One bad autoimmune reaction from a poorly engineered vaccine and the whole society will boycott the mRNA vaccines forever after. Safety is higher priority to ongoing viability than speed.
I have no doubt that some kind of safety-related trials must be run on boosters and that they will be run, but they will likely only take weeks in the future, not months.
We need just one Jesse Gelsinger to shut the whole thing down.
We now have a few hundred million people who got mRNA vaccine and had no trouble. I don't think that even after a death, mRNA would be completely toast. It has already proven its merit.
J.G.'s death involved an experimental modified adenovirus (the same family of viruses used as the vector for several non-mRNA COVID vaccines: Johnson & Johnson/Janssen, Astrazenica/Oxford, and Sputnik V).
If a new vaccine is made by taking a gene sequence from a virus protein that's already in the wild, and packaging it into a delivery mechanism (LNP) that's already approved for another vaccine...
If there are any strange reactions to the new spike protein, that would also be caused by the wild virus spike protein, so it's an obvious competing harms situation where the vaccine should be approved, at least so long as the pandemic is ongoing.
I'm 1000% pro mRNA vaccines and pro covid vaccines, but they still need to be tested.
For fuck's sake, I'm not saying do no testing. I would assume they do basic checks, first in humanized animals, then using bioassays to try to detect all sorts of problems including antibody cross-reactivity with a wide variety of human cells. I'm also not against a preliminary limited human trial, with bloodwork checked after a few weeks to try to see if the assays missed anything obvious.
Short of that, what do you want them to do? We can't wait years to see if people develop symptomatic auto-immune problems. If we even wait 3-6 months for each new protein, the time advantage offered by mRNA or adenovirus vaccine tech is blown, or at least reduced to the point where there's no ability to react quickly to changing dominant viral strains in a pandemic, or new outbreaks of known diseases.
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about or why the GP comment mentioned an autoimmune disease specifically. mRNA vaccines express specific proteins whereas the virus expresses entire viral molecules. A novel protein expression could cause an autoimmune disease because the novel proteins couls cause the immune system to attack the cells producing the isolated proteins, a problem you wouldnt have with cells producing entire viral bodies.
The immune system doesn't generate antibodies to an entire virus. It generates antibodies to specific immunogenic proteins or parts of proteins.
If the spike protein resulting from a vaccine causes an immune response that generates antibodies to the spike protein and oops, also some endogenous human protein, that's autoimmune disease.
If you get infected by a virus with the same spike protein, your body will generate antibodies to the same spike protein and also cause autoimmune disease if the antibodies are cross-reactive.
If cells expressing exogenous immunogenic proteins triggered autoimmune disease[1], even the existing wild-type (alpha variant) vaccines would cause autoimmune disease. Presumably that's not happening. The immune system may attack those cells expressing the exogenous vaccine-coded spike proteins, but normal immune systems down-regulate it well enough that it doesn't cause major problems. It would be a sign of a broken immune system if it decided to initiate a long-term attack of human cells just because they once expressed an immunogenic protein. If it did that, any virus would cause autoimmune disease.
Please tell me you work in a field related to immunology and you have a subtler point that I'm missing, and that you didn't just create an account to criticize a point you misunderstood yourself.
[1] to an unacceptable degree. Obviously, things can go wrong with the immune system and almost anything could, if you're unlucky enough, trigger an immune reaction leading to autoimmune disease eventually.
Pushing out a vaccine that causes harm, even if it's substantially less than the virus it protects against, is asking for a lot of trouble.
Harm ratio = harm caused by vaccine / harm caused by virus
Exposure ratio = projected people who would be infected by the virus / projected people who would take the vaccine
In an airborne, high-R_0 pandemic situation, the exposure ratio is high enough that only one of two cases apply:
1) The potential health problems caused by small-scale exposure to the spike protein alone is relatively small compared to problems caused by infection, in which case vaccinate everyone. This is the current situation.
2) The potential health problems caused by small-scale exposure to the spike protein are significant (for example, hypothetical antibody cross-reactivity with a normal human protein, as mentioned in a parallel comment), in which case obviously don't vaccinate everyone, but lock down the world for a few weeks since having much of the world suffer autoimmune disease is untenable.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-probing-moderna-vaccine-...
The spike protein is not necessarily a problem, but both NLP and viral vectors have never been rolled at the current scale. TTS seems to be particular to viral vectors, Myocarditis/Pericarditis more so to NLP.
This is like comparing my house to the Willis Tower and saying, "they're literally changing nothing except the blueprints."
mRNA codes for proteins. Coding for a different protein will produce different effects in the body. Most will probably be harmless. If a vaccine codes for a protein too similar to proteins that already exist, that vaccine will produce autoimmune disease.