Comment by LurkingPenguin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LurkingPenguin | Hacker News Reader

> For some people, it’s not so much the known risks that have them worried as the unknown. They ask, What if the mRNA vaccines alter our DNA, threatening our health far in the future? Will they affect our bodies in other, as yet undiscovered, ways? After all, some say, this is brand-new technology, and the F.D.A. has only fully approved the Pfizer vaccine.

> As it turns out, though, mRNA technology isn’t especially new. Scientists have been developing it since the nineteen-nineties.

A lot of the anti-vaxxer claims about mRNA vaccines are incredulous, but this common approach to dismissing concerns about them is a bit disingenuous and not very convincing.

Yes, mRNA technology has been in development for decades. So what? We went from having 0 mRNA vaccines in use to injecting hundreds of millions of people around the world with them all at once.

The sales pitch: if enough people get vaccinated, we'll stop the spread of the virus and life can return to normal.

The reality: people fully vaccinated less than a year ago are becoming infected, with the data showing clearly in the case of Delta that vaccinated people have similar viral loads to unvaccinated people and can spread the virus to others too. Now we're being told that we'll have to have booster shots, perhaps as soon as every 5-6 months, something that we don't do for any other disease.

I'm fully vaccinated with Pfizer and not particularly concerned about the risk of undiscovered long-term side effects, but to pretend that what we're doing really isn't novel is far from convincing and I think arguments along these lines are having the opposite of the intended effect.

There's one really simple, mechanical principle at work here. If you get an mRNA shot your body will generate a snippet of spike protein which your immune system will learn to attack and destroy. If you get a live sars2-cov virus, your body will also generate that protein, but orders of magnitude more of it and without automatically ceasing generation once the original mRNA breaks down... because the virus generates more mRNA. Your immune system will also learn to attack it but by the time it does the virus may be dozens of generations of exponential growth in which means there is simply so much to attack by that point that you will never generate enough antibodies before it overwhelms you.

The only argument for not getting the vaccine would be if you thought you had a better than average chance of never encountering the live virus. If given a choice between a vax and the live virus, no sane person would choose the live virus.

So everything else here is BS. People don't want to get the vaccine because they're scared. I understand that. But the probability of them encountering the virus is so high that taking the vaccine is clearly orders of magnitude less risky than not doing so, since in both cases you almost certainly will end up with the spike protein in your system and the only decision you really have is whether that will be self-administered and self-limiting, or wild and replicating uncontrolledly.

It's not really that simple. First of all, "the orders of magnitude" claim is not supported by anything I've seen, care to provide your source? Then there is an issue of what cells are affected. We know that the virus binds only to a certain receptor, which exists only on some cells. What about the vaccine's "lipid particles", do they bind to receptors at all? I also could not find any reliable information on these particle mechanism of action, which I imagine is natural as this is the trade secret of the vaccine manufacturers so we don't know if these affect the same cells the virus does. I for one rather sacrifice a few billion of epithelial cells to the virus than 1/1000th of this number in the brain neurons to the vaccine because neurons are probably not going to regenerate while the epithelium constantly regenerates.

From an engineering standpoint, it's just obvious that something generating a few million partial spike protein snippets originating in your deltoid muscle - even if some get into your blood or lymphatic system - is still a lot less dangerous than uncontrolled replication of billions of spike + whole viruses running wild around your body. Sure, either one could end up damaging your brain if it got through the blood/brain barrier. There's some evidence that vax-induced spike proteins have been found 30 days later in the bloodstream. Nonetheless, compared with the onslaught of that same protein you'd get from a live virus, it's the better of two bad options.

I do not understand this standpoint. I am an engineer myself and when I compare two numbers I calculate both numbers and not just wave my hands. I don't know how to calculate either number in this case. Where did you get the "few million"? How come the vaccine causes myocarditis and thrombosis, both outside the deltoid muscle, where you said it's contained? How could the virus end damaging my brain, are you really sure there are ACE2 receptors in the brain neurons?

> Yes, mRNA technology has been in development for decades. So what? We went from having 0 mRNA vaccines in use to injecting hundreds of millions of people around the world with them all at once.

IMO their argument works against them: Three decades of nothing, then two at once from different companies? What's the catch?

> not particularly concerned about the risk of undiscovered long-term side effects

We don't know the long-term effects of corona or corona vaccines on the female reproductive system, especially eggs.

Considering that if eggs are attacked, that's the end of us, so we should learn more and fast.

More than likely Covid-19 will have the same long term side effects of any other Coronavirus or the Flu. None of the long term side effects seem particularly surprising, other than they are publicized more.

More than likely Covid-19 viral vector vaccine's (Johnson and Johnson) or Live-attenuated vaccines will have the same long term side effects of any other vaccine in these categories.

There is no realistic theoretical mechanism for a delayed attack on the female reproductive system, and billions of mRNA doses have been administered over the last year with no measurable drop in female fertility.

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