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Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines
331–340 of 649 posts
Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "magic" from vaccinations comes from vaccinating most of the population so that the epidemic fizzles out. In that scenario it doesn't matter that much whether you personally are vaccinated or not. An unvaccinated person benefits from herd immunity like a vaccinated person does. From the viewpoint of a healthy young person, the risk/reward ratio of taking a vaccine is bad.
> From the viewpoint of a healthy young person, the risk/reward ratio of taking a vaccine is bad. Absolutely false. The disease can and does have severe and sometimes long-lasting impacts on young healthy people. The mRNA vaccines don't have any impact worse than a sore arm. And we aren't getting to a herd immunity level of vaccination if young people are unvaccinated.
> The mRNA vaccines don't have any impact worse than a sore arm.
Lets not go too far with statements like that. People with history of allergic reactions are told to not take it, and the Pfizer–BioNTech mRNA has a rate of about eleven cases per million doses of vaccine administered.
As with any medicine, there are a risk/reward aspect to it. If you take a over-the-counter pain pill there is a small but detectable risk of getting a serious side effect. Most people still take it because the reward out weight the risk.
I would rather go with the carrot then the stick when it comes to getting people vaccinated. Getting a vaccination protects against some of the really unlucky consequences of covid, including permanent injuries like decreased lung capacity. The risk involving the vaccine is to my understanding much lower, so the math comes out in favor of the vaccine.
Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines
#333Absolutely agree with everything Linus says here. But I'm almost equally concerned that there's an awful lot of people on the pro-science bandwagon who don't actually support science, but simply don't tolerate dissent or questioning, and that's unscientific and potentially harmful too. I scanned most of the Pfizer trial and was wondering why we expected the immunity after the vaccine to last longer than natural immun…
If you read Linus's post then it seems that no mRNA sequence (not necessarily a vaccine) can ever do harm when injected into the body, but I doubt that is the case. I hope someone who is knowledgeable about the subject can explain whether that is true or not.
It is unclear to me (having just re-read Linus's post) where you see the claim that an mRNA cannot do harm. He says it cannot be incorporated into the genome, which is true of the Covid vaccine RNAs but not necessarily true in general (one could inject the RNA of a retrovirus). But the Covid19 vaccine mRNA simply makes the spike protein and (I'm sure they checked) does not get incorporated into the genome.
Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The process is very complicated and beautiful And all the molecular machinery in our body is much more complex than any software system.
It had a bit more time to develop :) But, I don't think some software systems are far off, particularly if you are a bit more permissive with the boundaries of a "system". I don't know really how to compare such apples to oranges, but the genetic material of a human is just a single gigabyte. Now i know that a gigabyte C++ program is not on par with a gigabyte of DNA, but a terabyte of code? Maybe? We're definitely a…
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Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines
#335I cant +1 this enough. Thank you, Linus for standing up to the wealth of misinformation out there and holding his ground.
> Thank you, Linus for standing up to the wealth of misinformation out there and holding his ground. Being a pompous ass might feel good, especially when you think you are (or you actually are) smarter than your opponent, but it won't sway anyone. In fact, it does quite the opposite. If you're seriously trying to convince someone they're wrong, you need to be kind, be patient, and have a calm, productive discussion -…
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Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If that's the case, could the proteins coded by the mRNA potentially have kicked off such a response? Why would they? And more specifically, why would they cause lung issues? Because that's the main problem with COVID. The virus like to bind to cells that have a specific receptors, with the vast majority contained in lung tissue. You would expect to see major damage near the injection site if your cytokine storm th…
> If there is a mechanism that will cause side effects on mRNA vaccines, then such mechanism will also be presented in the virus. You're forgetting about the lipids the vaccine mRNA is put into. One big reason it took so long to create mRNA vaccines was finding a suitable lipid mix. They need to have a specific property, they need to be electrically charged in a certain way, and pretty much all lipids with that prope…
Just for reference, for those that won't read the articles you link to:
The conclusion of the article is that these lipids are safe, with a recommendation for further study. The article is from 2016, no ill effects were found since then
Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines
#337But Linus is not a doctor or biologist, so no expertise to speak of. And the infection rate dropped to almost zero last summer as well, no vaccine in sight at the time.
He's not a doctor, but considered as a God by a certain crowd, which allow his to spread the Gospel.
"Thou shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain"
Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines
#338I am eagerly awaiting my vaccine, however we are all alpha/beta testers. A real concern is about safety of those vaccines as typically they require ~3 years of testing and a single fatality aborts their use. Would you give alpha version to people you love? Why is this concern downplayed? I understand statistics but we have no clue what could go wrong in an early version of a new technology and no data on long-term im…
The technology itself has been around for decades, so it’s not new tech, nor is it an early version. The underlying tech barriers have been worked at for years, and that’s one of the reasons the vaccines were developed so quickly for SARS-CoV-2: very few parts of the an mRNA vaccine need to change to target a specific virus.
Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines
#339Ivermectin and HCQ sure got shut down hard even though recent studies are giving them some credit. If they had been a valid option, emergency use authorisation wouldn't have been granted. I honestly don't know what to think about all of this. I've seen a lot of censorship and stifling of speech. Reading Fauci's emails also makes me hesitate. I think trust in the experts will really take a hit going forward. I did get…
>If they had been a valid option, emergency use authorisation wouldn't have been granted. You don't want to treat a disease (especially with drugs that have their own problems), you want to prevent it from happening in the first place. Vaccines help prevent it, and so would still have gotten authorized.
Agree but these two options weren't given a fair chance by Fauci. He clearly had conflicts of interest. The emergency use authorisation wouldn't have been granted if he had. These are viable alternatives. Quercetin is another one and much more benign.
Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The process is very complicated and beautiful And all the molecular machinery in our body is much more complex than any software system.
It had a bit more time to develop :) But, I don't think some software systems are far off, particularly if you are a bit more permissive with the boundaries of a "system". I don't know really how to compare such apples to oranges, but the genetic material of a human is just a single gigabyte. Now i know that a gigabyte C++ program is not on par with a gigabyte of DNA, but a terabyte of code? Maybe? We're definitely a…
> It had a bit more time to develop
And it wasn't planned, but evolved. No plan, no developer. Hard to imagine.
> the genetic material of a human is just a single gigabyte
Indeed apples and oranges [*]. As long as we don't know all functions of this molecular machinery (and there is a very good chance we will never know all those functions) all comparisons with programming languages are pure speculations. Some "subsystems" seem to be representable by "programming languages" (as long as one ignores many unknowns and special cases). But the complexity not only happens on molecular level.
> comes from the massive parallelism of the code execution
A very daring comparison.
[*] EDIT: mind that the genetic material e.g. assumes all the laws of physics and chemistry (also those we do not yet know) which are not explicitly encoded.