Current RNA vaccines protect against worrying coronavirus variants • Hacker News Board

Re: Current RNA vaccines protect against worrying coronavirus variants

#281

Post by dnautics » Tue, May 11, 2021, 3:43 PM UTC

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #77

dnautics wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I advocate getting vaccinated (I am myself) but if people don't want to put foreign substances into their bodies, we should respect their choices, especially since the long-term risk profile is unknown (we are pretty sure it's safe, but who can know?)

We can. There have been hundreds of millions of doses administered and we are keeping track of the side effects.

there are some things you can't know without time travel. what happens after having the vaccine for 5 years? 10? The immune system is strange. There are very few mRNA vaccines that have been deployed to date. Can you be sure you aren't, for example, at elevated risk for something like MS? You can't. Again, I say this as someone who made the choice to get the vaccine. The worst thing about conspiracy theories is that some of them are true. If you don't like people being "anti-science", then the one thing you CANNOT do is shove scientifically irresponsible stuff down their throat in the name of expediency.

Re: Current RNA vaccines protect against worrying coronavirus variants

#282

Post by loveistheanswer » Tue, May 11, 2021, 3:43 PM UTC

o-__-o wrote: post #208

senectus1 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the big diff between a vaccine and a previous infection is that the vaccine doesn't damage your body in the process of training your body to attack it. Covid can wreck havoc on your body and leave it in a weaker state.

20 million people already had the virus. I’m one of them. Are we the red headed step child that we have forgotten about? Let me change the perspective: when I get the flu because I stupidly did not get the flu shot that year, I don’t rush out and get the flu shot after the fact. I’m wondering why I would do the same with this vaccine when there are lots of evidence that first rounders are not likely to be infected ev…

I've been asking this same question and have yet to hear a very convincing answer.

The best answer I've heard is: it will give you "extra immunity".

Which begs the follow on question, if we're so concerned about topping off our immunity, why shouldn't people get vaccinated and revaccinated every month or two?

Re: Current RNA vaccines protect against worrying coronavirus variants

#283

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 11, 2021, 3:44 PM UTC

bart_spoon wrote: post #261

miked85 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but what do you propose? We will never have 100% of people get the vaccine due to either personal choice or medical conditions.

Right now, there is no cost to not being vaccinated, but it does cause damage to society. Its an economic externality. So we should do same thing we do with any other externalities such as pollution: you legislate to bring cost in line with the damage being imposed on others. I don't think this should mean jail time, but anything from being barred from public spaces like schools or government jobs, to tax penalties,…

[deleted]

Re: Current RNA vaccines protect against worrying coronavirus variants

#284

Post by selimthegrim » Tue, May 11, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

nickthemagicman wrote: post #223

bawolff wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Im social distancing, wearing a mask doing all the things necessary Those things are emergency measures, that are important, but not anywhere near as effective as vaccines are. They stop things from rapidly spiraling out of control so instead they just slowly spiral. Its a holding action, one with a pretty high cost, not a solution. > that has been rushed through trials They've had the same amount of safety testing…

They're choosing to become immune naturally instead of pumping an experimental drug into his body. If they're under 55 and healthy they're actually doing a good thing by letting people who actually need the vaccine get it. It's arguable that actually getting the vaccine if you're healthy and young is selfish by stopping someone who needs it from getting it. Think if all the people in India and Brazil had the vaccines…

Do you think India has time now for “natural immunity”?

Re: Current RNA vaccines protect against worrying coronavirus variants

#285

Post by dnautics » Tue, May 11, 2021, 3:51 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #260

dnautics wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I advocate getting vaccinated (I am myself) but if people don't want to put foreign substances into their bodies, we should respect their choices, especially since the long-term risk profile is unknown (we are pretty sure it's safe, but who can know?)

Cars and certain power plants dump toxic chemicals into the air and occasionally the water supply. Society doesn't give anyone the option to opt out of putting these known toxins in their bodies because we can't. Society either has electricity & cars, thus poisons everyone, or it doesn't. The best we can do is work to mitigate the negative impacts. We are at the the point where society needs people to receive a vacci…

your assumption is that threatening mandatory compliance is better than voluntary compliance. Humans are irrational and sometimes resist doing the right thing when force them to. Surely you have had the experience that being forced to read a book for school has ruined it, or resisted doing something you wanted to do just because your parent made you do it. If instead you work harder to get assent and consent, your vaccination rate might be higher than if you threaten to hammer it in. Especially in a society where voluntary compliance and resistance to authority is in its social DNA, like the united states.

Re: Current RNA vaccines protect against worrying coronavirus variants

#286

Post by tialaramex » Tue, May 11, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

cmckn wrote: post #157

tialaramex wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not quite no downside. It may be inconvenient (especially if you live in a country where you can't necessarily get time off work to seek medical treatment) and you're quite likely to have a sore arm. Some people experience fever, headaches, or other annoying symptoms for a day or even longer. I had a powerful craving for a kebab, at like 0400 when all the kebab shops are closed, maybe a coincidence, but maybe no…

I totally take your point, but frankly, I’m not interested in convincing someone who would avoid the vax because of the (minor, very manageable) side effects. I’ll let the public health folks tackle that one ;) I honestly hoped I had more side effects! You know you’re not getting sick, so a mild fever? Kind of a perverse pleasure.

With the AstraZeneca vaccine (and presumably J&J would be similar) a consideration is that the side effects you see might actually have to do with the platform itself.

Unlike the mRNA platforms, these vaccines use an existing virus to make the spike proteins. Specifically, an Adenovirus (so the sort of thing that might be implicated in some colds) but which ordinarily thrives in Chimpanzees instead of Humans, so they can have confidence you aren't immune to it already. The virus is altered to tell human cells to make the protein chosen by the engineers (for COVID-19 this was the spike protein from the SARS-CoV-2 virus); and not more copies of itself, once the copies in the vaccine injection are cleaned up (typically a few hours to a few days) the virus is gone, so you can't "catch" the virus.

But of course your immune system has no particular reason not to destroy this (harmless) Chimp virus meanwhile, it shouldn't be in your body, so it's every bit as much a target as the spike proteins we want immunity against.

Thus, it's certainly possible any fever one particular patient suffers is a side effect from their immune defence against this poor harmless chimp adenovirus, and nothing to do with SARS-nCOV-2 or its spike protein. No way to tell for sure I believe.

Re: Current RNA vaccines protect against worrying coronavirus variants

#287

Post by Pyramus » Tue, May 11, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

MockObject wrote: post #275

Pyramus wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't get the vaccine without anamnesis/checking your medical history, and one item is prior infection.

Not in the US. I got my first vaccine shot, Moderna, with no medical consultation at all. Nobody asked me if I'd gotten Covid already. And I had never heard about this six month interval until this moment.

Interesting, could you elaborate more?

The six month interval is not a universal truth but the recommendation by the German regulator [1].

[1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/50476/do-the-co...

Re: Current RNA vaccines protect against worrying coronavirus variants

#288

Post by MockObject » Tue, May 11, 2021, 4:35 PM UTC

Pyramus wrote: post #287

MockObject wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the US. I got my first vaccine shot, Moderna, with no medical consultation at all. Nobody asked me if I'd gotten Covid already. And I had never heard about this six month interval until this moment.

Interesting, could you elaborate more? The six month interval is not a universal truth but the recommendation by the German regulator [1]. [1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/50476/do-the-co...

What would you like me to elaborate exactly?

Re: Current RNA vaccines protect against worrying coronavirus variants

#289

Post by valarauko » Tue, May 11, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #76

sigmaprimus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Canada so it is age based. I'm guessing it will be either Pfizer or Moderna both of which are mRNA which from my understanding is a form of gene therapy. My main concern at the moment is: Just as the virus can mutate during it's replicatative phase and produce variants why can't the spiked protien during it's production or the cells producing it mutate also? If these production cells can mutate or the spike…

The very TLDR response to this is that MRNA is temporary and not self-replicating. Within a few hours of being administered, all the MRNA in the vaccine has been broken down by the body into amino acids. MRNA can't mutate because it doesn't replicate. It just produces proteins.

Slight caveats:

The mRNA in the vaccines have been engineered to resist degradation in the body, and stick around for as much as 2 weeks. Also, they degrade to nucleotides.

Re: Current RNA vaccines protect against worrying coronavirus variants

#290

Post by Retric » Tue, May 11, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

bart_spoon wrote: post #267

Retric wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “reproducibility crisis” is largely overblown. Individual scientific papers have always been close to junk on average. Look at a wide swath of papers from say the 1950’s or even 1850’s and you see not just poor methods but also outright fraud.

It absolutely isn't overblown, and "individual scientific papers have always been close to junk on average" is a pretty damning indictment. Meta-studies have found that, depending on the field, up to 70% of published papers can't be reproduced. I'm not sure its possible for considering that a crisis to ever be "overblown".

Even 30% of papers being reproducible is orders of magnitude better than random chance. That’s the signal that pushes science forward.

As to old papers, go back to the 1950’s and plate tectonics was still being debated. What do you think the other geological papers where based on? When you read a specific older paper it’s generally because it stood the test fo time, but that’s just selection bias.