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No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

sciencemag.org

321–330 of 436 posts

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#321
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can read all of them in their published protocol at https://www.modernatx.com/sites/default/files/mRNA-1273-P301... under section 5.2.

Relevant criteria for the question "does it it exclude old, fragile people with various common pre-existing conditions?" (not exhaustive, but indicative): Included: Pre-existing conditions are okay as long as they are in a stable condition (defined as no significant change in therapy etc for the 3 months before enrollment). Excluded: Immunosuppressive or immunodeficient state, asplenia, recurrent severe infections (H…

That's why it's so important that all the people who can get the vaccine get it - this is the herd immunity everyone is yammering about. If the healthy people are vaccinated the virus won't be able to spread to the people who can't get vaccinated.

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#322
post #293

I was reading about Moderna today, and I found a number of articles from 2017-18 expressing concern about their secretiveness and impatience with both safety precautions and the failures that are inevitable in drug trials, based on the experiences of former employees and science journals. I can't deny that makes me nervous. I didn't see anything about it after that time, however.

Combined with their legal immunity from any liability, that can be concerning.

That's true, but also true in general which is why we have a National Vaccine Injury Fund aka vaccine court:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Vaccine_Injury_Compen...

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#323
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Antisense drugs are the same biological material, but have a very different mechanism of effect. Specifically, mRNA vaccines require an immune response to be effective. The mRNA (vaccine) encodes a viral protein, and the host (human) immune system still has to learn to respond to that protein. Antisense drugs are much simpler, with no immune response required. The mRNA (the drug) itself simply binds to the target mRN…

I know all that. Besides, one pedantic point - antisense are not the same to typical mRNA, they have thiophosphate group instead of normal phosphate in their backbone, or some other tweak to make them bind mRNA permanently.

Some of us don't know, so the extra detail is appreciated :)

Interesting re: the thiophosphate group. It sounds like it just floods your body with some mRNAs complementary to the viral mRNA that blocks it from getting turned into proteins by your cells' ribosomes?

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#324
post #104

The null hypothesis (people with symptomatic covid are as likely to get severe symptoms, regardless of whether they received the vaccine) predicts this many cases with severe symptoms: 30 / 185 * 11 = 1.7 1.7 ~= 0, so the sample size is too small to support the headline.

If you take a Beta(1,1) distribution as your prior, then the control group's risk-of-severe-covid-given-symptoms posterior is Beta(31,156), and the experimental group's conditional risk posterior is Beta(1,12). Drawing 100,000 samples from these distributions (`betarnd` function in matlab) gives an 87.8% sampled likelihood that the intervention reduces the conditional risk (intervention(i) This is suggestive (but not…

“Absolutely remarkable” was removed from the HN headline since I posted this.

Thanks for running through the math; I’m guessing we came to the same conclusion about the strength of the evidence.

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh, yes, ModeRNA's vaccine is some very clever stuff. The way that one works is a bit complex. Essentially, they still want your immune system to recognize that the virus is bad and then make antibodies against it. Usually, you inject broken up bits of a dead virus into a person. The immune system sees the foreign objects, and makes antibodies against it. Withe ModeRNA's vaccine, we go inside out. You have the body…

> Through some complex bio-chem, the mRNA that codes for the spike protein gets into your cells Is this bio-chem designed by Moderna, or is it just a property of the mRNA? Does all mRNA follow the same path into the cell?

I believe Moderna has a patent on their methods; it is not a property of mRNA in general.

Not all mRNA follows the path that the Moderna vaccine uses.

Someone else please chime in if I am wrong here, but their method is basically use little lipid micelles (fat micro-blobs) that cover the mRNA. Because of some biochem, these micelles can then enter a healthy cell and disgorge the mRNA. This is kinda how a virus works as well. However, these micelles seem to be very fragile, hence the very cold temperatures needed for transport.

Once in the cell the mRNA then diffuses and is translated by ribosomes into protiens

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#326
post #48

Does anybody have a good link for a layman's overview of how mRNA vaccines work? Lot's of nervousness from people around this, and would love to be able to help quell some of that.

Normally cells use DNA to make mRNA, which are recipes for building proteins. In this case, the proteins are antigens used to fight COVID.

mRNA vaccines give the bits needed to skip to the last step in the process. Notably, there is nothing about "genetics" involved here.

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an atheist more or less and I agree with this sentiment. I'm not fond of transhumanism. But I don't think the mRNA vaccine process fits this description.

Why aren't you fond of transhumanism? At some point medicine and technology will advance so much that we can save and improve many lives by replacing bits of ourselves with superior artificial variants. Is that so bad?

I don't even care about the risks. It's about changing the rules so much that we don't know what game we're even playing. If you stop caring what's technically a human anymore, you have to reconsider the imperative to propagate the human race. Who are you propagating and why? What's the point of any of it anyway?

Granted I'm disinclined to propagate the human race anyway, so I guess I may actually be ahead of you.

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#328
post #91
post #8

Yeah but imagine being dumb enough to get infected and very sick over the next month before you can get both shots next year. Because there are going to be thousands, maybe millions who do that in the USA alone for no good reason.

I just recovered from it. I'm pretty sure I got it walking out of a grocery store. I was wearing a mask, and was walking by another older man who was also wearing a mask and standing at the exit. He was hacking and coughing so hard that the mask did nothing. I tried to hold my breath as I got until I got outside, but it was to no avail. About four days later, I developed flu like symptoms. Sometimes, it doesn't matte…

There's also such a thing as ocular transmission to consider, maybe that was a factor in your case:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7537833/

Did you have any conjunctivitis-like symptoms?

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#329
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree we should have a vaccine, I do not agree with mandatory shutdowns and all the negative down stream side effects which are PROVEN to be larger than the disease itself.

Gonna need a citation on that all caps “proven.”

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

#330
post #328
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just recovered from it. I'm pretty sure I got it walking out of a grocery store. I was wearing a mask, and was walking by another older man who was also wearing a mask and standing at the exit. He was hacking and coughing so hard that the mask did nothing. I tried to hold my breath as I got until I got outside, but it was to no avail. About four days later, I developed flu like symptoms. Sometimes, it doesn't matte…

There's also such a thing as ocular transmission to consider, maybe that was a factor in your case: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7537833/ Did you have any conjunctivitis-like symptoms?

No. I didn't have the taste and smell sensory symptoms either.

I did have hive like blistering down my left thigh though.

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