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Comment by macksd | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely agree with everything Linus says here. But I'm almost equally concerned that there's an awful lot of people on the pro-science bandwagon who don't actually support science, but simply don't tolerate dissent or questioning, and that's unscientific and potentially harmful too.

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.

View on HN

There are a LOT of anti-vaxxers who disingenuously couch their advocacy as "I'm only asking questions". It's no surprise when you've seen a 10:1 ratio of bad actors to good (or worse), one might get a little exasperated.

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.

> There are a LOT of anti-vaxxers who disingenuously couch their advocacy as "I'm only asking questions"

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

I’ve been accused of this before and it’s fucking bullshit.

I have been accused of it in another context, so I sympathize with your frustration, but this concept is not bullshit. It is important that we have a taxonomy of fallacies and troll tactics because that makes it easier to detect them. Regrettably, it also makes it trivial for bad-faith actors to just accuse everyone they dislike of some named troll tactic. The cure is not to stop using names for bad behaviors. Rather, we should have rigor when accusing someone of bad behavior: do not just name the behavior, but describe why the name fits.

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.

Even if you know for certain that someone is an anti-vaxxer, disregarding their opinion/question by accusing them of sealioning is a fallacy.

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.

Sealioning is to good faith questioning as DDoS is to genuine web traffic.

I think you misread what I said. Check out the end of the first paragraph, as I think it mostly says the same thing you said.

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.

> Even if you know for certain that someone is an anti-vaxxer, disregarding their opinion/question by accusing them of sealioning is a fallacy.

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.

My evaluation is that the original usage of the "sealioning" accusation was indeed as a generic dismissive, and its application was dishonest as well; I don't accept the term as a well-founded descriptor of troll behavior in the first place.

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.

[1] http://wondermark.com/c/2014-09-19-1062sea.png

I get accused of something like this daily.

The internet is a fun place.

Were you saying something racist? I'm just asking.

Come on, really!? In a discussion about how trolls use "I am just asking", you decided that doing the same is a good idea. I am not op, but I have been accused of sealioning in the exact opposite direction: I was defending some curriculum based on ideas from critical race theory.

Edit: Well, as the comment below alluded to, I probably missed a pretty obvious piece of sarcasm... This is certainly funny in hindsight.

One of the difficult parts of text based debate and discussion is that it's impossible to determine from vocal inflection, tone of voice and method of delivery whether someone is genuinely a fool, simply cosplaying as one, being sarcastic or facetious, etc.

Oh, I'm definitely, genuinely a fool. For ever trying to get a point across on the internet.

Sorry it wasn't clear. I tried to be as extreme as possible to avoid being taken seriously. (Although I guess these days that works the other way.)

You have fallen afoul of Poe's Law.

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.

/s takes all the fun out of it. If someone initially thinks I'm serious, someone else gets an opportunity to explain a joke, which is a rare pleasure.

But of course we all know confronting someone directly about their opinion always works.

You are all good! I feel like such a fool :D

They're not the exact opposite.

It is bullshit. It helps to create an atmosphere where you can't ask questions or debate.

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.

I like your idealism, but there are plenty of tactics that would make even the most knowledgeable person look like a fool, because knowledge and oratory skills are completely separate: my favorite example is the gish gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

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.

I don't know what your experience has been, but I would wager good money that nearly every anti-vaccine person I have encountered has nearly zero capacity to have their opinion changed by properly formatted scientific evidence and experts presented in a rational, logical way. They are firmly set in their bubble of conspiracy theory rhetoric. You could literally bring an expert panel of eight virologists and epidemiologists in front of them, face to face, and they would still stick to their position. In summary, a real waste of time.

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.

The only (limited) success I've had moving emotionally-held models of belief is specifically exploring what signals would be present if the competing models were incorrect. By focusing on falsifiability and reconciling it with reality, I've _sometimes_ managed to have my counter-party downgrade their argument from scientific surety to human behavioural expections in some key ambiguous situation.

One of the thousand unfalsifiable “troll” accusations.

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.

This presumes that anyone on the Internet owes a troll their time and effort to discern between a fool, an extremist, a shitposter, a troll or a misguided but earnest individual who shares a genuinely held but scientifically false opinion.

It does not such thing.

In fact, by saying there is no way to differentiate, it implies the distinction is not that relevant.

It doesn't presume that.

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.

That's fine- whether or not their question is disingenuous, it's almost always a reasonable question that has been asked and answered by researchers, or that has been asked and not been able to be answered (e.g. what are the long term effects of mRNA vaccines?).

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".

I’m having a hard time believing you’ve met worse than a 10:1 ratio, with respect to interest in vaccines, of “bad actors” to “good actors”.

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.”

There is a major biasing factor; it's trivial to ask a question like "Have you looked at the data in VAERS that shows tens of thousands of adverse vaccine reactions??" It's not so trivial to answer the question in a way that explains how VAERS works, and why this conclusion is incorrect. This is the same with many possible questions.

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.

> 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.

> There are a LOT of anti-vaxxers who disingenuously couch their advocacy as "I'm only asking questions".

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?

I agree, and that's why I try to answer questions with friendly answers. It wasn't so much that I was advocating for dismissing the question, I was just trying to explain why experts have gotten really, really tired, and might do so.

(Also: My local county facebook group has no shortage of very vindictive, angry, and seeming inexhaustible anti-vaxxers.)

Most of the Q-idiots are of the same mindset. "Go do the research" is a common phrase.

Is that a book?

Yes: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/How+the+Immune+System+Works%2C+6...

Yes. https://www.amazon.com/How-Immune-System-Works-dp-111954212X...

Why would you expect a nurse in a COVID ward and an anesthesiologist to have strong answers on this question? Vaccinology is laboratory science. My son works in a vaccinology lab; as far as I know, nobody there has been to med school.

I just happen to know a lot of anesthesiologists and they went to all of med school - I didn't. They were easy to ask and know more than me. The first nurse, again, more medical education than me to begin with, was very interested in the science beyond his work and was obviously briefed on the situation at work as it changed. I just figured it might have been more common knowledge than it turned out to be.

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.

It's a little bit like asking a random software engineer on the street on how GPU drivers work internally: they're unlikely to have an actual informed opinion.

Worse, maybe even an ill-informed opinion since they might feel like they should know how GPU drivers work since they're in the industry and start spouting off smart sounding techno-babble. I know a few nurses myself, they're not a good source for medical advice but people trust them anyway. Hell, my mom does clerical work in a hospital, and people ask her for medical advice.

The alternative here is ignoring the software engineer, and instead asking the crazy person on the corner who’s shouting at the sky and wearing his underwear on his head.

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.

No, I think the alternative here is asking vaccinologists.

The alternative I was referring to is wherever Enrico Weigelt got his information, which certainly was not a vaccinologist.

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...

I have some more questions (serious), can I have the number of one of these 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.)

> I have some more questions (serious)

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.

Yeah I've done that two or three times about different things. One time I got an answer, the other (reporting an outdated page) an automated reply five days later that they're too busy. I don't expect they have time for in-depth questions about research that's not even a month old. Thanks for the tip though!

Sorry, I didn’t read all of of the original comment earlier.

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.

Except here's the thing: I do know how GPU drivers work internally so assuming I don't when someone wants to know isn't helpful, and I did end up getting referred to a helpful answer by one of the medical friends who had a connection and could make an introduction. I can't believe this is being dismissed as a moronic approach when it actually worked and I just asked in casual conversation with friends - all of whom were actually intrigued by the question as well and wanted to know the answer when I eventually learnt it.

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.

But compared to someone who isn't in CS, they'd at least understand that GPUs exist, might be able to speculate on what's needed, and have an idea of who to 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.

I think the quality of the speculation you'd get from a random software developer on the design of GPU drivers is, in fact, probably a good model for the quality of vaccinology speculation you'd get from a random anesthesiologist.

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.

Probably the person that is producing the vaccine is not the same person that is running the clinical trials and it's not the same person that is calculation the statistics and writing the final paper.

That's a reasonable start if you want to know and the best alternative is to ask a random person who doesn't know anything about computers at all.

More like asking an microelectronics engineer how 3 phase motors work. She probably took a course in school although it may have been awhile and it's not her specialty.

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.

They still know more than I do, an average Joe who makes and sells socks for a living, though.

Its actually a perfect example. But for the opposit argument. A random software engineer has a much deeper understanding about the inner workings of GPU then the average non-software engineer. So its a perfect analogy for asking a nurse about a health related topic. He probably doesn't know much about the immune system but he definetly knows more then the average population.

Really? :D I highly doubt that, as I personally did dabble with a bit of OpenGL and still know jackshit about GPUs. People are likely to overestimate their knowledge on things they know little about.

But there's no reason to know they don't know that as a layman.

I think there's a bit of difference between asking a medical professional in person and asking a generalized audience over social media. Asking "do we know if immunity from the vaccine lasts longer" that

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.

People who went to medical school may not know how to assimilate, read, synthesise and make conclusions about scientific literature. Yes, the average social media person wouldn't either but better ask the scientists.

They may not have the answers, but you would think they would have a better idea of where to look than someone with no medical experience at all.

People think that, but there’s basically nothing in nursing or anesthesia training that’s gonna deal much with the nitty gritty details of vaccines and how they’re developed and tested.

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.)

There's also nothing in medical doctor training, as well. Or in fact in most specialist training - e.g. my father-in-law who's an ObGyn couldn't you how an mRNA vaccine works beyond what he learns from reading the same material I can - it's not a relevant part of his training beyond "they work and here's the list you should be giving babies as soon as possible".

Medical professions, the ones you interact with as a patient are essentially highly specialized mechanics for the human body.

It’s a starting point though. How often do you get to your answers immediately without having to go through some dead ends and wrong turns? That’s how learning works.

> It’s a starting point 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.

Everyone seems to be missing the part of the story where I actually got connections and introductions to others in the medical field and got an answer, and the part where an anesthesiologist actually gave me what turned out to be a pretty good guess at the answer because they DO understand biology in general better than me and hey do have to learn a lot about the immune system even if they specialty isn't vaccines.

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.

I didn't miss it, but it proves my point.

> 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.

Why do you think that? Perhaps they might have access to some paywalled medical journals, but other than that I don't see why they would have a better idea of where to look than an interested and scientifically literate person who hasn't been to medical school or practiced medicine.

In the end, I got my answer because somebody in the medical field made personal introductions until I got an actual expert working in the field. So clearly it's not such a moronic approach.

> But I'm almost equally concerned that there's an awful lot of people on the pro-science bandwagon who don't actually support science, but simply don't tolerate dissent or questioning, and that's unscientific and potentially harmful too.

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.

True. Perhaps dissent is a poor choice of words here, because I was never against the vaccine - I would default to supporting a vaccine. More - I didn't get why everyone was so optimistic about them and asked to know more. Even that was blasphemy to a few people - but ironically not to the people who are medical experts in SOME way.

> but ironically not to the people who are medical experts in SOME way.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

I think it's unfair to characterize people who are skeptical about mRNA and liquid nanoparticle technology as anti-vax, but this is what people (including Linus) are doing.

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...

Yet people like this who just don't want to inject anything that hasn't been studied for at least a couple of years, don't coach our opinions in anti-vaxx language. Stuff like "new species" is ridiculous and masks the actual rise of surveillance totalitarianism which uses Covid as an excuse.

As far as I’m aware, there is no direct experimental evidence over a long duration as the virus is novel and the vaccines new, but for now we have this: Antibody Persistence through 6 Months after the Second Dose of mRNA-1273 Vaccine for Covid-19[1]

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.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2103916

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

It's also not like this is the first vaccine, or even the first mRNA vaccine. So we have analogs and precedents we can use. My understanding is that was heavily used in the clinical trials before roll out -- an understanding from previous vaccines that if someone majority were to go wrong it would go wrong in the first few months, and not 5+ years later.

> So we have analogs and precedents we can use.

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.

> 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.

every molecule has different effects. Change the wrong amino acid residue in insulin and you get something that hyperactivates IGF-1 pathway and causes cancer, which you won't see in the short term. You can't be sure that any given vaccine won't accidentally activate an oncogene, until you do the study, and such a study would necessarily take years, or decades.

> there's an awful lot of people on the pro-science bandwagon who don't actually support science, but simply don't tolerate dissent or questioning

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).

Ever since the pandemic started, useful information was few and far between. I know that numbers scare people, but so much of this is basic risk assessment. The facts are extremely pro-vaccination, but good luck finding them!

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.

Typically a vaccine is aborted if it kills just a single person during its clinical trial.

There is also the issue of estimating very rare events. You need significantly more data to do so with any reasonable accuracy.

9 out of 10 times when someone claims people have been dogmatically unwilling to consider ideas that run counter to scientific establishment, those people were just responding to profoundly insane anti-science ideas (earth is flat, covid is fake,global warming is just the sun etc). Their responses may seem glib, because they don't feel the ideas are deserving of serious discussion, but usually they understand things just fine.

Let’s not forget microchip tracking and Jewish globalist overlords.

Originally it was about storing the vaccination history on the person's skin:

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.

> 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.

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!)

For the curious who were left a little lacking in an answer to OP's question:

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.

A couple of comments:

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.

I think part of the problem is that the science keeps changing as we find out more. Were masks going to help with Covid? No, then yes, then kind of drifting back toward maybe no.

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.

I get what you're saying, but the logical conclusion of all this is that no one can know anything at all unless they're an expert in that specific thing. But that's why we have experts in the first place - so that we can determine what is most likely to be true without necessarily needing to deeply understand it first hand. So sure, perhaps there's some small chance that the vaccines don't work the way they're supposed to or the earth is flat. But "expert consensus is X" is a pretty good heuristic for "X is correct." And while I'm not defending random trolls on Facebook, this does happen to be a pretty sensitive subject right now because there is a pretty significant proportion of the population who won't get the vaccine precisely because they don't believe in expertise.

The average pro-science person on Facebook primarily is approached by an anti-science person looking for public confrontation. I didn't see your post, but I'd imagine looking around you could find many questions similar to yours being asked in bad faith. While I agree your question _isn't_ bad faith, the surface level hallmarks are there. Question about the expedited testing process, context includes a reason to worry about safety if there isn't a scientific answer, then concluded by anecdotes of stumped medical professionals as if to give credibility to the concerns. I'm aware that a close read of this post shows you have a genuine question, but I can also see why it blends in well in a sea of "But we don't know the vaccine is safe" posts.

You are right, not tolerating questioning is unscientific and harmfull. Asking questions is the one way how you can learn things and also, I find it extremely useful for myself to answer scientific questions. Becauses it forces yourself to review the matter at hand, sort out your own thoughts about the problem and refine them to a point where you can deliver a satisfying answer. Often enough that leads to deeper insights.

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.

> 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?

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)

If you have academic curiosity about that vaccines that's fine, but it is irresponsible to be voicing that in a way that could discourage people from getting a vaccine in the middle of a global health emergency.

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.

I see what you mean and was wondering the same myself, but I'm not convinced it's really for the best to say we should not be asking questions and apply self-censorship as a general rule during some period that lasts multiple years.

Most of the times I've seen those ~6 months numbers being quoted, they were lower bounds. We have 6 months of data saying that immunity lasts at least this long.

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.

Why are you expecting your nurse and anesthesiologist friends to answer questions about mrna technology and then taking it to mean something when they can't answer? That's like reading a paper about an advancement in compiler parsing technology asking an average Software Developer who has spent the last 3 years of his career doing React apps to answer detailed and specific questions about ambiguities in the said paper?

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 didn't take it to mean something that they didn't know answer. But as relative experts in the medical field, they considered it a good and valuable question.

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.

The thing is, any random person can be a genuine skeptic by simply having a lack of expertise in the subject. It’s much more interesting to hear from s skeptic that is more than a layman, otherwise we’d just be inundated with skeptics.

So my hypothesis is that groups of experts, or expert-adjacent, that are used to dealing with the public pelting them with questions and then ignoring them anyways, will be prone to shooting down smart, good faith questions too.

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.

> and was wondering why we expected the immunity after the vaccine to last longer than natural immunity.

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.

If you read Linus's post then it seems that no mRNA sequence (not necessarily a vaccine) can ever do harm when injected into the body, but I doubt that is the case. I hope someone who is knowledgeable about the subject can explain whether that is true or not.

Natural mRNA sequences tend to contain uracil, which the immune system is not a fan of (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S152500161...). The innate immune system generally attacks extracellular mRNA because of this. The mRNA in vaccines are specially modified to bypass the immune system and be taken into cells, at which point they will be translated into spike proteins and be expressed on the cell’s surface. In conjunction with an adjuvant, the immune system will recognize this as a threat and begin producing antibodies.

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.

Sure there is potential for harm. Most mRNAs just tell your cells how to make certain proteins, and there are tons of harmful proteins. You could be instructing your cells to make potent poisons, or instructing them to make all of the proteins necessary for an entire functional virus.

But the person he's responding to is citing methods of harm that aren't realistic.

I only got that he was arguing it won't make permanent changes to our genome, which was the claim he was replying to, and he's correct. The spike protein is damaging to cells when present at all, but still very apparently much less dangerous when exposed via vaccine than an actual infection. And, as you know, cells die and get replaced all the time. I think people who are aware of it sometimes gloss over how the spike protein does some damage simply because they don't want to stoke unreasonable fears.

No, he said that (in general) mRNA is flushed from your system within days and that (in specific) these vaccines don't permanently alter your DNA. That's nowhere near claiming that "mRNA can't ever do harm."

It is unclear to me (having just re-read Linus's post) where you see the claim that an mRNA cannot do harm. He says it cannot be incorporated into the genome, which is true of the Covid vaccine RNAs but not necessarily true in general (one could inject the RNA of a retrovirus). But the Covid19 vaccine mRNA simply makes the spike protein and (I'm sure they checked) does not get incorporated into the genome.

TL;DR you heard claims of vaccines' prophylactic effect lasting for years, from somewhere unnamed, and you correctly heard from people in the medical field that no one has any idea of how long it'll last, we're barely 6 months into have a sizable cohort to analyze this with in the US, which itself is far ahead of most of the world. Another massive factor is we have no idea how fast the virus will mutate.

Edit: oh, the irony of going -3 for this comment on this article...what's wrong people, lay it on me

> Another massive factor is we have no idea how fast the virus will mutate.

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!

We have a fairly good idea about how it will mutate actually. COVID is probably one of the most heavily studied and sequenced viruses ever, and a lot of research has been published on likely mutagenic pathways.

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.

We do have a fairly good idea, but certainly not enough to describe it's exact relationship to exactly how long we can except vaccines to last, to OP's concern :)

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.

Do you have anything on the Astra-Zenaca vaccine and how well it works against the do called "South-African" variant. There was a story that they'd stopped a trial because the results were so bad. Do we have any harder data?

Yes, Astra-Zeneca has been shown to be repeatedly poor against variants, a big story in the UK right now is whether the increase in cases and sense of being behind the US is due to gov't overly committing to a shoddy vaccine, or if it's variants burning through unvaccinated populations.

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.

Astra-Zeneca is not an mRNA vaccine.

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 gish gallop'd me through the floor by answering, yet again, as if I claimed something I hadn't. You should be ashamed for yourself, the very intent you had to better inform people was defeated by you.

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 meant some actual links to some actual data...

I don't know why I have to also do the Googling of the terms you mentioned as well as telling you what the results say.

You don't have to do anything at all that might assist anyone else. But without support it's just like "your opinion, man." ;-) And difficult for anyone to act on in any meaningful way.

https://americasvoice.news/video/DHUF0DZxs4KXyGX

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

I too have degrees in bioengineering, and I'm interested: given the function of an mRNA vaccine, by what mechanism do you think it would be possible for the cure to be worse than the disease in this case? Said another way, if you are guaranteed to either get COVID-19 or an mRNA vaccine, would you really prefer to get COVID-19? If so, what are you worried about in the vaccine that SARS-CoV-2 does not have?

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.

I’ve had covid19, wasn’t a big deal, more mild than the flu I had the year prior. In fact, half the people I know got covid19. The only people I know who ended up in the hospital were a couple of family members who were vaccinated.

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.

What exactly do you think is happening when you get SARS-CoV-2? Do you think your cells are not taking viral mRNA and using it to make proteins? That is exactly what a virus does – it hijacks certain parts of your body that don't know any better to do its bidding. That protein is going to be produced by your body whether you get the virus or you get the vaccine. The difference is that with the vaccine the spike protein is all your body is producing (and a limited amount at that), while with the real virus your body is contending with 29 proteins that can work together in concert.

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