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Comment by hackingforfun | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty surprised to still see some misinformation in some of the posts here.

I have a friend who has a PhD in molecular biology and she described the mRNA vaccines to me.

The mRNA is only a piece of the spike protein, and does not enter the cell's nucleus. It only interacts with the cytoplasm. Normally, if a cell had to deal with an actual SARS-CoV-2 virus, it would be dealing with the spike proteins and the entire virus, basically, a much higher dose, and it would also invade the actual cell.

She also described the ingredients of an mRNA vaccine, which were basically:

-mRNA (which is gone from the body in a few days)

-lipids

-salt and sugars

It's also worth noting that the mRNA does not interact with a person's actual DNA. I just don't see why there is so much concern out there. This is a potentially deadly virus. Look at the states with the highest amount of unvaccinated individuals in the US. They are running out of hospital beds [1]. This is not about taking our freedoms, this is about getting this under control.

I do agree with the other posters here that say that COVID will likely just become endemic. My understanding is that eventually it will probably be a common cold, once humans have enough antibodies for it.

[1] https://fortune.com/2021/08/25/states-icu-beds-covid-cases-d...

View on HN

I have never ever on HN seen an argument about DNA and mRNA, but then again I don't follow the conversation too much.

As it seems like you know someone with correct background on the subject, so I wanted to ask you something I've always wanted to know as a young,(late 20s) healthy person with no existing risky precondition in this pandemic:

Why should I take a vaccine, when it is now known that vaccinated people can still spread the virus, there's an almost neglible chance of side effect, and with no information about possible long-term side effect. If the chance of me getting hospitalized is so low to begin with, what's the benefit of the vaccine to me.

It's an genuine question, as I soon have to travel (to a country that still force quarantine even with vaccine) and have vaccine session booked by next month.

With my limited info the risk vs benefits of vaccine seems to solely end on "we know too little about the vaccine".

Edit: thanks for all the thoughtful replies. It's a hard question to ask (without anonymity) these days so all the sincere replies are much appreciated. I'll read through the given links (and credibility of the link) when I wake up

> If the chance of me getting hospitalized is so low to begin with

I just don't think this is true. Again, look at the states in the US with the lowest levels of vaccination. They are running out of ICU beds due to the amount of cases.

I'm not sure where you're located. Maybe there's a low amount of cases there, but in general, the risk of being hospitalized (and maybe not having a bed to go to) is rather high. The delta variant is also affecting young people more than other variants before it. I personally think getting the COVID vaccine is a smart choice.

In terms of vaccinated people still spreading the virus, the idea with vaccination is to reduce the chance of being hospitalized. That still seems like a big benefit to me.

It is true. There's an Oxford Covid risk calculator, and for an average 20 something person, the risk of hospitalization is ~0.002%.

https://qcovid.org/

Has this been updated for the delta variant which is estimated be twice as likely to cause hospitalization?

https://www.politico.eu/article/delta-coronavirus-variant-do...

So ~0.004% then. Are you suggesting that is statistically significant?

I'll get downvoted, but people keep forgetting that covid spread is exponential, not linear.

Ok, 0.008% if you want. Sure feels like an argument for argument sake. I can find a list of odds of things that will hurt/kill a 20-something where the percentage is greater than 0.008 if you'd like.

That calculator includes an estimate of likelihood of catching covid - so the actual risk of hospitalisation for someone who does catch covid is way, way higher - for a 25 year old man in the US it's about 1.6%.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/covid-pandemic-mort...

That calculator isn't telling you the risk of hospitalisation per case, but the risk of hospitalisation over a 90 day period during the first peak of the pandemic.

The two are very different. The calculated risk includes the fact that not everyone (or even most people) will get covid during that 90 day window. It's also based on the statistics for the original covid variant - by all accounts Delta is both more transmissible and more likely to cause hospitalisation.

The likelihood on a per-case basis is significantly higher. The Economist has a tool here: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/covid-pandemic-mort...

For example, a 25 year old man with no co-morbidity who receives a positive covid test has a 1.6% chance of hospitalisation. Obviously not everyone with covid will receive a positive test (I've seen an estimate of 1 in 4 are tested) - so perhaps that rate is actually 0.4%. That's way, way higher than the 0.002% you said.

Ultimately if covid is endemic, you will get it. At that point, even as a 25 year old, you're risking hospitalisation.

Thank you for the rapid and informative reply. I appreciate it (esp when the topic is a bit politicized right now)

I'm not from US so I haven't checked the stats closely for those states. My current city of residence is Tokyo. Afaik right now hospitalization seems quite bad, and there's no strict lockdown. I'm trying to work from home and dodge rush hours as much as possible to reduce the risk for now.

Do you have any numbers of "old vs young" hospitalization in the majority unvacinated area? And stats such as "young vaccinated vs young unvacinated" would also be interesting to see I would guess.

I've heard about the delta variant being more dangerous to the young, so that's for sure a important point. But last I heard the vaccine is not that effective to Delta variant, and also the delta variant difference seems to not be that much bigger according to this[0] study I found Jeremy Howard link on Twitter (I've only read the summary so I might be wrong on this)

Edit: thanks for the link hackingforfun, I'll be sure to take a look at it (tomorrow as it's late night here right now)

[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

I don't have numbers on "old vs young" hospitalization. I'd have to do some more googling for that and I need to get back to work.

However, regarding efficacy on the delta variant, from here [1]: Data so far suggests efficacy rates of approximately 67 percent for the J&J vaccine, 66 to 95 percent for the Moderna vaccine, and 42 to 96 percent for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

Seems like pretty good efficacy to me.

[1] https://www.healthline.com/health-news/heres-how-well-covid-...

Indiana currently has about 44% of overall population vaccinated (3.0M out of 6.8M).

Since January the state has recorded the following numbers of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths: [1]

    Unvaccinated  Vaccinated
  C      278,508       6,740
  H       16,322         226
  D        5,709          78

(The article did not provide a full breakdown by age, but did note that Indiana’s vaccinated population skews older and would have higher baseline risk for complications.)

[1]: https://www.kpcnews.com/covid-19/article_f0e9bff4-a968-56b3-...

I'm not trying to deny that the vaccine has a positive effect, but this data as presented (aggregated across the entire year) is extremely misleading. Here's why:

1) The infection/hospitalization/death rates were highest last winter, and relatively few people were vaccinated during the peak of the infection

2) A large proportion of the people in the Unvaccinated column here were infected long before we reached the current vaccination rate.

3) Therefore, suggesting that the numbers in this table represent the outcome of vaccination is simply not correct. This data is aggregated across the entire vaccination campaign and is completely confounded by the timing of waves vs that of vaccination rates.

If the goal is to build trust and present data transparently and fairly, why not show the same data with aggregation starting in July or starting AFTER reaching 40% vaccination rate?

More recent data would also be good for reflecting any impact from delta becoming the predominant variant.

That article only provides cases from the week of August 15:

    Unvaccinated  Vaccinated
  C       13,990       1,417

>But last I heard the vaccine is not that effective to Delta variant.

That's not exactly the case. Neutralizing antibodies created from the vaccines work about as well against delta as they did against alpha. The main differences are that delta:

  * Spreads more efficiently
  * Has a shorter incubation period
  * Produces a higher viral load in those infected

The incubation period being shorter means your T-cells have less time to ramp up in the case of naturally-waning antibody levels (which applies to people who were vaccinated at the beginning of the year), giving the infection more time to set in (remember, viruses grow exponentially). The higher viral load likewise means that the circulating antibody levels that were adequate for alpha may not be sufficient for delta. So we may see that people vaccinated with Moderna now have a better response against delta due to it creating twice as many antibodies.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2783797

> But last I heard the vaccine is not that effective to Delta variant.

It is not as effective as it was against earlier variants when it comes to preventing you from getting infected with COVID, but it is still very effective at preventing you from getting seriously ill or dying from COVID.

COVID is likely heading to endemic status where it is something we all get now and then, but we all have immunity from previous infections or vaccinations that largely protects us from serious illness when we do get it. In that world it is only your first infection that is dangerous for most people.

Vaccination essentially makes your first infection count as a second infection.

As someone going through a second infection now, I hope that’s not the case. It isn’t as bad as the first time so far but it’s still no fun. I’m a healthy 33 year old.

We should not consider the US to be a good sample, given the sky-high obesity rates.

> when it is now known that vaccinated people can still spread the virus

I imagine this is not binary but you are likely to be less sick and less contagious.

That's a good point. The article that mentioned it (I think it was based on study in Boston or Manhattan?) did mention that vaccinated people carried/spread it for _shorter amount of time_

Exactly. Getting vaccinated is not just about you, but everyone you come in contact with - especially those who may be at higher risk than you are. Maybe even people you care about?

I'm in my 30s and in good health. I've not been particularly concerned about dying myself from covid[0]. But I do have a mom and grandparents. I do have immunocompromised friends and family. How could I live with myself if I got one of them sick and hadn't taken even that simple step of a shot in the arm?

[0] though long-covid is another story, or even short-term "being sick for days/weeks" doesn't sound like a particularly good time.

Please circle back and post that article. That would be the first that I've heard of any difference in time between the two. Honestly it sounds suspicious.

Less likely to be sick and.. That's it. Equally as likely to spread the Delta variant if we're considering viral load as the metric. That's only compared to an unvaccinated person who has not previously had an infection (i.e. no natural immunity).

I lack the background on biology, just a layperson take.

> Why should I take a vaccine, when it is now known that vaccinated people can still spread the virus, there's an almost neglible chance of side effect, and with no information about possible long-term side effect.

There's unknowns about the long-term effects of infection, too. Several viral infections result in prolonged symptoms or decades-later re-emergence.

Bottom line IMO - there's little/no treatment for the infection resulting from this virus. So the best solution medicine can offer is the vaccine. Safe vaccines have been designed and administered before, so I hope this is among the many safe vaccines. We know it's effective at mitigating symptoms and we know it's effective at reducing the spread.

I think taking the vaccine is the net least risk, but you're right that there's stuff that we just don't know.

So it just doesn't give any benefit. Reducing the risk of something which is already close to zero, is still 0. If we follow your argument, why not take the vaccine ten times ?

The excess mortality of people under 49 years in a country like france is zero in 2020 [0].

About long term effects of infections. Well the same can be said of the vaccine. In both case we have no idea

[0] https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/4493806?sommaire=449384...

>Well the same can be said of the vaccine. In both case we have no idea.

See https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19...

   * History tells us that severe side effects are extremely rare, and if they if do occur, they usually happen within the first two months.
   * COVID-19 vaccine technologies have been studied for years and used in other treatments without issue.
   * The vaccine development process, from clinical trials to ongoing monitoring, helps to uncover and understand side effects.

The same can be said of unknown longterm side effects of covid

Covid is a virus, the effects of which are not comparable to a vaccine. There's a lot of past evidence (as mentioned in the article) for < 2 month indications of long-term side effects based on historical vaccine development. We aren't seeing any of those indicators for the covid vaccines.

Moreover, we already have clinical evidence that covid causes long-term side effects in up to a third of people infected. There is no such evidence for any covid vaccine.

Not really. There are multiple instances of viruses, such as HIV, Chickenpox, and HPV, which are known to cause increased health risks or outright disease years and often decades after the initial infection appears to fade.

There are also many instances of "long" Covid we are already seeing in which people struggle with lingering symptoms, sometimes severe, for months after initially getting ill.

And in children, the rare but serious phenomenon that's been called MISC, usually occurs weeks or months after the initial Covid infection has subsided.

You are right that we don't know the long term side-effects of Covid, or of vaccination, and won't for quite some time. But what evidence we do have based on previous experiences with vaccines and viruses, as well as what we have already observed in Covid infections and vaccinations, makes it clear that vaccines are a far less risky prospect than the disease is.

If I were in your shoes, the main thing I'd look into is not hospitalized/death, but "long covid".

Huge quality of life impact, way less understood. Estimates range from 6%-20%+ of people who get covid are still having symptoms 2 months or longer post infection. People who have symptoms two months after infection usually still are having side-effects one year later. Neurological, blood or organ impacts, but all very different and still not well understood.

So I both don't want to seem like I'm hyping it up either because again a lot is unknown it might not be a serious issue / concern.

The main point I'd say is if you're going to make a judgement based on risk make sure you're evaluating the situation completely. And for anyone looking at covid risks, they shouldn't be focused on solely death, but understand long covid as well. Current speculative thinking essentially believes it parallels either triggering auto-immune type issues, or dormant/re-emergent viruses (like chicken pox / shingles type of behavior).

A not very good article on it, but don't have time to find a better one:

https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/619941/

Thanks for the informative reply. Yes, I think my demographic group are way more concerned about the side effects/long term effects of vaccine/covid than hospitalizations or death. And covid is not "risk free" after a influenza like symptoms for weeks.

I know same age group friends that have had covid and "loss of taste" have been the most common experience I've heard. It's anecdotal, but also a good data point to me since I know these people's lifestyle / demographic a bit better than sweeping big stats.

I'll check out the link you gave regarding this specific topic about covid long term effects and compare it to what we know about the vaccine

> there's little/no treatment for the infection resulting from this virus.

This is not true. Since the beginning of the pandemic front line doctors have been successfully reducing hospitalization and death through early treatment with antivirals, corticosteriods, and antithrombotics.

[1] Multifaceted highly targeted sequential multidrug treatment of early ambulatory high-risk SARS-CoV-2 infection (COVID-19) https://scholarlycommons.henryford.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...

[2] Timing of Antiviral Treatment Initiation is Critical to Reduce SARS-CoV-2 Viral Load https://ascpt.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/psp4.1...

[3] Clinical outcomes after early ambulatory multidrug therapy for high-risk SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) infection https://rcm.imrpress.com/EN/article/downloadArticleFile.do?a...

[4] Early multidrug treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection (COVID-19) and reduced mortality among nursing home (or outpatient/ambulatory) residents https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03069...

[5] Multidrug treatment for COVID-19 https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ddt/advpub/0/advpub_202...

I guess a better way to phrase it is that there's no over-the-counter cure, and if you're at the point where a front line doctor is giving you steroids, things are already going worse than most people's vaccine side effects.

> there's no over-the-counter cure

All of those medications can be prescribed prophylactically (early in the symptomatic phase) by just about any clinic.

I'm not advocating against vaccination, just pointing out that early treatment with widely available and existing medicines has also proven to be effective in reducing severe outcomes.

I think he is talking more about long-covid and not the actual hospitalization. Since he is talking about symptoms and not hospitalization explicitly.

Even persons who don't end up in the hospital can have symptoms. I'm leaving up to the reader of these are ok or not.

[1] is an interesting lit review on what drug strategies have been tried where in the world.

None of these papers seem to present strong clinical evidence that these drugs have actually been effective, vs some hidden covariate or something. A couple include interesting small-sample observational studies, but as I understand it those haven’t panned out in follow-on randomized controlled trials that have been done.

There are also a couple essentially viewpoint articles that are interesting. [2] is basically a pharmacokinetic calculation motivating further study, but no clinical data.

[4] is a hypothesis piece about hydroxychloroquine that draws on nine other studies. Haven’t been able to evaluate those because [4] is not open access, but this is one of the drugs that has not lived up to expectations in various RCTs that have been completed…

Fair enough, here are some high quality RCTs that provide the strong clinical evidence you're looking for.

[1] Ivermectin in combination with doxycycline for treating COVID-19 symptoms: a randomized trial https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33983065/

[2] Fluvoxamine: A Review of Its Mechanism of Action and Its Role in COVID-19 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2021.6526...

[3] Baricitinib plus Remdesivir for Hospitalized Adults with Covid-19 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33306283/

[4] Remdesivir for the Treatment of Covid-19 - Final Report https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32445440/

> when it is now known that vaccinated people can still spread the virus

Why wear your seatbelt if you can still die in a collision? Why bother with refrigeration when cold food can still rot?

You can't think of risk in terms of binaries; bad things are still possible with the best safety technologies, but that doesn't mean those technologies aren't worthwhile.

As an aside, the virus is actively changing over time, and delta variant is putting a lot more young people in the hospital.

> As an aside, the virus is actively changing over time, and delta variant is putting a lot more young people in the hospital.

If this is the case, this is not hugely more than the previous variants as we can't see it on hospitalizations charts

> Why wear your seatbelt if you can still die in a collision?

Why not wear a helmet in a car I'm sure it would help in some cases ?

Wearing a helmet in a car is a PITA. Getting vaccinated causes literally no ongoing inconvenience 24-36 hours later. It's effectively a cost-free intervention with enormous upside in terms of protection from death and hospitalization. Helmets are better compared to interventions like masks and social distancing, as they must be used constantly.

Edit: taking your analogy less literally, it seems the issue here is the socially acceptable level of risk. The health risks of covid are demonstrable and apparent. If we can mitigate those risks by ~90% with no ongoing cost, then that intervention makes sense. On the other hand, if additional interventions mitigate it by only an additional 5%, then those may not be worth the trouble.

I was comparing the helmet to the seatbelt. So the comparison between helmet an seat-belt is not ok, but the comparison between the seat-belt and the vaccine is ok ?

See my edit.

I think this is a good of example of why Scott Adams says this about analogies:

Analogies: Analogies are good tools for explaining a concept to someone for the first time. But because analogies are imperfect they are the worst way to persuade. All discussions that involve analogies devolve into arguments about the quality of the analogy, not the underlying situation.

https://www.scottadamssays.com/2016/12/21/how-to-be-unpersua...

> Why not wear a helmet in a car I'm sure it would help in some cases ?

Race car drivers do wear helmets!

Risk-benefit is a simple matter of considering the relative downsides (costs) vs benefit (safety) of available options, and making some rational choices.

COVID is insanely dangerous. Even for young people, the dangers of COVID are directly comparable to professional car racing, base jumping, or similarly high-risk activities. For older people, it's comparable to being an astronaut. For people with co-morbidities, it's more risky than climbing Mount Everest!

Everybody undertaking all of those activities wears a ton of safety equipment. Did you notice?

Unfortunately, this kind of thinking has never worked for the general public, they always have to be dragged, kicking and screaming the whole way, every time.

My cousin drives his car with one hand past every traffic light with a safety camera, so that he can use the other hand to hold his seat belt near the buckle. This makes it look like it's clicked in securely, but obviously provide no safety beneft. This is insanely dangerous and much less comfortable than simply clicking in the seatbelt. (He drives a manual car, so he has to switch back and forth between the gear shift knob and the steering wheel rapidly!)

Why does he do this? Because "the man" is forcing him to wear the seatbelt, so it's a point of personal pride to refuse. "Gaming" the system by holding the seatbelt in the closed position without actually providing safety fills him with a sense of small accomplishment for having resisted the authorities.

I really wish I was kidding, but these are the kinds of thoughts that drive people to refuse to get vaccinated as well.

"No, I won't! The gubb'ment can fuck right off! I'd rather risk it and take Invermectin!" -- literally two of my friends, almost verbatim.

You are posting misinformation. I would encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can. But according to the CDC the fatality rate for people in the 18-49 age group is only 0.06%. And the deaths are mostly people with serious co-morbid conditions. The risk is nowhere near as high as BASE jumping.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsams.2020.11.002

If you literally Google "base jumping risk statistics" it helpfully says, right at the top: "BASE jumping carries a 0.2-0.4% injury rate per jump, and a fatality rate of 0.04% per jump."

I'm saying 0.06% risk of death is comparable to 0.04% risk of death.

How exactly am I spreading "misinformation"?

Googling "everest climbers death rate" yields: "Interestingly, the death rate has decreased a bit, from 1.6 percent in the earlier period to 1.0 percent in the more recent period. That said, since the number of climbers has quadrupled, the actual number of deaths has increased."

Remind me what the CFR/IFR is for COVID for over-70s with co-morbidities again? I don't want to post "misinformation" here, so I'll let you do your own research.

Let's put it another way: with Delta, the chances of you getting COVID are pretty high. If you do, the chances of you getting bad side effects may be low, but they're a few orders of magnitude higher than the vaccine.

In this case, why not take the vaccine?

> Why should I take a vaccine

> when it is now known that vaccinated people can still spread the virus

Because just because you "can" doesn't mean that you're as likely to[1]:

> Fully vaccinated people with Delta variant breakthrough infections can spread the virus to others. However, vaccinated people appear to spread the virus for a shorter time […] This means fully vaccinated people will likely spread the virus for less time than unvaccinated people.

(—the CDC)

> If the chance of me getting hospitalized is so low to begin with, what's the benefit of the vaccine to me.

With what data exists, the chance of side-effects from the vaccine is many orders of magnitude less than the chances of any of suffering from COVID or even death from COVID.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/delta-var...

I also don't think it is worth putting stock into fear of the unknown with this vaccine: scientists have developed vaccines before. If anything, the structure of this particular vaccine — an mRNA strand inside a lipid bubble — seems a lot safer and much less ad-hoc than what I understand of earlier vaccines; in fact, it seems like downright engineering, and to me, it is exciting that we've gotten tech for that at such a crucial time. My high-school level biology knowledge of how mRNA interacts with a cell makes me feel that part should be pretty safe; what side-effects the spike protein might have are, I suppose, an unknown, but without the virus, your chances of not getting infected, are, IMO, not good, and the virus will generate far more than just spike proteins, and in far greater numbers. We also know just as little about the long-term side effects of the virus, but thus far, the reports on side-effects from the virus are much worse than reports on side-effects from the vaccine.

That's also just assessing it from the standpoint of "me", but part of the other reason I got the vaccine is that, while I might be young and healthy and might be able to give COVID a run for its money (though honestly, the idea of a respirator scares me far more than anything about the vaccine) I have people around me who are not so young or not so healthy; while I might live, I do not want to transmit a a virus that could be potentially lethal to them.

The good outweighs the bad. (Very clearly, IMO.) Yes, there are some unknowns, but nothing in life is certain.

Hi thanks for the reply and the perspective.

>I have people around me who are not so young or not so healthy; while I might live, I do not want to transmit a a virus that could be potentially lethal to them.

This is also the reason I did sign up for vaccination,(traveling with work and all) but it also put a dent in the reasoning that the people I'll meet will highly likely be vaccinated due to their age.

>I also don't think it is worth putting stock into fear of the unknown with this vaccine

You have a valid point and I do trust the scientist to do their work well(although after entering research this year my trust for science have been slightly jaded), but trusting the vaccine means I have to trust not just the scientists but all entities involved along the line (mass production, distribution, quality control, government logistics, safe storage and transportation).

With the entire vaccine thing being so highly politicized and tribalized, having the (healthy) level of scepticism and trying to express it to inform myself through dialogue have been very hard, so I appreciate your comment a lot. I'll ponder a bit where my doubts are valid/not valid and what action is reasonable based on that

> but it also put a dent in the reasoning that the people I'll meet will highly likely be vaccinated due to their age.

Gotta stop thinking in binary terms.

Breakthrough cases happen though. So even if the people you're seeing are vaccinated, if they are unlucky they can still pick up the virus from you, and if they are even more unlucky they can still have a pretty bad infection from it.

Vaccination reduces spread, and reduces severity, but it doesn't just flip those from 1 to 0.

Vaxed you + vaxed them is less risk to them than unvaxed you + vaxed them.

1. even in your 20s, there's still risk to be sick in an unpleasant way 2. we've been using vaccines forever. I've been vaccinated maybe 10 times in my life. Why suddenly should I worry. RNA vaccines may be newer, but 100s of millions of people have been vaccinated, and side effects happen usually soon after the injection. You can also use the AZ vaccine which is more conventional. 3. you prevent other people from getting sick. Even though the vaccine doesn't totally prevent spreading the disease, it does to some extent. 4. Consensus about doctors is that ratio benefit/risk is favorable toward the vaccine for all age classes. I trust my family doctor with my health and follow his recommendation.

The risk of suffering long-term damage from getting covid unvaccinated is way higher than the risk of any long-term side effects from the vaccine or getting Covid vaccinated. Even if the former is low, there's no downside to getting the vaccine anyways.

I can kind of understand if someone is avoiding the vaccine and also isolating themselves to protect against the virus, but I really just don't understand the risk-benefit analysis where the vaccine is too risky but catching Covid isn't.

Also, the risk of catching Covid unvaccinated may not be that low. But, the risk of any serious vaccine side-effects, or catching Covid vaccinated, is super low. IIRC Israel did a study and, the amount of breakthrough cases requiring hospitalization for under 40 was 0.3 per 100k, and the amount of people suffering myocarditis and other vaccine complications is in the double-digits, despite vaccinations being in the billions.

We know little about the vaccine, but we also know little about the effects of social media, random pollutants, etc. And that stuff is applied without your consent, and unlike the vaccine that stuff probably is harmful long-term.

> The risk of suffering long-term damage from getting covid unvaccinated is way higher than the risk of any long-term side effects from the vaccine or getting Covid vaccinated

Honest question, there were studies about the effect of the vaccine on hospitalizations. But is there any studies about the effect on long covid ? And especially is there studies showing that people under the age of 40 in healthy condition have any benefit regarding long covid by taking the vaccine ?

> I really just don't understand the risk-benefit analysis where the vaccine is too risky but catching Covid isn't.

Well, some people don't like to take drugs, so if they know that their immune system can cope with it (even if that means difficult time for a short time) they would prefer it. It is not risk-benefit positive. It is just more aligned with some people feelings. Some people make preventing death as the almost most important things in their life, so they will take drugs, be careful in life and so on. While some people are just ok dying in certain conditions, and are not willing to engage in risk-free life

I don't know of studies directly studying the vaccine for prevention of long covid, but most of the studies coming out seem to indicate that long covid is more likely in severe infections. So since we know the vaccine is good at preventing severe infections, it makes sense that the vaccine would be good at preventing long covid.

I get where you are coming from on the default being not taking medicine. But to me, I just don't see a vaccine as quite the same as medicine. It's basically a training program for your immune system. It tells your immune system what to look for and then when covid does enter your system, it is prepared and your immune system naturally fights it off the same way it always would. It just has a headstart in creating antibodies.

> And especially is there studies showing that people under the age of 40 in healthy condition have any benefit regarding long covid by taking the vaccine ?

If you mean risk of long-covid after getting covid with vs. without the vaccine: of course we don't know, but it's pretty likely the vaccine significantly decreases the chance of long covid. Since long-covid correlates well with infection severity, and the vaccine is particularly good at preventing severe infections.

If you mean the chance of people who already have long-covid recovering after getting vaccinated - it's pretty low.

> Well, some people don't like to take drugs, so if they know that their immune system can cope with it (even if that means difficult time for a short time) they would prefer it.

Ok. But still, "drug" is an arbitrary label, the vaccine consists of mRNA and other compounds which are in your body. I get taking risks and not being over-careful, like I definitely get why lockdowns / even masking in some situations is a bad idea. But the risk of not getting vaccinated is an unnecessary risk, kind of like driving without a seatbelt or riding without a helmet, except you only have to wear the helmet initially (idk I can't think of a better analogy).

> the amount of people suffering myocarditis and other vaccine complications is in the double-digits

This is not true, according to the CDC (as of August 18th) there at least 742 cases of myocarditis and myopericarditis associated with vaccination, potentially upwards of ~1,300 [1].

For males age 16-17 the reporting rate of myopericarditis after 2 doses of Pfizer is 71.5 per 1 million doses administered (0.0071%) [1].

Compared to natural infection, vaccination is likely still a favorable tradeoff for most people. However the tradeoffs are highly dependent on age, health, and gender. Stratifying by these factors is essential for any scientifically accurate discussion of risks.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...

Personally, my heart & chest are still recovering from the second Pfizer shot, after having ECG, bloodwork and nearly going to the ER. Wont be getting a booster, thats for damned certain.

I suspect the number to be significantly higher than whats reported.

Literally billions of people around the world have been vaccinated against Coronavirus now. How high can the chance of serious short-term side effects be?

Again, depends on age, condition. I'm currently fighting long COVID symptoms that have showed up after vaccination. I never had COVID, but the vaccine has given me - chronic fatigue - chronic headaches - brain fog. From JJ vaccine.

If you look into the Australia, Canada and Norway data you see that the numbers are higher than initially expected. Serious side effects like TTS were thought to happen around 1 in 100k, but they now think it would be something like 1 in 20 000. Perhaps less, if you account for people that don't even realise they're getting it.

The vaccine are something like 5x reduction in mortality, but they are not perfect.

lol that's the same logic that resulted in 100M passwords and credentials being leaked....again and again and again.....

mistakes are normal, to assume none is truly unfathomably dense....

A large sample size provides more conclusive results than does a small sample size.

In the case of Coronavirus vaccines, the sample size is 1/3 the population of Earth.

If hundreds of millions of vaccinated people were developing heart problems it would be noticeable.

I note you conveniently left out "reported" cases from your sentence. You are citing numbers reported by VAERS which is not at all the same as confirmed cases. Please don't fear-monger on HN.

I cited numbers reported by the CDC who reviewed VAERS reports and determined that a subset met the CDC’s own criteria.

I accurately transcribed facts from an official CDC document, and even linked the source, nothing more. Do you really think that is fear-mongering?

The CDC is actively investigating many of the reports, dismissing them as not confirmed is a bit disingenuous at the very least.

I think parent is commenting here that the CDC is talking about self-reported data. We're not talking about a diagnosis from a doctor. Calling them "confirmed" is just as disingenuous, if I'm understanding the explanations in the slides you link.

Slide 11 appears to say that a large number of cases were hospitalized. If this interpretation is correct, we are talking about a diagnosis from a doctor, not self-reported data.

All the slides say is that there were 700ish reports that met case criteria as reported through VAERS, a self-reporting system. We are not told any information about which case criteria were met (objective vs subjective), comorbidities, reason for presentation (all vital information for a true diagnosis not report). We are not told about degree of hospitalisation or reason for hospitalisation. We are most certainly not given confirmed cases as GP claims, the stringent criteria for which are listed one link deep from the presentation. We are left with a misleading link to a scary-sounding number that is being posted by multiple accounts across HN with nebulous intent and in some cases history of posting blatant misinformation. I feel that calling this practice out when I see it helps if just a little bit.

In this case a look through GP's recent comment history reveals many comments with disinformation and fear-mongering.

Does the link https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7027e2-H.pdf on the same page 11 answer your concerns? That paper (from June) explains in some details what the CDC did, and I would assume that the slides are just an update of the numbers on the paper to a later date. At least the author of the slides was an author of the paper, so I would infer that they kept doing whatever they were doing in June.

One thing that the paper is pretty clear about is that in order to proclaim a "case", the CDC reviewed medical records and interviewed the healthcare provider looking for specific criteria. It seems like all criteria include at least one test, e.g. EKG, in addition to symptoms reported by the patient. It's not like they ran a SQL query over a bunch of dudes reporting chest pain---the CDC did their homework. If anything, I have more confidence in the CDC and the vaccines now than I had before reading these documents.

Of course I read through the link. It did not alter my reading of the slides in the slightest. The simpler tests recommended in the paper are not as objective as you might think. Again, the slides do not give us the information used and the interviews you mention did not happen for entire age categories. I'm glad you have confidence in the CDC and vaccines; GP does not and is actively trying to mislead users of HN. Appreciate the downvotes instead of discussion.

People have a right to take that risk!

The govt has the right to protect public health.

The government does not have rights. In the United States the power resides in the individual citizens. The "government" are individual citizens selected to do the paperwork. When their corruption exceeds our disinterest, they're done.

And yet the majority of those citizens agree with vaccine mandates among other public health measures https://news.uchicago.edu/story/most-americans-support-vacci...

It’s almost like the government is still fulfilling the will of the people!

The government is not meant to be majority rule.

It was explicitly created to prevent majority rule. The Senate acted as a longer term, more stable body to counteract the more popularist House. Originally citizens didn't even vote for Senators, they were appointed by the states themselves.

An entire set of explicit rules restrained what the majority could do (Constitution and Bill of Rights).

Majority rule has a long history of abuses. We shouldn't abandon our system of limiting majority power because of a virus.

lemmie guess... “America isn’t a democracy, it’s a republic” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/yes-consti...

“The government wasn’t meant to fulfill the will of the people... it was meant to fulfill the will of my people!”

Minority rule has a much longer and more gruesome history of abuses, and it never ends well for the rulers.

What a straw man argument in that article. "not a democracy" simply refers to avoiding decisions based on the public opinion that sways in the wind, sometimes dramatically. See vaccine and mask mandates.

Umm.. this is why we need civics classes because people Don’t actually understand what the purpose of government is and what we rights we give up to be governed.

We do need much better civics and history classes. We don't "give up rights," and we're not "governed" in this country. Look at the wording of the bill of rights. It's a list of limits on the government.

I think the Supreme Court disagrees with you. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-04-20/government-...

Think of it this way, you have two choices:

1. You have a 0.0001% risk of death, and a 0.001% risk of hospitalization, and will maybe spread covid to 5-8 people. Long term effects unknown.

2. You have a 0.00001% risk of death, and a 0.0001% risk of hospitalization, and will maybe spread covid to 1-2 people. Long term effects unknown.

Which choice would you take?

(note the 2nd option is a conservative estimate of the effects of the vaccine, and the odds are probably less than what I wrote)

you forgot to add an important argument: You forget to say that probably both are manmade.

Who do you trust more? 1) something probably created in a chinese lab? 2) something created by a list of different corporations and tested independently by at least 50 countries?

Lab released, maybe. Lab created, seems unlikely, although the line between lab released and created gets blurry. Genetically engineered (rather than created via "husbandry"), seems very unlikely given that nobody has noticed anything to suggest that it might be. So either it isn't, or China has gotten so good at it that we can't tell when they do it, which is terrifying!

The risk of hospitalisation for most people who get covid is way higher than 0.01% - it's about 1% for a 21 year old man, 2.7% for a 30 year old man and 8.5% for a 50 year old man - and only goes up from there.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/covid-pandemic-mort...

I should've posted where I got the values for Covid risk, my bad. I used this: https://qcovid.org/Calculation and did it for a healthy 25 year old, and then rounded. I don't know exactly what the different between what I used and what the Economist used, but I'm guessing the Economist is using a dataset of people that skewed more symptomatic?

I wrote more in another comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28391526

Basically the qcovid calculator tells you the overall risk during a specific period of the pandemic . Most people didn't get covid during that period, which makes the overall risk appear very low.

However, if you do contract covid (which seems inevitable if it becomes endemic) then the individual risk of hospitalisation is much higher - 1%+ for even young adults.

This is a false dichotomy: low risk hospitalization vs unknown long term side effects of the vaccine. The correct choice is unknown long term side effects of COVID-19 vs unknown long term side effects of vaccine.

In other words: you will get your immunity either by becoming sick (and maybe get well known short term side effects of being sick, including hospitalization and death) or by getting vaccinated, with other set of short and long term known and unknown side effects. In the first case you will put more pressure to public health system (even by staying home and consuming self-prescripted basic drugs). Otherwise the choice is yours.

The vaccine has an extremely low risk of side effects short term. There is no scientific reason to think there will be long term effects. What exactly are you concerned about? In terms of "we know too little about the vaccine", we know even less about "covid" itself.

The vaccine reduces the likelihood you will get severe covid and require hospitalization. It's like a 22x reduction in risk.

The vaccine reduces your infectious period if you do catch covid, this reduces R0 (R-naught) will help shorten the pandemic.

The delta variant is hospitalizing healthy and young people with no preexisting conditions. Future variants are likely to do so as well.

The amount of times I've seen text to the extent of "mRNA does not alter DNA" vastly exceeds the amount of text I've seen that claims mRNA does alter DNA. As far as I could see nobody in this thread is claiming such a thing, so I'm genuinely curious to know why you feel the need to point it out.

Everyone knows you can't predict what a treatment will do just by knowing its mechanism - if you could, clinical trials would never fail. Talking about the mechanism is the least effective way to explain how it's safe, because most people realize that well-controlled studies are the only true authority.

A hypothesis still must precede a trial, and many hypotheses are formed based on an understanding of fundamental concepts/mechanisms and prior studies.

Studies are still required because a hypothesis is just that - a hypothesis - but I wouldn't completely dismiss a discussion of the mechanism, because this may still provide meaningful context and/or help form an initial understanding of risk before having real study results.

There are a few hypotheses suggested by the higher-count events in VAERS, as well as the standard ones checked in postmarket studies (effects on pregnant women and children in particular). I agree that the mechanism is a good way to do hypothesis generation, but it's not a solid argument for the safety of a treatment. It is really only an antidote to specific, hallucinatory claims, like the line about it "changing your DNA."

Except we’ve been studying this for well over a hundred years, and it’s not a medication, it’s only presenting something to the immune system so it can perform it’s singular task on.

So, by this point, you’re telling me I can’t understand what editing a cell in my excel spreadsheet will do without a huge test of hundreds or thousands of people all making the same edit to figure out if it’ll work.

We know it works. We know how it works. It works by handing the task to the immune system and getting the fuck out of the way.

Clinical trials are to assess if it works well enough to consider widespread use.

The claims that rare side effects have been well-characterized and can be predicted from the mechanism alone are simply not true - the FDA itself required further postmarketing studies (to be finished around 2023) as a requirement in their approval letter. The foundation of convincing people that taking the vaccine is safer than not taking it cannot be the false claim that the probabilities of each side effect are known, because they are not. Instead we should focus on the true claim that the virus is much more dangerous and also not completely characterized.

That’s absurd.

Yes, I still test my code.

But when I write it, I do it with the lessons I’ve learned over decades, and it’s usually close to working before the first test comes into the picture.

That’s where we are with vaccine production: we’ve been cranking them out for decades, and the process is so robust that failures at in the six plus nines range of outliers.

I think you might be overestimating the success rate of drug discovery and underestimating the complexity of the situation. Starting from 10,000 compounds chosen on the basis of reasonable mechanistic or chemical arguments, one or two working drugs are typically discovered.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Drug-discovery-and-devel...

Like the rest of engineering, you very rarely start with a novel target.

You’re building things from a library of tested techniques.

Vaccines aren’t drugs.

They’re a method of delivering material to the immune system for it to do its thing.

We do that by finding the thing we want to present, finding a pipeline to extract that, and finding a delivery mechanism that is tested and compatible.

We don’t “discover” a new flu vaccine ever my season, we put together this seasons release.

That’s why it didn’t take years to design and release a new vaccine for covid: we have the technology already, we just needed to pick the payload and select the rocket best suited for the job.

I have actually seen that claim elsewhere. The issue is, almost all of them know about reverse-transcription enzymes and use that as part of their argument, while the people attempting to debunk them have never touched on it, instead treating them as if they don't know the difference between DNA and RNA.

> I'm genuinely curious to know why you feel the need to point it out.

I haven't seen it in this thread either, but it's been a very common [false] talking point in the conspiracy/anti-vax circles.

What is this paper saying then?

SARS-CoV-2 RNA reverse-transcribed and integrated into the human genome

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33330870/

>The mRNA is only a piece of the spike protein, and does not enter the cell's nucleus. It only interacts with the cytoplasm.

>it would also invade the actual cell.

Before complaining about misinformation, you might want to freshen up on your basic microbiology.

I get that this has become more about the narrative than the facts, but this comment gets quite a few fundamentals very very wrong for it to be up top with the HN crowd.

You're right, and I agree about reviewing basic microbiology, thanks for that suggestion.

In terms of the quote about the spike protein, someone else thankfully corrected that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28382167). In terms of the quote about invading the cell, I meant that the SARS-CoV-2 virus would also invade the cell nucleus (yes, saying just cell was not correct because the cytoplasm is part of the cell). Those two quotes were the two specific things that were incorrect about my post, that I'm aware of, and I'm happy that others corrected those.

I posted what I did to counter some of the more ridiculous claims I've seen made, not just on HN, but also elsewhere. I consider HN to be a great source of information and I wanted to contribute to that. My intention was to pass on information that I was happy to learn and which helped me understand what was in the mRNA vaccines and how they work (at least at a high level). I would hope that anyone would evaluate and research for themselves, whether they hear it on HN or elsewhere.

If you would care to elaborate any further, I'd be happy to listen, so that I can learn more myself.

> The mRNA is only a piece of the spike protein

The mRNA produces a piece of the spike protein once inside the cell, it’s not the protein itself.

these are the kind of small detail slip-ups that bother me about the commenters (everywhere, not just HN) that decide to try to educate people in broad-strokes and general overviews.

it's hopeful and altruistic to try to educate the ignorant, but politically-charged topics have a characteristic that when misrepresented -- even accidentally -- someone may use that foul-up to reduce the efficacy of the advice by injecting the shadow of doubt.

(to be clear, issues with data should be corrected by others; my issue is with the grandparent poster getting the small details wrong while Speaking From On High and quoting scientist friends)

This not only hurts the credibility of 'scientist friends' by proxy, but it also just creates another foot-hold for the already suspicious to continue being suspicious; something that is trying to be remedied by the whole speech in the first place.

Please, if you feel the need to educate on something politically charged like this, gather the facts first and triple-check -- otherwise you will likely harm your base motivating premise incidentally through loss-of-trust.

Yes, thank you for correcting this.

> Look at the states with the highest amount of unvaccinated individuals in the US. They are running out of hospital beds [1]. This is not about taking our freedoms, this is about getting this under control.

> [1] https://fortune.com/2021/08/25/states-icu-beds-covid-cases-d...

I can't see the article due to paywall, but based on how you're presenting I have to say: Due to the phrasing it isn't a straight lie, but it's definitely not true either and is meant to be misleading. Hospitals are not being overrun by covid patients, most of the capacity is being used by things from last year that people were putting off.

For example in the least vaccinated state, Idaho [0], most hospitals are running at around 50% capacity [1], and even then only around 10% of beds are covid-19 cases.

On top of this you have to remember that hospitals are for-profit institutions, and beds are counted not just by physical beds but by having nurses to attend to them. Empty beds cost the hospital money, so they try to run fairly full anyway. I remember reading 80-90% in the past, but have found a source [2] that says 60-70% is the average across all hospitals, and another that gets into the 80-90% range for only large hospitals [3].

[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2021-07-27/...

[1] https://data.commercialappeal.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/185904/hospital-occupanc...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4191350/

From the article: As of Tuesday Aug. 24, six states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas—had less than 10% of ICU beds available according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

I'm happy to hear Idaho is fine. It doesn't sound like these other states are.

Alabama: https://data.commercialappeal.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity... - Scrolling through these, it still looks like only 20-30% are covid.

Arkansas: https://data.commercialappeal.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity... - Mostly not being overrun, and again covid is only like 20-30%.

Florida: https://data.commercialappeal.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity... - Similar to Alabama, and like Alabama, mostly not covid.

Georgia: https://data.commercialappeal.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity... - Only a handful are out of beds, with the covid patients looking like an even smaller proportion, around 15-20% in most of them.

Mississippi - https://data.commercialappeal.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity... - Only the smallest hospitals are out of beds, with covid again looking like the 20-30% range for most of them.

Texas - https://data.commercialappeal.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity... - About half of them are on the high end; Texas looks like it's in much better shape than the other five states. Again covid cases are on the low end, 15-20%.

If there's something overrunning these hospitals, it's still most likely deferred treatments from last year. (Edit: And as the comment sibling to yours points out, they're currently doing elective surgeries that can probably be postponed to open up more capacity if really needed)

So why, in your opinion, are elective surgeries and deferred treatments only overrunning hospitals in states with lower vaccination rates? That's an especially strange assumption to make, given that said states also generally had the least restrictive lockdown measures from last year, meaning that if anything they would likely have fewer deferred treatments to perform now than states taking more intensive steps to halt the spread of the disease.

You also seem to think that somehow 20-30% of hospital beds being occupied solely by people sick with Covid is somehow not significant. Hospitals aren't designed to have so much capacity that they run on empty. Nor are they meant to be running at near max capacity at all times. But if a hospital is generally running on having 50-60% of beds occupied normally, and there is a surge like we've seen over the last 6 weeks that adds 20-30% on top of that solely because of Covid, then yes, its Covid that is causing hospitals to be overrun.

> in states with lower vaccination rates?

Come to think of it, two of those states aren't near the bottom, so that's also just wrong: Texas and Florida are around the halfway point when the states are ranked by vaccination rate, Texas just below and Florida just above. [0]

So yeah, I definitely think there's something else going on.

[0] https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...

That "80-90%" might have been a thing before COVID, but now more and more facilities are running at capacity.

Even in Washington (70+% with one shot) and Seattle (83% one dose, 77% complete series) a number of hospitals are full enough to be cancelling elective surgeries again.

I live in South Carolina, where the pandemic is especially bad now, and where vaccine uptake has been low. A friend told me that ambulances were being turned away at the front door of a local hospital.

It is true that there are many possible factors for this, that planning at that hospital might have been questionable and/or very profit-oriented. Also, I've read that a lot of medical staff have gotten fed up with the situation, and in some cases quit their jobs.

But matter the underlying causes, it's a scary picture.

Interestingly enough, in Idaho, 92.3% of people over 65 have at least one dose.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trac...

I see a lot of presumptions that Covid will "become like a common cold," but what separates this from dangerous wishful thinking?

Humanity suffered from smallpox for centuries before it was finally eradicated. It's not clear that it was becoming meaningfully less severe.

Dengue is endemic in tropical regions. A reinfection often leads to severe disease.

Yellow fever did not get better over time.

We vaccinated actual measles in children somewhere close to oblivion. Pockets of vaccine resistance still lead to localized outbreaks in the US. Measles is, according to most estimates, significantly more infectious that Delta, and yet we still managed to reach crowd immunity instead of throwing up our hands and relying on hopes and prayers.

Finally, HIV is perhaps our most recent experience with a viral epidemic. If we expect Covid to turn into a cold, maybe we should expect AIDS to turn into a cold first. It has a 40-year lead!

Some common cold is caused by coronavirus (not covid-19) or other virus, but HIV/smallpox are far from cold virus.

I see a lot of presumptions that Covid will "become like a common cold,"

Could do, yeah. I'm no evolutionary biologist, but I guess that for this to happen, it needs to mutate in various directions, and the strains to feel selection pressure to become non-lethal to humans. Which I guess means that a lot of people need to die of more lethal strains faster than they spread it, and that way the surviving strains will become the dominant strains while the people-killing strains wipe themselves out by killing their hosts quickly.

This does not feel like a great solution; using human deaths as a way to select for the less lethal variants. Feels like that involves a lot of humans dying, which people have a strong bias against.

There are several arguments supporting the idea that covid will become like the common cold, it is not a generic "all viruses turn into the common cold".

We already have 4 endemic coronaviruses that cause common colds, and we suspect that they started as deadly pandemics too, which were historically reported as the flu. Many specialists suspect that the OC43 coronavirus caused the 1889 "Russian flu".

Covid seems to follow the same path: a disease that is mostly harmless to the young but potentially deadly to older adults with no acquired immunity. It is likely that in a generation or two, everyone will be infected at a very young age, building immunity and occasionally get breakthrough colds. Breakthrough cases already look a lot like colds.

You give two arguments. One is that some colds in humans are caused by coronaviruses. But on the other hand, coronaviruses cause severe and fatal illness in livestock and are not getting attenuated.

The second argument is that over a century ago, an epidemic might have possibly been caused by a coronavirus, and might have possibly become a common strain of the flu. This tenuous and unprovable line of reasoning is exactly what I see as wishful thinking.

And speaking of breakthrough cases, I am literally writing a condolence note to a colleague whose mother passed away yesterday.

COVID-19 already is like a common cold for the vast majority of younger patients. Over the long run most people will get infected as youths and build up immunity which protects them later in life. There will be no significant herd immunity effect, but fortunately the vaccines are very effective at preventing deaths.

https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/175...

> lipids

These "nano"-bubbles of fat were advertised as nano-particles. It was just this old doctor that wanted to be cool for once but it has become a grave mistake...

That said, I don't see the current concern in that regard. People believe they will be lied to when there are counter-indications for the efficiency, that side-effects won't be reported on, that they need to provide vaccination and medical passes. And to be honest, these fears are 100% valid. It is very likely there will be media blackouts about such issues. Especially if you know a bit about politics and how people build a profile. Safety sells better than sex in politics.

And the hysteria about misinformation isn't at all conductive for real scientific debate. On the contrary, it is far more disruptive than conspiracies of any form. The self-imposed defenders of science are fools in their approach to contain information.

While there are no cures yet, there was a political campaign against substances that helped, even if the benefit was small. This should be a scandal on its own.

> My understanding is that eventually it will probably be a common cold, once humans have enough antibodies for it.

This can’t be right. Antibodies fade: for other coronaviruses within 6-12 months. They aren’t a thing the body keeps around forever.

Lasting immunity would be from memory T cells or memory T cells, if their long run response worked well and the virus didn’t change enough between infections.

Actually we didn't get into antibodies and memory T cells when talking with my friend. I don't have a PhD in this, so I can't say either way.

I mostly just wanted to pass on the information from her regarding the ingredients and how the mRNA only interacts with the cytoplasm of the cell, and not the actual DNA. That's the important part.

The explanation reminds me of this wonderful (and previously posted on HN) article https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...

> They are running out of hospital beds

I find that hard to believe, considering that these states didn't run out of hospital beds in any of the previous waves that also had higher incidence and far higher mortality.

I quote:

> "Another nine states have less than 20% of their ICU beds available."

This is still on the high end, by international standards. Optimal occupancy rate is estimated at 70-75%:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24373914/

Running near capacity doesn't mean there isn't emergency capacity that can be made available, otherwise ICUs wouldn't be able to run above 100% capacity.

Whatever is causing the severe side-effects, it's probably not the MRNA or the spike protein. With Pfizer/Moderna vaccines, it's likely the lipid nanoparticles causing Myocarditis. With the J&J vaccine, it's likely the viral vector that is causing TTS.

Both technologies have never been widely deployed before. The fact that we could not predict and still do not understand these side-effects is quite concerning. It also puts into question the "COVID infection is like the vaccine only worse" narrative.

I've read that Myocarditis can happen with actual COVID cases as well [1]. To me that makes sense, considering that the mRNA-based vaccines generate a portion of the spike protein similar to the actual virus.

[1] https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/comment/myocarditis-covi...

This doesn't explain that the viral-vector vaccines generally don't cause Myocarditis, or at least not anywhere near as much as the LNP vaccines.

Considerably greater risk of myocarditis and other heart issues from infection than the vaccine. See Fig 4 of [1] in particular.

When reading that chart, keep in mind that lymphadenopathy is just swelling of the lymph nodes, and is an expected and not-serious effect of the vaccine; it's a sign that an immune response is being triggered.

[1]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110475

> Considerably greater risk of myocarditis and other heart issues from infection than the vaccine.

Citing your source:

2.7 events per 100,000 persons (vaccinated)

11.0 events per 100,000 persons (SarS-COV2 positive)

This already doesn't look that great, considering that the risk of a PCR-confirmed infection is not 100%. More importantly, it doesn't take into account age.

The age group at highest risk from Myocarditis following vaccination is 16-17 year-old males, latest numbers from the CDC[1]:

5.1/71.5 events* per 100,000 first/second Pfizer doses administered (within 7 days)

This has a strong bias towards the second dose, it's not clear yet how booster shots fare here, which may need to be administered at 5 months intervals.

It stands to reason that the Myocarditis risk from COVID infection in that age group should also be higher, but it's not clear whether the benefit outweighs the risk in that age/sex group, considering that both infection count and side-effect cases tend to be under-reported.

*) It's not clear whether that number includes the cases "under investigation". If so, this would further raise the risk by up to 66%.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-... (Page 13)

>it's likely the lipid nanoparticles causing Myocarditis

What's this based on? Given the occurrence of myocarditis in actual COVID infections at a higher rate than with the vaccines, it seems more likely to be an immune-mediated response, at least partly to the spike fragments included in the mRNA vaccines.

> What's this based on?

It's a common feature of the LNP-based vaccines, not the viral-vector-based ones.

You are contradicting yourself. You say this is about getting things under control, but then you say there is no way of controlling things.

Because vaccinated people can still spread infections vaccinations, just like lockdowns, do not help ‘getting things under control’. They only delay progression of the pandemic.

You say ‘it will probably be a common cold, once humans have enough antibodies’. Humans do not get permanent antibodies from the vaccines. They get antibodies from getting infected. Lockdowns and vaccines only delay the inevitable.

The only argument there is is that vaccinated people get less seriously ill than unvaccinated people. But then it affects only themselves so it’s pretty hard to argue for schemes that force people to get vaccinated against their will.

> Humans do not get permanent antibodies from the vaccines. They get antibodies from getting infected.

Weird, I've yet to get chicken pox/shingles, mumps, polio etc despite being vaccinated against them as a child. And I still catch the flu regularly despite having already had it.

Not the OP, but antibodies are just one part of a fairly complex immune system and it does not make too much sense to concentrate just on them. Antibodies are proteins and their level goes down over time naturally. What really interests you is the level of immune response on subsequent exposure to the pathogen, which may be pretty robust even if antibodies are low or undetectable at the moment of new exposure.

We obviously do not know yet whether we can get permanently robust immune response to SARS-CoV-2, either from vaccines or from natural infection; the virus is only two years old. We know that we can get permanently robust immune response to the viruses you mentioned in your post. But this cannot be easily generalized to any new virus that comes along.

We actually do know that we can not get permanent robust immune response to COVID-19 from the vaccines that are in use because the statistics are already there, immunity starts wearing off after about 6 months.

That’s why the new push is for ‘booster shots’.

To which degree is this statistic confounded by the Delta mutation emerging?

The original strain upon which the current vaccines are based has basically died out and Delta carries a lot more viral load (400x or so?), which changes the game a bit.

In comparison, smallpox virus was pretty much the same across centuries, so it was comparably easy to target and eradicate. No animal hosts helped, too.

Covid-19 is impossible to eradicate as it spreads through animals, forget that idea.

Pfizer themselves have performed studies that show immunity declining. I do know that they tell from the levels of antibodies seen in blood but I don’t know if the effect of variants has been measured (if it can be measured at all without unethical experiments).

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.19.21255739v... <- natural immunity is pretty long-lived https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v... <-- 6x better than fresh vaccine after a year or so, 13x better in a 4-6 month period after

Now try getting the flu vaccine (it exists!) and see if you will ever catch it again.

You've made it abundantly clear here that you don't know what you're talking about, so you perhaps should just stop talking at all on the matter.

>Because vaccinated people can still spread infections vaccinations, just like lockdowns, do not help ‘getting things under control’. They only delay progression of the pandemic.

Delaying the progression DOES help get things under control.

>The only argument there is is that vaccinated people get less seriously ill

No it's not. Vaccinated people are less likely to get ill at all, get seriously ill, or spread the virus.

You were doing so well until the last sentence.

Vaccinated people are just as likely to spread the delta variant. If you disagree, please post your proof. Until then, please stop spreading misinformation.

"The mRNA is only a piece of the spike protein, and does not enter the cell's nucleus."

and with the AZ vaccine, due to the vector chosen, supposedly it (spike protein) does enter the nucleus. Oops.

(note I'm not suggesting the AZ vaccine causes any alteration of our DNA)

Just to clarify I was talking about the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines.

AstraZeneca’s vaccine uses adenovirus-vectored technology, which is different [1].

[1] https://www.prevention.com/health/a35118263/astrazeneca-vs-p...

I was aware of that.

From what I read, the mRNA vaccines manages to get the spike in to the cytoplasm, just like the real virus, so it to that extent mimics what is desired.

Whereas the viral vector (a different delivery technology) used for the AZ vaccine manages to get the spike in to the nucleus, due to picking the "wrong" vector, so to that extents it could be said not to mimic what is desired.

There was speculation that if it had used a different vector which delivered to the cytoplasm, then some of the low probability issues may have been avoided. So one could argue that the choice of vector was/is a bug with the AZ vaccine. Despite that, it does seem to be having the desired effect - reduced hospitalisations.

Mind, I've had the AZ vaccine, and so far have survived.

:-)

mRNA vaccines deliver mRNA to the target cell, via merging a lipid bubble into the cell membrane and dumping the contents into the cytoplasm. The mRNA is then translated into a specially designed variant of the spike protein that is embedded facing out of the cell membrane. As it happens, the physical details of embedded protein translation means that the spike proteins never see the cytoplasm at all, being restricted to the endoplasmic reticulum.

Thanks.

That is what I read, just that I couldn't remember the term "endoplasmic reticulum", and so used "cytoplasm" as a hand wavy stand in.

:-)

That's because most people don't remember the basics from their Biology classes. I believe it's taught here in the US with the basics: DNA->RNA->Protein. The J&J vaccine does work with DNA I believe, so people may be confusing them?

Since you are describing the ingredients of an mRNA vaccines, here is an illustration by David Goodsell.

https://pdb101.rcsb.org/sci-art/goodsell-gallery/sars-cov-2-...

Check the rest of the site, he does awesome watercolor illustrations of microbiology. Including of the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself ( https://pdb101.rcsb.org/sci-art/goodsell-gallery/sars-cov-2-... )

Certain virus do in fact modify the DNA in cells[1].

From the article:

> Some types of virus, such as retroviruses, integrate their genetic material (including the new gene) into a chromosome in the human cell.

Therefore the claim that an injection of RNA could modify your DNA is possible. Whether the COVID injections do this is a different story, and seems unlikely.

[1] https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/therapy/proce...

> Therefore the claim that an injection of RNA could modify your DNA is possible.

Absolutely not. This is like saying water is a neurotoxin because a tiny subset of neurotoxins contain water. Or that almost any food can modify your dna, since mRNA, RNA and DNA are in any cells you eat.

reverse transcription doesn't just happen. Retroviruses work because they carry reverse transcriptase: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_transcriptase

No reverse transcriptase, no DNA integration. The vaccine leaves out any other parts of the virus besides the spike coding. That makes it SAFER in that respect than conventional or monoclonal vaccines, which include tons of other viral parts! You know what might do reverse transcription? Covid: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2105968118

Good thing the mrna vaccine leaves out all those parts that could be activating LINE1 retrotransposons!

I’m not saying the vaccines do this, just that it’s theoretically possible to make a gene therapy that does modify DNA.

A gene therapy, sure. After all, that is the basis of CRISPR gene editing [0].

One of the key differences is the mRNA vaccines are not delivered with the necessary enzymes to actually cleave and splice DNA, e.g. [1].

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR_gene_editing 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cas9

What is this paper saying then?

SARS-CoV-2 RNA reverse-transcribed and integrated into the human genome

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33330870/

> I'm pretty surprised to still see some misinformation in some of the posts here.

Continues with anecdote of conversation with anonymous molecular biology PhD.

Isn't that the optimal breeding ground for misinformation?

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