, but in reply to a comment noting we don't have an ETA for ending security vulnerabilities, so they unintentionally implied the picture is good.
The mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) have both shown excellent (though in some cases reduced) efficacy against all strains [1], and the protein regions they target have not shown substantial alteration against antibody binding affinity (fun fact: this is "easy" to test - you give people the vaccine, isolate the antibodies in their blood, then test them against COVID in a petridish - so monitoring and change discovery is quick because you're not dependent on finding infected patients). The linked paper is notable, because while efficacy is effected, in tests the antibodies still ultimately inactivate the entire viral sample: no survivors means no natural selection criteria.
Given the widespread of COVID-19, the emergence of strains which do not successfully alter targetable regions for vaccines means that those regions are not easy (read: lead to reduction in fitness) to change. Similarly, the spike protein displays suboptimal binding to ACE receptors (tested by producing modified ACE receptors which have better binding) but there's been little field emergence towards a superior binding motif in any of the faster spreading strains [2], which implies again an evolutionary blockade or dead-end to improvements in that dimension.
Finally, antibody studies have found that in people who have had COVID, long term antibody production sets up in the bone marrow - this was recent research, but thats important because the basis of long term immunity is the development of immunological complexes which keep some antibody circulating. This is a hallmark of most long-lived immunities, and is for example one of the desired (though difficult to induce) end states of a potential mRNA HIV vaccine. [1]
Taken together (and again: you can also just go read what epidemiologists and microbiologists are publishing, plenty is out there) - the consensus opinion at the moment is that COVID-19 immunity is long-lived based on established science from decades of previous experience with vaccinating against viral diseases.
[1] https://asm.org/Articles/2021/February/SARS-CoV-2-Variants-v...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-70812-6
[3] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting...
You know most of the world isn't getting mRNA vaccines, and even if we quibble over 'most', it has nothing to do with your original nonsense, that somehow we know exactly when boosters for mRNA will be needed.
I don't think the media has sensatialized any of the strains, and I am equally unconcerned as you. I expect I may need a booster in a year, probably in reality two, but one is safer under uncertainty.
Sorry, what? We've been sequencing and tracking variants and lineages reliably since the pandemic started. This is very well travelled science. We've seen multiple notable variants arrive already, something that was predicted form the very early days of the pandemic and that surprised no one in the field.
Literally reality is the opposite of what you're saying. The virus is in fact "mutating" in more or less exactly the way that virologists would have expected, given decades of research on the subject.
One of the weirdest angles that the anti-vax/anti-mask crowd tend to take is to somehow argue that covid-19 is simultaneously "just a disease"/"not that bad" and that it's somehow some crazy unpredictable thing that defies the expectations of all of science. And both are wrong!
It's a very conventional novel disease behaving the way novel diseases do. There's a "global pandemic" among some species or another every few years (e.g. 90% of the pacific sea stars disappeared to a novel virus like 15 years ago and they're just now recovering). And that's bad, and requires action!
And I think it’s okay to ask questions, that’s how science progresses. I suspect a lot of people on social media are just super wary of vaccine trolls and sea-lioning[2], so unfortunately good-faith questions suffer.
You gotta be careful. Biology is not always "linearly interpolable" like that.
> "if someone majority were to go wrong it would go wrong in the first few months, and not 5+ years later".
You REALLY can't say that. There are plenty of medical conditions that will not manifest at all until years later.
But is that true for vaccines? We've had a hundred years of precedent.
In any case, I've recently been reading Lauren Sompayrac's "How the Immune System Works", and it's a technical overview of the immune system. It's not going to make you into a full blown immunologist, but it will give you the answers to most the questions you ask above, and a framework and vocabulary to begin to understand deeper academic immunology works.
P.S. The immune system is FUCKING AWESOME. There's rarely a page where my mind is not blown.
Edit: I misspelled "Sompayrac"; it is now correct.
It's perfectly fine to say, "we don't know what are the long term effects of mRNA vaccines but we can guess they're unlikely to be worse than the long term effects of the thing they're vaccinating against, which you're almost certain to catch sooner or later".
Edit: Well, as the comment below alluded to, I probably missed a pretty obvious piece of sarcasm... This is certainly funny in hindsight.
Basically, it is now impossible to make a point by attempting to present an absurdly extreme viewpoint in the opposite direction, because too many of us have encountered people who genuinely espouse viewpoints even more extreme. (As well as the exact one you said—no matter what it happens to be.)
If you want to present such a thing sarcastically, you're gonna have to make an explicit indication of your sarcasm (even just a "/s" at the end is usually enough). Otherwise, you're very likely to just be taken as meaning it sincerely.
But of course we all know confronting someone directly about their opinion always works.
Sure, this is no fun, but this whole discussion exists because trolls exist: can we really expect anything pleasant to come out of that premise.
Someone is not a "bad-faith" actor for asking precisely the questions that are hard to answer, even if they're using those questions to support a wrong idea.
If you don't have time to answer their questions, don't answer them. If you do have time, you have a good opportunity to expose the falsehood of their ideology. But don't use ad-hominems like "sealioning".
Sure, there are some stupid questions, or questions that come with a false premise, but that's not the same as discounting good questions because they come from an anti-vaxxer.
Yes, just saying someone is "sealioning" is lazy at best, trollish on its own at worse (as I have already said in the previous post). Saying "your argument is fallacious *because* of A, B, and C", is pretty much the only way to deal with a troll (besides just banning them from the platform). In the particular example of sealioning: certainly, never assume bad-faith, but after you briefly explain and give references, it is definitely very important to also explain to the person how sealioning is a dangerous tactic - at best, you helped someone be more resilient to sealioning themselves, at worst you lost some time with a troll.
The one thing I would agree on with you: if you come in on a high horse, you have already lost the discussion, no matter whether you are talking with a troll or not.
1. Labeling someone a "sealion" doesn't even hinge on their opinion. You seem to have missed the entire concept, and instead interpreted it as a generic dismissive.
2. Uh, you don't get to just call something a "fallacy" because you don't like it (though many others are doing the same thing in this thread).
Sealioning is a reference to the specific disingenuous process of spamming the same low-effort, low-brow, easily-answered questions in every last public forum. It's a basic disinformation technique to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt.
If you look at the original comic[1], the sea lion follows the couple around in public, into their house, and even into their bedroom, without permission; that is what makes the sea lion's behavior bad (criminal, in fact). However, "sealioning" in practice refers to people responding to public internet comments with other public internet comments. To treat the latter like the former is dishonest.
Furthermore, the sea lion is objecting to unsubstantiated criticism of his species, which is a form of bigotry. Imagine people searching Twitter for criticism of, say, their race or religion and arguing back at it. I suspect that 90+% of those who complain about "sealioning" would consider that behavior permissible and probably downright virtuous (and would add that the arguing-back need not be scrupulously polite). I'm frankly surprised that "social justice"-associated people managed to decide that objecting to speciesism was worthy of mockery. I think they just really wanted some term of disparagement for their opponents, and happily accepted this one when it appeared without analyzing it too closely.
I'm entirely pro-vaccines. However, I'm simultaneously entirely in favor of people asking questions, no matter what their intentions are. Their intentions do not matter. You either know your stuff or you do not. It's always better to draw out the eg anti-vaccine types. If something is defensible, then don't be a coward about it, don't be lazy, respond with a decent answer. Put in some effort. Use it as an exercise for your own brain, your own beliefs, your own ability to discuss and debate in an (ideally) civil society. Only the anti-vaccine arguments benefit from not doing that.
The shut-down angle always comes from cowardice and or intellectual weakness. You can tell a lot about someone by whether they're terrified of a discussion. Shut-down attempts are meant to evade personal shame (and more rarely to avoid putting in the time/effort), while preserving an intellectual or moral foundation established by someone else who did put in the effort.
Nearly all shut-down attempts come from weakness. If the position is important, such as vaccines, then that weakness only encourages the skeptics even more. They can practically sense it. The right thing to do is to engage and push back with facts (and or even links, with which all the hidden passive readers can go make up their own minds as to whether they agree or not), even if you don't have all day to argue a topic.
For some of them, their entire method of operation is to waste your time, troll, and gain acclaim from their own hardcore fan base by doing so.
I'm sorry to say that I have no time and effort left on my part for anything other than low effort mockery and derision of people engaging in infowars/hardcore conspiracy theory stuff.
This is why good journalists do not invite a "flat earther" and a "nasa scientists" when discussing, e.g., climate change. Because those organizing debates have a responsibility to ensure the debate is based on facts, not on oratory skills.
The internet is a fun place.
There is no way to differentiate a troll from either a fool, an extremist, or simply one who happens to not share the opinion of the reader.
There is more at stake in public debates than just the back and forth between troll/skeptic/questioner and someone responding to them.
If you benefit from such a good idea as vaccines and the rather obscenely massive benefit they have delivered to humanity, you have a moral obligation to step up and - even if rarely - throw down in a debate in their favor, when presented with such a tremendous opportunity. It requires the tiniest of efforts compared to the scientists that manage to give us these vaccines across decades of their efforts. Which also doesn't mean a person can't be lazy and free-ride on everyone else that is putting in some group effort to intellectually defend vaccines, of course. There are always free-riders.
The public skeptics and trolls are doing everyone a favor. They're being public about it. They're providing an intellectual and social opportunity that should be taken advantage of, eagerly. It's wonderful that they exist. They provide an opportunity to educate/inform, not specifically the troll or skeptic, rather, everyone else that is reading along. There is no avoiding the consequences of public debate on such important ideas, there is only to engage or give ground to the other side.
In fact, by saying there is no way to differentiate, it implies the distinction is not that relevant.
And they quickly reveal their bad faith, at which point they can safely be ignored.
Or, if you don't feel like discussing it, it's easy enough to say "I don't know about that, but the anti-vaccine stuff sounds like lies to scare people so I decided to trust my doctor."
If honest questions are met with hostility, while the anti-vaxxers are friendly and "helpful", guess who's going to be more influential?
(Also: My local county facebook group has no shortage of very vindictive, angry, and seeming inexhaustible anti-vaxxers.)
Here are some links to polls about American views on vaccines. It seems unlikely you’re running into this ratio without some major biasing factor.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/02/09/he...
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2021/03/05/growing-share...
(I’ll admit the numbers in September from the Pew poll are surprising to me)
Granted, you’re further assuming the person asks questions about vaccines. In your description it seems to me that we’re already far away from scientific thinking as a society if the way we can confirm someone is anti-science is by whether they exhibit symptoms of any kind of curiosity. This sounds like what the previous commenter is talking about.
Maybe you’re saying, “people who spread doubt in the form of a disingenuous question frequently do so in a particular social environment I’m a part of.”
This specific scenario happens on my local Nextdoor groups all the time. I've answered responded with what I think is pretty clear and concise information, and then seem that same person ask the same question the very next day in a new thread. (And the next day, and the next...) I cannot help but conclude they're not really looking for an answer.
Maybe I'm a jerk, but I'd be inclined to answer the second question with "I answered that yesterday. Why do you keep asking if you aren't going to listen to the answers?" And reply with that every single time they re-asked the question.
But... Nextdoor... does that mean it's your physical neighbors? That might make me hesitate to do so. Or maybe I'd still do something like the same, but worded more gently and politely.
https://news.mit.edu/2019/storing-vaccine-history-skin-1218
Who turned that into microchips? Either the anti-vaxxers or people who want to discredit the anti-vaxxers.
In any case, the original idea is repulsive enough.
But the person he's responding to is citing methods of harm that aren't realistic.
It’s certainly possible that mRNAs could do harm: they could code for protein sequences that might disrupt cellular function, increase cancer risk (e.g. by disrupting DNA repair or even causing mutations), etc. The spike protein is none of these things - it just gets expressed on the cell’s surface - so the risk from the vaccine is low. And, crucially, once the mRNA runs out, no more protein will be produced: mRNAs are degraded after protein translation. This serves to generally limit the amount of lasting impact that an mRNA vaccine could possibly have.
For example, the whole thrombosis / Astra-Zeneca issue, which was a big deal here in Germany. Lots of articles and discussions. Everyone was saying "don't use it on young people", but I don't even remember if they came to that conclusion because only young people got thrombosis or because the risk of dying of COVID was so much higher in old people that it trumped all other concerns.
And that's because nobody bothered to even estimate those risks. Given your age, what's your likelihood of catching COVID and getting lasting damage (including death) vs. getting thrombosis from AZ? I'm guessing that based on that, it was probably still a no-brainer to get vaccinated no matter your age.
But I think one of the central issues is the trolley problem. Somehow dying from a virus is okay because it's "natural", while having any sort of potential complication from a vaccine (no matter how unlikely) is much worse because it follows a human decision. If I'm a politician and I pass some law that indirectly (but predictably) kills tens of thousands of people, I'll be fine. If I go out and strangle a single person with my bare hands, I'm in trouble.
This reminds me of my aunt who calls me about random issues she is having with her Samsung tablet and then is shocked when I can't solve her problem when I "do computers" all day.
I was contrasting this with keyboard experts who berated me for asking but know even less. The former are pro-science. They have studied. They didn't know. They valud the question.
Others knew less and didn't even see why it was a valid thing to wonder about. Instead of any scientific answer, they regurgitated garbage.
One reason to expect that immunity might last a long time is that people infected by Sars-Cov-1 still have plenty of antibodies 10 years later.
That said, when it comes to reinfections there is the big problem of variants of the virus. Immunity against one variant might not protect fully against another variant. It's very possible that we'll need to get yearly COVID vaccines, similarly to Influenza. But right now, it's still too soon to worry about that; we're still trying to get everyone vaccinated for the first time.
I think the problem is that its 10-100x as expensive to refute a misinformed statement than it is to make one. So the plea for the small pool of genuinely authoritative / informed people to invest two orders of magnitude more effort patiently and kindly explaining misinformation to people just isn't practical in any meaningful sense.
We don't need to persuade them. They aren't persuadable, and in many cases they aren't there in good faith in the first place. We do need them to stop spreading lies and causing extreme harm to their communities. The most effective way to do that is to teach them that their actions - spreading obvious misinformation - are as offensive as they actually are (in that they actively harm people).
In the case of Pfizer and Astra Zeneca, the simple answer is that it is the second dose which presents a second challenge to the immune system which is designed to stimulate the longer protection, I'm quite surprised that none of your medical friends said that.
That leaves the question of how the single-dose jabs fair, and the honest answer is, I don't know.
I am not a doctor, but some observations from my side, what might be reasons for a different behavior of vaccinations vs. an actual infection. One point, that the vaccine is very targetted, you already listed. Then, the vaccine doesn't make you sick. Suffering through the infection might impact the ability of your immune system to build up long-term immunity. I read some article which claims that getting sick of measels does give you good immunity, but lowers your immunity against other diseases for up to two years. Also, the numbers of the time span of acquired immunity of both the vaccinations and getting infected by Covid are varying a lot. Recently I saw some claims that the infection does give you some reasonable long-term immunity.
Because the science on the immunity of coronaviruses is very poorly understood because previously they gave us the sniffles for 2 weeks and didn't cause the worldwide economy to shut down so nobody studied them well enough.
And studies had been done which seemed to showed that immune waned after 6-24 months with common cold coronaviruses.
More recent studies have now found that while people will get reinfected with HCoV-229E that immunity to an individual strain seems to be very durable/permanent and that on a scale of years the virus eventually mutates to achieve escape immunity and reinfects:
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
Note that was published as a preprint back in Dec 2020, so They(tm) didn't have this article back last summer when the question of reinfection was first raised.
6 months of immunity after natural infection was what was _guessed_ by some cautious immunologists last summer, based on the prior studies of coronaviruses. With better studies and with more time spent studying the only coronavirus that actually matters it looks pretty confident that its going to be more like years. The vaccines produce stronger results measured by neutralizing antibody titers so we _guess_ that they'll be more certain to hit those kinds of timelines. We still don't understand how long it'll take for this virus to achieve escape immunity, but the safer money is on the idea that it'll become endemic, but second time around those with natural or vaccine immunity won't be anywhere nearly as severely affected (e.g. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6530/741)
The big problem with "natural" infection and response is that you have no idea what your body locked onto and made you immune to.
For example, my mother-in-law had measles 4 times. Her immune system clearly doesn't lock to the same piece as everybody else's.
For Covid, most of the time the lock point is the spike protein, but sometimes it's not. And sometimes it's different pieces of the spike protein. Some of which mutate quite quickly.
So, your immune system is spending a lot of energy "training" to lots of different pieces of the virus. That's what it's supposed to do.
But it's specificity isn't anywhere near as good as the vaccine which is engineered to give you a response to exactly what seems to be the most relevant chunk of the spike protein.
Of course, if the virus mutates that spike protein area, the specificity is useless. However, if that section of the spike protein mutates, the virus also gets a lot less problematic as it seems like it won't be able to bind to the ACE receptors.
Jump to the 5 min mark. Dude explains some other stuff that works but is being suppressed.
For reference, I’m pro vaccine, but not one that hasn’t been tested for 10 years. Especially not for a disease that has a 99.99% survival rate in my age range. I’m appalled that anyone with an opinion (who’s educated!) can’t share that opinion, they’ve been banned.
For reference, I have a minor in bioengineering and read papers on this stuff. My wife works in genetics and I’ve assisted on and off. This virus and the vaccines are still active areas of research and what the NIH, CDC, WHO, etc act as fact is in fact just an unproven and likely correct in some and incorrect in other respects for virtually everything — from origin of disease to vaccines. We haven’t had enough time to study.
That being said, stop talking about vaccines when you’re developing the Linux kernel
Additionally, that guy saying "there are great alternative treatments but they've been suppressed!" doesn't mean it's true. I've seen neither evidence of this effectiveness nor evidence of suppression of this effectiveness, so not really sure what you expect people who care about demonstrable facts to do with that information.
Regarding the mechanism. Inflammation, we are not 100% sure where and what cells the mRNA is injected into and the spike proteins themselves have risk. Further, you’re training the body to attack these proteins... in the case of the second shot, those proteins are being produced inside your cells and being released, are we sure you won’t have an autoimmune response? We know the second shot reports the highest rate of issues. Where do spike proteins accumulate after they’re created? Etc etc
I’m not saying I know, I’m saying for most vaccines we wait 10 years because there’s the unknowns. Covid19 has very minimal risks and for those under 35 it’s less risky than the flu. In contrast based on VARES data your more likely (in that age range) to be hospitalized and die from the vaccine (depending on confounding factors)
https://vaers.hhs.gov/index.html
I’ve been bullish on people 65 and older getting the vaccine. Below that it doesn’t seem anywhere near justified.
Regarding suppression, families are having to resort to lawsuits to use safe drugs which have been shown effective in studies:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-elmhurst-hospi...
If you talk about these alternative drugs on social media your posts will be removed. Try it, post how you should try one of these drugs alongside of the vaccine.. that’s suppression.
Qualified people agree that the vaccines save lives. People should get them. Unqualified people expressing their curiosity about the details is something like the guy in the backseat of a crashing car loudly wondering how brakes work. It's an interesting question, but now is not the time for it. If you aren't helping, keep it to yourself. And if you don't have any relevant knowledge or background in a related field, you should assume you aren't helping.
For simplicity's sake, your immune system has two main things of concern here: antibodies and memory cells (B and T). Antibodies are the short-term "find and kill invaders" proteins. They're looking for a particular antigen to attack and do so well, but they don't last very long. Memory cells are basically blueprints which stick around for much longer than the antibodies (some studies indicate for decades), so that if your body ever encounters those same antigens again it recognizes them much faster and starts pumping out the antibodies much faster as well.
So, why would a mRNA vaccine result in better long-term protection than COVID-19 itself? Well, the thinking here is that because an mRNA vaccine in this case only results in the creation of the singular spike protein, the antibodies created to fight off the invader are very focused, as they're only ever going to be looking for that one protein. In the same way, the memory cells your body creates will also be very focused. Your immune system post-vaccine is therefore very well adapted at targeting that particular protein/antigen (could be an amino acid that is part of the protein).
Meanwhile an immune system fighting off actual COVID-19 might be creating antibodies and memory cells that are targeting slightly different antigens, as the overall coronavirus has 29 different proteins your immune system could be looking at to find antigens. This could result in a little bit more "overlap". e.g. You have two antibodies each keyed to a different antigen. They both find the same sars-cov-2 target and bind to their two respective sites. They're now doing "redundant work". Additionally, any antibody which is targeting an antigen that is not the spike protein is probably going to be less effective (the spike protein was targeted for the vaccine because it accounts for most of the outer surface area of the virus, which obviously makes it the best target for antibodies which must "bind" to something).
tl;dr: mRNA vaccines might be more effective than natural immunity because they are creating tools which attack only the most targetable of sars-cov-2's proteins – the spike protein. Natural immunity might give a more "diverse" response, but this is unneeded and could actually hinder secondary response if it is creating tools which are less effective.
Are RNA vaccines going to work without having many side effects? From what we know now, yes. We may learn something from trying it large-scale, though. (Just today there was this article on HN about men suffering unexpected levels of heart complications.)
This leads to people who are "pro science" but have out-dated science. And many people, even those who want to "follow the science", have run out of time and energy to keep following the science. So they treat "science" as frozen in time, not as a process.
And then you have people with vested interests and/or political angles. That includes the vaccine makers, and at times may include the CDC.
All in all, sorting out the science has become a real bear on this particular issue. People get tired, and freeze at the position the science supported when they gave up tracking.
Isn't there some analogy with the immune system to be made here?
Anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers and the like function like an aggressor. They make bizarre, tiresome, persistent claims, and arguing with them earnestly is like going down a rabbit hole. Like some sibling comment said, anti-science people often dishonestly start their conversations by "asking questions" and wanting you to be "open minded", but spending time and energy on this is usually futile.
After a while, you (the "immune response" in this analogy) start taking the easy way out, no longer answering earnestly, just taking cheap shots at the flat-earther/anti-vaxxer, and just want them to shut up, stop spreading misinformation, and go away.
In the way of all this, the truth and the scientific method get simplified, dumbed down or outright destroyed, much like an out of control immune response may turn against your own body and harm it.
(I'm sure my analogy is flawed, but I kinda like it!)
Here's an analogy most people here should respond to: a family member asks, "you know about computers, why isn't my [insert some app or website] working?" Now, most of the time, do you think that they actually want the details? Even if many possible explanations leap to mind automatically, maybe it's some weird application that you've never heard of, and you really don't want to take the time at that moment to go figure it out for them. But generally, they're not asking for you to layer on the jargon and actually explain the nitty gritty details of why something isn't working, they just want you to make it work. Very seldom, sometimes that person really wants to absorb some real knowledge and learn. But that's not the common case by far.
So if most of us here are "computer people" to the lay public, then people working in many disparate fields of medical work are lumped together as "human body fixing people". Try to perspective take on what kinds of questions they usually get and from whom they usually get them.
For a large portion of the population, there is not much will to learn deeply about things. For them, science is surface level, and not much different from faith. We still need those people to "believe" in science even if they're never going to work hard to understand it, because the human animal hasn't changed that much in the past few thousand years, and people who are curious enough today to become scientists may well have been burned at the stake as witches by the same kind of people who are reflexively dogmatic today, and those doing the burning would have felt just as justified about protecting the public safety.
I get irritated with it too sometimes, and increasingly some entities like corporations are trying too hard to turn the act of science into a PR battle. It's extremely corrosive, because a lot folks know just enough to nod their heads at something that sounds good without checking whether it's a company pushing some really flaky "science" or real, solid research.
So please, ask smart questions, but also be careful where you sow doubt. Sometimes it's better to just hit the books if you really want to know something. We're not going to reach a state any time soon where everyone that claims to love science is actually going to love the act of methodically analyzing and questioning everything. We're probably going the other direction lately.
The official position of the government here in The Netherlands is that you can still spread the virus after being vaccinated [1]. If I recall correctly, this has been the official position internationally since the beginning.
Also, cases went down sharply during the same period last year in all Europe thanks to the weather and without vaccines. In the UK, which has a much higher vaccination rate than the EU, cases are currently rising.
Correlation is not causation.
[1] https://www.government.nl/topics/coronavirus-covid-19/visiti...
Unrelated question here - how are people actually consuming mailing lists like this? I always find these links difficult to read and have always assumed there much be some superior format, alternative typefaces for one.
But if you are not subscribed, then all the web ui's I've seen for mailing lists are painful to use.
It’s really annoying how many people think that because they are competent at a limited subset of discrete mathematics that people should care what they think about subjects where they are basically ignorant.
You do realize that medical science has been doing vaccines for a while now. Really, there's no reason to think that there are any long term side effects to the covid-19 vaccine. Medical scientists aren't reinventing the wheel with covid-19. They already have blue prints from other corona viruses to work off of. There's nothing experimental going on here.
It's also sad that when they actually need treatment in hospital the society (public health insurance) will still pay for the stupidity . They should at least be charged for it.
That's not really anti-vax, but an acquaintance died a couple weeks after getting vaccinated due to diabetes complications, and I've always wondered if this was the cause.
I don't think I should post this without pointing out that I'm strongly pro-vax, though. It was just surprising.
Knowing some of the people I look up to in the world are not complete and utter morons is cathartic.
I guess there is a reason to raise concerns about the novelty of the technique, if this is indeed the first time artificial mRNA is used on the general public.
No he doesn’t say that and is not true. mRNAs are “commands”. They encode proteins — each triplet (of nucleotides) on it will translate to one protein building block. They are semi-stable and are actively destroyed in the cell so they can only produce a few protein molecules. So injecting mRNA will give a temporary command to the cells to produce this protein so that the body can learn to defend agains them once they are released from cells.
> that the mRNA vaccines do is to add a dose their own specialized sequence that then makes your normal cell machinery generate that spike protein so that your body learns how to recognize it... your body now knows how to recognize and fight off a new foreign protein
So what happens if some faulty proteins are created from this process, any chance they then be used to build new cells and cause disorders?
I'm not on the "change genetic" argument anymore as I'm not sure what even defines that, just trying to understand the risks here.
And it is temporary because mRNA is constantly degrading — it is a must otherwise a cell would have no way to stop manufacturing a protein after giving out a command.
It says "low risk" of being integrated into the genome. Sounds like there is still a risk.
But my second paragraph here is about what would this cause theoretically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27468123
I will only respond to people who are serious. There is a section of the pro-vax crowd that is indeed scratching their head as to why there are some apparently intelligent people that they know are anti-vaxers. IMHO, they deserve an explanation.
Hopefully I come across as someone intelligent and sane.
Outside of the Linux kernel and version control, his opinions isn't worth the electrons used to transmit it.
Linux is not about vaccines either way.
All this off topic garden shed stuff needs to be shutdown in open source. And normal companies too if they want to prosper.
How does a credentialed person go off the rails so badly??
How many people who have never touched kernel source vaguely follow his antics?
Too many people have opinions about too many things.
In regards to COVID the folks managing the response are encouraging it. They’re using influencers and celebrities to “echo” their messages.
Heaven forbid we leave the influencers out of the loop and just go to the CDCs website.
Some people care about what Linus thinks about COVID. That terrifies me.
My second paragraph.
I have engaged many anti-vaxxers in different tones, and a polite tone usually does not resonate with them much because "political correctness" is perceived as a lack of authenticity.
Profanity and emotion resonates more with them, because that is the way you talk to people you trust.
Can someone with more knowledge comment on whether this is true for components of the vaccine that aren't just the mRNA bits? I am not sure, but I assume there are various other components that form the delivery vehicle for the vaccine, stabilize it for storage, and so on. What are the actual mechanisms for those to be 'gone from the body'?
The mRNA delivery system is about as close to "nothing" as you can get.
1. ALC-0312 2. ALC-0159 3. 1,2-Distearoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine 4. cholesterol 5. potassium dihydrogen phosphate 6. sodium chloride 7. disodium hydrogen phosphate dihydrate 8. sucrose 9. water
The first four are various lipids, used to build the lipid nanoparticles. The body can get rid of those the same way that it would get rid any other lipid.
The remaining excepients are just some salts and sugar.
Source: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
The m in mRNA stands for messenger.
I'm failing to find anything I consider to be a succinct explanation in layman's terms (other than the one in the piece under discussion: all that the mRNA vaccines do is to add a dose their own specialized sequence that then makes your normal cell machinery generate that spike protein so that your body learns how to recognize it.).
But from what I gather, mRNA vaccines basically inject your body with a coded recipe for how to manufacture the immune stuff it normally manufactures in reaction to an infection, only without having to first be infected. Not even with a dead version of the virus, as some vaccines use for trying to prompt the body to figure this out more safely than by actually catching the infection.
A few sources I looked at, without feeling satisfied with their explanations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messenger_RNA
https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/messenger-rna
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/translation-dna-to...
Edit: Thank you to everyone supplying a more accurate explanation in layman's terms. Much appreciated.
[1] https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/9160...
That’s not correct. The coded recipe is for covid’s spike proteins. Your body manufactures a bunch of those spike proteins and then has an immune response to them.
The mRNA in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines contains the instructions to make copies of just the spike protein from the outside of the virus. During the short lifetime of the mRNA, your body will follow these instructions and produce these spikes. Alone, this protein isn’t a virus and is pretty much inert.
Then, your body naturally recognizes this protein as a foreign substance and creates antibodies to attack it.
If the real virus enters your body later, your body will already have antibodies that recognize the spike and will immediately start fighting it off, faster than it normally would if you got infected without already having the antibodies.
It’s like a training program for your immune system.
Then next time around B-cells and T-cells are primed from all this target practice and its a lot easier, even if the neutralizing antibodies wane.
DNA -> RNA -> Protein
So the mRNA in the vaccine simply contains the instructions to produce a copy of the spike protein from the COVID-19 virus. When your body produces enough copies of that protein, your immune system takes notice that a foreign protein is floating around and begins the process to recognize and memorize it for future use. (that last part is super simplified).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_bio...
[2] https://biologydictionary.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Rib...
1. Cells contain different organelles that serve different functions.
2. One of the organelles is the Ribosome which exists outside of the nucleus (which contains and protects your DNA) and receives mRNA and tRNA inputs and outputs proteins.
3. The mRNA vaccines contain the RNA necessary for the ribosomes in your cells to manufacture the spike proteins of the virus. The spike proteins are treated as if they were the real deal because your body doesn’t know it is hollow, only that it must be a threat because it doesn’t belong. SARS-CoV-2 shows up with the same spike protein and runs smack dab into the middle of all the antibodies your body produced to target that specific type of threat with that specific spike protein having gone through a dry run before and SARS-CoV-2 gets slaughtered for its efforts.