India approves first DNA Covid vaccine

I think your premise is greatly flawed. The risk from getting a little piece of Covid mRNA is infinitesimal compared to the risk of getting Covid and having the whole genome replicated, all the proteins, and actually maybe dying to Covid or suffering long Covid after.

I don’t know of any risks that have been shown to be associated with the vaccine.

> if you don't analyse something over 10 years, you don't know its effect over 10 years

Yes, that is why long term studies are done. Vaccine as a methodology has been proven effective. Many diseases are non-existent now thanks to it.

My knowledge is limited with respect to COVID vaccines but if they are any thing like the vaccines developed for flu strains then they will not have any adverse impact.

>By using a variety of different vaccines all over the world the expression of humanity is that we are spreading the risk among various vaccine types or contracting COVID itself.

"spreading the risk among various vaccine types" could you elaborate on this?

If you've ever cut yourself in a non-sterile environment, then you have been exposed to thousands of times more genetic material and invading pathogens then a vaccine contains, bent on doing much more serious damage.

For some reason people worry about "what vaccines might do" but not "what the virus that invades your cells, co-opts the replication machinery, and then invades more cells uncontrolled" will do. The virus that literally did not exist in nature till 1.5 years ago when it started infecting humans and killing them.

Like it does not only produce more viruses either - that's the goal but it's a stochastic process. You also get filled with bits of viral RNA from sheared up viruses, or ones that run into an enzyme, or from viruses where the cell shuts down or dies early and it blows fragments of viral protein into your blood stream.

If you truly believe that you can wait out a few years without being at reasonable risk of getting COVID, you're logic isn't off. You are ultimately correct, we can't actually really know what the 5+ year side effects are until we actually witness them, though I believe the data at hand indicates that they should be long-term safe.

Pretty much any type of reasoning + data at hand would indicate that any type of "years past" risks that would occur with vaccines would also be present with COVID itself (especially along the inactivated virus and mRNA vaccine routes). And if the magnitude of the risks scale with exposure (they probably do), then getting straight up COVID would still yield higher long-term risk than getting vaccinated (and either successfully not getting infected, or getting infected).

Basically, if you really think your choice is between not getting COVID, and not getting COVID and getting vaccinated, then obviously not getting COVID at all yields the lowest possible risk. I would challenge anyone's risk assessment on thinking they can just... not get COVID over a 10 year window however.

Perhaps one change to your analogy is that the intention of these vaccines doesn't map well to new software into a distributed system. It's more like providing a specifically crafted input to a system. Long-term there is supposed to be no distinct "vaccine" sub-unit that you can point to in the human body, there's only the human bodies persisted long-term memory and response to a vaccine. I dunno if that's meaningfully changes your thinking at all, but maybe worth thinking about.

"So for a mostly self-interested individual in a rural area with a low chance of catching COVID, would it follow that the safest (but maybe selfish) bet is to wait many years?"

It would be fine strategy for Hepatatis B, for example, however delta COVID is so infectious that most people will get it, vaccinated or unvaccinated (with currently available vaccines). The only difference will be severity of the disease.

> Or is my premise or conclusion flawed, especially because I missing prerequisite knowledge?

One obvious flaw I can point out in your reasoning is that you are mixing tried and tested technology with new ones. While mRNA and DNA based COVID-19 vaccines are based on new technology and perhaps their long-term impact is not yet fully known or understood (and need to be studied), there are many other vaccines based on the older, more widely used and studied bio-technology (e.g. vaccines using inactivated virus). The older vaccine biotech have been studied for, and perfected over, more than half a century. So even if the efficacy of vaccines created with older tech maybe purportedly lower (not really) than the vaccines based on newer biotech, you can be relatively sure that they are safe.

Your concern about the long term impact of newer mRNA and DNA based vaccines may be justified. But that shouldn't extend to the vaccines based on the old, tried and tested and well-understood popular tech that has successfully been used in other older vaccines for decades now. (Yes, even the COVID-19 vaccines based on older biotech need to be studied. But because of the decades of data we already have, we can be reasonably predict that nothing biologically unexpected will happen. And so most of the long-term studies of these older biotech vaccines are more focused, with fewer parameters, to determine how long their efficacy lasts. With the newer mRNA and DNA vaccines though, the long-term study will have more parameters to study and more diligently observe if some thing unexpected may occur in the future.)

So all said and done, even if the prevalence of the epidemic is low in your rural area, it is much better and safer for you and your community to get vaccinated, than remain unvaccinated. It just takes one undetected case to spread it to others.

>Or is my premise or conclusion flawed, especially because I missing prerequisite knowledge?

Pharmaceutical-risk-based arguments aside, India is in a pretty bad spot COVID-wise. A massive proportion of the population is dirt poor (<$1/hr) and the broader society in general don't give a damn about their plight.

They cannot afford to lock down. If they do so, millions will starve to death.

They were literally begging, fighting and worse to get access to oxygen tanks earlier this year. The unlucky ones watched their parents and grandparents asphyxiate in their homes with no access to treatment of any kind.

If this stuff can be produced cheaply, locally and quickly, then it will be lapped up gratefully by the hundreds of millions of poor people who would be dead and buried before they got the opportunity to receive Pfizer or Moderna.

What could or might happen 10 years down the track will be the least of their worries if we see another flare up.

It seems the newer variants like delta are more contagious yet vastly less lethal, so if it continues this trend then yes, we're past the optimal time period for vaccinations.

It is helpful to consider the four prior coronaviruses that are in widespread circulation among humans.

They are believed to have causes pandemics when they first crossed over into humans, but like SARS-CoV-2 they caused very little death in children even though children are easily infected. Once someone caught them and survived, that person had some immunity. Immunity against reinfection fades, but immunity against serious illness lasts longer.

So what happened with them is that you got a terrible pandemic that did a number on adults but while widely infecting children didn't harm them much. People who caught it and survived would get reinfected as their immunity against infection faded, but would not get seriously ill, so the pandemic would eventually end with everyone eventually having been infected, and the virus regularly in circulation. Everyone gets infected every year or so, for the most part getting only mildly ill at worst.

Children born after this point all catch these viruses when they are young. They don't yet have any immunity, but these viruses only very rarely cause serious illnesses in children. They then get reinfected every year or so just like adults, but now they have the immunity against serious illness too so remain fine when they get older.

Now, hundreds of years after those viruses crossed over and caused their pandemics they are so routine that we generally don't specifically track them and don't even have a specific name for the illnesses they cause. We just lump the illness in with the illnesses caused by several other respiratory viruses and call it the "common cold". Those four coronaviruses are responsible for about 20% of the common colds in the US.

It looks like SARS-CoV-2 is heading toward becoming another common cold virus. Look at infection rates, hospitalization rates, and death rates by age group (US, through May 2021, rates per 100k):

    Age  Infect  Hosp  Death
   0-17     37k   287      0.5
  18-49     44k  1100     25
  50-64     32k  2600     85
  65+       22k  5200   1140

Children get it, but very rarely die from it. For comparison, the death rate for children 0-12 per year in car accidents is a little over 1.3 per 100k. For kids, COVID is about as risky as taking about 50% more car trips.

If it is indeed heading down the path of the other four then it is extremely likely that you will get COVID-19 at some point, despite living in a rural area. Vaccination makes it so that when you do get your first COVID-19 infection, it will almost certainly act more like a second or third infection. Without vaccination, you go into that first infection with your immune system totally unprepared.

As far as the risks of vaccination go, yes, there is a lot we don't know about how the body works. (Ask me sometime about the mysterious lump that showed up on my ass one day, baffled all the doctors that looked at it, and a few years later just went away on its own).

But we do know a lot about vaccination in general. We've been doing that a long time. For all vaccinations so far if there was going to be a side effect it showed up within something like 6 months.

For new vaccines for new diseases the things that go into them are all things that have been well tested before, except for whatever is specific to the new disease. In the case of the mRNA vaccines, that new thing is the mRNA, but mRNA is broken down in cells in a few days.

All the COVID-19 vaccines in use in the US and Europe have been given to enough people long enough ago that we can be confident that if there are any side effect that we do not yet know about it is because they are extremely rare rather than because they take longer to develop.

Bottom line: Waiting it out perhaps made sense when it seemed like there was a chance we could eradicate SARS-CoV-2, but too many people were not willing to do what that it would have taken to do that. With it heading toward becoming the fifth common cold coronavirus that is no longer the case. Get vaccinated with one of the vaccines that has been widely deployed for at least six months.

I know several people that almost died from the vaccination I'm one of them and I never heard anything about any problems with the vaccination until I had problems and that seems to be the normal. The behavioral health center forced me to get it never asked me never told me just jabbed me and then all the sudden I had a ton of tubes and hoses coming out of me. I'll get reparations if I have to get them myself. Hardly any doctor will even entertain the fact that the vaccine did damage to my body. The few that do are baffled, even though I'm not the only patient they're seeing with the same exact problems that won't go away.

But not particularly great compared to Covishield (Oxford-AZ) and Covaxin which are the main vaccines in use in India. The fancy needle free injector is almost certainly going to be more expensive than a normal syringe and will make logistics more difficult. While the thermal stability is great, I don't think it will be a game changer. The one thing it has going for it is that it can be given to children above 12.

Very cool if the efficacy numbers turn out to be true. No reason to doubt them, but a few of the vaccines have turned out to have wildly worse efficacy numbers in the real world compared to what was reported by the manufacturer. 28K trial pool (including children) is good, let's see if the numbers hold up over time.

Vaccine that's injection free?

DNA is remarkably stable. I’m not sure if it’s true, but I’ve heard reports of separating it from proteins by boiling the stuff, which will certainly destroy the proteins but apparently leaves DNA largely intact.

The second it’s inside your body the enzymes in your bloodstream will start tearing it apart, but that’s also true for practically anything else you can inject. Until then, refrigeration is far more than enough.

Coaxin is a transitional vaccine already approved in India (I took it). But yes they haven’t got EUA in US and WHO still hasn’t approved it yet.

I too see some corporate competitive politics behind Novavax - Serum Institute of India (SII), one of the largest manufacturer of vaccines in the world, had been licensed to manufacture Novavax in India last year, but apparently the US administration held it up by preventing exports of the raw material with their "US first" policy. That's kind of understandable, but even in the US, I don't think Novavax is so easily available (or perhaps it is but the US media is excessively giving attention to only the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna?). Even recently, SII said they are in talks to start production of Novavax this year, but it's still not available. It's not clear what is going on behind the scene with this particular vaccine.