RNA vaccines have a huge potential in treating cancer as well. Basically, you can whip up a personalized vaccine which wakes the immune system up to the fact that it has a growing tumor on its hands. So far, the success rate is very far from 100 per cent, but the therapy sometimes works even in patients with severe late stage metastatized cancer and, in all likelihood, we will learn how to use it better in coming yea…
No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19
401–410 of 436 posts
Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19
#402Is it true that the flesh of murdered babies (embryonic stem cells) was used during the research for this vaccine?
I don’t think this should be downvoted just because it’s crass. In a way its crassness illustrates an important point. We have a vocabulary for abortion which very deliberately avoids confronting the simple fact that it involves killing an unborn child. That is the choice in pro-choice. Anyway, yeah, we make valuable things out of dead unborn babies. It’s a hell of a silver lining.
murdered, usually.
I'd love to know if they were used in the making of this particular vaccine.
Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19
#403Is it true that the flesh of murdered babies (embryonic stem cells) was used during the research for this vaccine?
I dunno but my understanding is there are completely ethical ways to obtain embryonic stem cells for research.
Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19
#404I don’t see it in the article but the majority of the work for this and other mRNA vaccines was done by a lab at the US government NIH which has been working on stabilizing coronavirus spike proteins for years now in collaboration with university labs. Moderna and other companies have supplied the platforms for distributing the mRNA coding the protein. There’s a great lecture [1] from an NIH researcher that covers th…
Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, it seems a tad reckless to make the first attempt at vaccination with this method one that targets the entire world population.
Given the desperate times, it actually seems like an ideal time. Even if there is some unknown side-effect, it only has to be less worse than the current situation to still be a net benefit.
Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
In order to produce a personalized anti-cancer RNA vaccine, you need to a) do a biopsy of the tumor and some healthy tissue, which is fairly cheap, b) do genetic analysis of those samples to find the differences. This used to be prohibitively expensive, but now is fairly cheap too, the price went down six (!) orders of magnitude since 2000, c) ask specialized software to find the optimal protein set to express. This…
If the total course of treatment is closer to $40000 or $4000 then it doesn’t seem unreasonable for insurance to cover it.
If it's $40,000 yeah -- still that's on par with the cost of an ER visit for a traumatic injury and a couple of days as an in-patient, exactly the sort of thing you have insurance for.
Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19
#407Is it true that the flesh of murdered babies (embryonic stem cells) was used during the research for this vaccine?
I don’t think this should be downvoted just because it’s crass. In a way its crassness illustrates an important point. We have a vocabulary for abortion which very deliberately avoids confronting the simple fact that it involves killing an unborn child. That is the choice in pro-choice. Anyway, yeah, we make valuable things out of dead unborn babies. It’s a hell of a silver lining.
Since there are opposing strongly held viewpoints on abortion and neither can be proven to be more correct than the other - neutral language seems like the best way forward.
You can claim the language is biased, but as a medical procedure it’s coded in all the same language as any other medical procedure - which seems to me to be the neutral thing to do. How you feel about the emotional or moral content of a medical procedure is separate from what is done.
To take a less emotional example - I think genetically modified organisms are basically a bad thing, but that doesn’t make the term wrong - calling them monsterplants would make me happy but it’s not more accurate and it linguistically enforces a viewpoint that is not “correct” just because i happen to hold it (for many nuanced reasons i won’t go into here)
Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19
#408Is it true that the flesh of murdered babies (embryonic stem cells) was used during the research for this vaccine?
I dunno but my understanding is there are completely ethical ways to obtain embryonic stem cells for research.
Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19
#409Is it true that the flesh of murdered babies (embryonic stem cells) was used during the research for this vaccine?
But anyhow, to answer your question despite the terrible way it was asked, no, the Moderna vaccine did not use embryonic stem cells in its development or production. Some partners, such as NIAID, did use embryonic stem cells for in-vitro testing of the vaccine: http://phillycatholiclife.org/life-affirming-choices-3/covid..., but the Catholic church does not consider that to make the Moderna vaccine unethical, as it's its direct development and production have never involved the use of embryonic stem cells.
Re: No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that I agree with the parent but isn't technically mRNA used to "hack" DNA to make it synthesize a specific protein?
no. DNA doesn't synthesize proteins. Roughly: Protein descriptions are "read" from DNA into mRNA, which is then used by ribosomes to synthesize proteins. An mRNA vaccine adds additional mRNA with instructions to synthesize the vaccine-specific protein to the cells. So it uses some of the same mechanisms that are also used to generate proteins from DNA, but does not involve DNA itself.
Perhaps people are getting mRNA vaccines confused with CRISPR, which _is_ a technique to modify DNA.