Hacker News Reader

Comment by jleyank | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry... What is the point that you're trying to make? That mRNA spike protein lasts forever while viruses are cleared in a week or so? That they're different? I assume they're effectively similar from any source and if there's a problem it should increase with increasing level.

There is a risk from the vaccine: spike protein + delivery package. I think there's a greater risk from the vaccine: more spike protein, risk of cytokine storm, etc. If you don't like mRNA vaccines, there are a number of alternatives using different mechanisms to deliver material to train the immune response. But the spike protein is a good target as it's absolutely required for transmission.

Perhaps they'll find a region of the virus that is (relatively) invariant and develop vaccines to that. So far, the human immune system has been unable to do this.

View on HN

My point is that your continuing assertions that an unvaccinated infection must result in higher levels of spike protein exposure than Covid-shots-plus-the-eventual-infection-you'll-still-get-anyway is not really backed up by anything. It's just an assumption you are making. Beyond that, naive comparison of the levels involved may not fully capture the level of clinical risk: maybe the mRNA causes higher levels of spike detached from an intact virus, or maybe it causes it to spread to parts of the body which an infection doesn't.

The ideal here would be to have a randomized control group which could be compared to various different vaccination profiles on an ongoing basis to assess overall risk and outcomes on a population levels, but that's impossible because all the control groups were promptly vaccinated the second EUAs were granted.

Age stratification is an important consideration. A 12 year old comorbidity-free male's risk of a cytokine storm from a COVID infection is effectively nil, but his risk from the COVID vaccines (which many have been required to take to participate in school activities) is substantial.

They tried to create coronavirus vaccines for 50 years and failed terribly. So far it seems to have been a good bet that all those issues were not magically solved in 9 months of "Operation Warp Speed."

> If you don't like mRNA vaccines, there are a number of alternatives using different mechanisms to deliver material to train the immune response.

Yes, one such alternative, which is perfectly safe for a large proportion of the population, is natural SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Way more infectious that the vaccine, though, and probably not any more effective. Nobody's caught the vaccine from the exposure that I've seen mentioned.

It seems like you're under a misapprehension that there is some mutually exclusive tradeoff of "vaccine vs infection" to be made, but this is not the case. It's well established now that natural immunity is more effective and longer lasting than the vaccines. And again there's no point in the infectivity comparison because whether someone is vaccinated or not makes no difference to their odds of contracting or spreading Covid -- if anything, the current level of case rates in highly vaccinated countries vs less vaccinated ones suggests the vaccines have made infection more likely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com