As Campbell asked, why has it been left to Danish researchers (who were doing Hepatitis C testing and decided to tack on an assay for covid jab mod-spike mRNA) to look into these questions? Why haven't Moderna or Pfizer undertaken large-scale studies of this type? Why haven't they been mandated by large regulatory agencies in the USA, UK, et al.; Japan; etc.? Why haven't well-funded researchers in those nations done similar work?
We're so far downstream from the initial rollout that nobody seems to recall the blanket assurances that all of the mRNA in the shots would be taken up and translated into modified spike proteins in a very short period given by health authorities and putative experts during the height of the coercion campaigns.
It's much the same as with the issue of biodistribution. Most have forgotten why we were promised the contents of one of these shots remained at the injection site and how the practice of aspiration of the needle (done in Denmark, after concerns were raised, but rarely done elsewhere) was pooh-poohed. The same individuals and entities preached the stays-in-the-arm gospel and derided anyone who raised concern or produced research results indicating wider distribution, via the vasculature, throughout recipients' bodies.
The same people who promulgate the idea that VAERS and the Yellow Card system and analogous institutions are now honeypots for fake reports from Russian bots or the "Science Truster' bogeyman du jour.
Oh well. Spilled milk at this point. The revelations will continue to trickle out for the foreseeable future. Turnover in the upper echelons of regulatory and funding bodies and in academic biomed research will gradually loosen more tongues. Eventually, there may be large lawsuits and settlements. We will see.
I'm no medical professional but this seems like a bit of an over reaction given the article. The article doesn't make mention if there is anything particularly negative about this. More focuses on the behavior of the mRNA after a given time.
I imagine to know something like that would be useful for later itterarations or variations of mRNA applications?
Making cells in your body produce an antigen that stays rooted within those cells and causes them to be destroyed is risky business. There are reasonable applications, like products selectively taken up by cancer cells that cause them to be targeted for elimination by the patient's immune system, for these techniques. And wider applications for products that cause a patient's cells to produce non-antigenic materials. I'm a proponent of mRNA therapies.
The mRNA (and adenovirus-vector) covid shots, however, indiscriminately cause (healthy) cells to produce and display antigens (the transmembrane-anchored modified covid spike) and, intentionally, kick off an immune response that gets those cells killed. I'm not a proponent of this specific type of pharmaceutical product.
> kick off an immune response that gets those cells killed.
I am not a scientist but I was to ask if this was the case for every vaccine, yet I reflected that no in pre-mRNA vaccines the principle is different: You body cells are not primed to produce an antigen. The antigen is brought externally and T-cells recognize it. They kill only infected cells.
If I understand correctly in mRNA vaccines, all cells produce the antigen (the spike protein) so they are indiscriminately killed by T-cells.
There are plenty of vaccines that use attenuated viruses - these also force your cells to produce antigens, and in fact the virus reproduces in your cells and damages them on its own as well. You could think of an mRNA vaccine as kind of like an attenuated virus vaccine, except for the fact that it can’t reproduce itself at all, unlike a virus.
JPLeRouzic's point about indiscriminate expression is significant though.
The tiny lipid bubbles used to introduce the (recent mRNA-)vaccines should introduce foreign nucleic acids (RNA,DNA) just on the basis of there being a cell membrane to merge into, whereas virions ('virus particles'), attenuated strain or not, would typically (always?) co-opt some receptor or other trans-membrane molecule, other than the membrane phospholipids, to aid their introduction of foreign nucleic acids.
In other words, the virions are at least somewhat restricted/targeted in what cell types they enter, and in many cases even the susceptible cells can in principle affect their level of susceptibility by regulating how much of those co-opted molecules are created, or allowed to be transported to the surface. (Innate immune response includes cells generally becoming more wary about how they transport materials and metabolize molecules we might describe as carrying information)
So it's a prefectly good description, in my opinion, that
> [for these] mRNA vaccines, all cells produce the antigen (the spike protein) so they are indiscriminately killed by T-cells.
although there are indeed aspects which are similar with live vaccines.
There is in fact a conventional vaccine for Covid, but most people are not aware nor do we have access to it. The inventors did not patent it but made it a gift to the world. Buy hey, money and "do as I say". Oh it's called Corbevax.
Your comment raises two main straw-men. Neither of which seem to be supported by facts.
What stay-in-the-arms gospel are you talking about?
What reason do you have, besides Campbell's baseless assertion, that such large-scale studies of nucleic acid persistence has not been performed?
Not going to dig for a source, but we were told that the spike proteins only get produced at the injection site. There was evidence that the spikes do damage and people were told not to worry because they didn't float around the bloodstream - this seemed obviously false to me, but whatever. Turns out the RNA goes everywhere now.
The problem isn't these facts. The problem is health authorities and companies destroying their own credibility with some more critical people.
Because they know already. Many patient died from these jab DIRECTLY. But of course everyone must ignored it. You can see many medical researchers hesitant to research on this topics let alone getting published and then peer-reviewed. Personally I've known people dying DIRECTLY of the jab within 2 days of it. And I know many knowing someone died and not hearing from someone else someone else story. And yet, here even medical doctors have been cautioned not to speak about it or will face consequences not only from pro-vac group but government or medical board displine. So at this point, we will just have to keep it quiet until #1 a lot of people been affected like thalidomide years ago, or #2 nothing happens, and those did died are just collateral damages.
I find it quite remarkable how virtually everything about the last 3 years has been built up using appeals to authority such as yours.
It’s kind of funny how so many supposedly open minded people who thrive on questioning authority seem to all just fall into line when it comes to Covid.
I really wish the “are you an expert? No? I well than shut up and fall in line” argument would die in a fire. It is essential to be intellectually curious. It’s essential to question authority. In fact, it is vital to for both to be encouraged. Both science and democracy depend on it.
The more people say “shut up and listen to ‘the experts’” the more I get skeptical. True experts don’t derive their powers through appeals to authority. They get their powers by being humble and knowing they barely know anything. The science is never settled. Question everything.
The appeals to authority are a response to the flood of online discussions by people that are confused by what “doing research” means and suffer from Dunning-Kruger. I don’t want to read any “just asking questions” comments about COVID or the vaccines unless the people have years of experience working in the field prior to the pandemic, because it filters out the armchair experts that we have so many of.
What’s funny to me is that not everything evokes this much scrutiny as vaccines. Why do relatively few people care about what they’re putting into their bodies via the products they find at the grocery store vs a jab in their arms?
They’re not novel in as in a box of cookies is a box of cookies, but you bet your ass that the manufacturers are constantly innovating new ingredients and processes to make their products ever more shelf stable and inexpensive. Same goes for cleaning supplies and similar things you can find in the grocery store.
“Appealing to authority” when it comes to deeply technical topics is the only sane approach because otherwise the zone is just flooded with morons who don’t understand the first thing about the topic promoting ivermectin or other random snake oils.
Do you think there’s some forum deep in the bowels of academia where immunologist and virologists are neck-deep in discussions about cryptographic hash functions?
I’m sure these threads have a huge selection bias because they become so toxic so quickly, but the quality of discussion on HN for anything Covid is one of the most confidently wrong places on the internet.
Why would a COVID denier be concerned about vaccine safety? They already didn’t take the vaccine. I think somebody who’d taken the vaccine might be concerned.
Because they often aren’t rational people. Are you unaware of the conspiracy theory. Ring passed around that people who got the vaccine are now tainted?
The article mentions they ran the study from May until June, and detected mRNA 28 days after administration... I didn't see mentioned if the test period expired or if they stopped because it became undetectable. I wonder if it can be detected longer if they measured longer?
The more worrying thing here is the "circulate" part. Meaning that the lipid packages containing the mRNA sequences are traveling throughout the body, instead of staying at the injection site.
"When mRNA-LNPs were injected intramuscularly and intratracheally, similar to intravenous and intraperitoneal deliveries, a large portion of the luciferase activity was detectable in the liver, demonstrating systemic spread of the nanoparticles."
Yes, and people like Bret Weinstein say this is a massive problem and why there’s heart inflammation, if the mrna enters heart muscle your immune system might well attack it, the problem is - heart muscle does not get remade.
The problem with this is that there's simpler explanations. Myocarditis is more frequent with C19 infection than vaccination, so it seems spike protein circulating is "enough".
Also this study didn't find significant uptake of mRNA in the heart (though it did find notable uptake in the lungs).
The Mycocarditis line is not true - it highly depends on gender and age. Repeating that its more frequent for infection outright is wrong, it is only in certain sub-populations (female, older).
Moderna does seem to have an effect in the direction you name; the Pfizer vaccine seems to have a lower risk than infection in all categories. Overall, the myocarditis risk is lower with vaccination than infection with both Moderna and Pfizer, but it may not be in some subpopulations with Moderna.
It’s such a dumb topic too - because when you focus solely on the myocarditis risk stratification between Covid and the vaccine, you lose sight of all of the other morbidities that come with Covid. It’s like that video making the rounds right now where Bill Maher is trumpeting that the infection provides as strong protection against severe disease compared to the vaccine. Cool! Not actually surprising but kind of misses the obvious point that it involves you getting Covid, a serious, highly
transmissible disease, when you could get the same protection without the illness.. I guess you could use the evidence to adjust guidance on vaccine schedule but protection still wanes over time so..
Finland, Denmark and Sweden recommend against getting vaccination for young men as they have almost no risk with Covid outside of extreme co-morbidities.
They didn't actually do that - and you should change your media diet if you sincerely believe that they did.
Denmark is probably the most stark -- after they had >80% uptake in their initial vaccination drive and then Omicron proved to be less dangerous, they no longer recommend boosters for under 50s unless you have risk factors.
Sweden still recommends 3 doses for everyone over the age of 18 (https://www.krisinformation.se/en/hazards-and-risks/disaster....) They no longer recommend that all children receive the vaccine but that's a much more neutral stance than "recommend against getting it".
So they did stop recommending it? Tbh I’m not tracking every countries exact status and don’t need to to make the point, in fact your citations only strengthen it.
There’s are a whole list of countries that have backed off recommending vaccines for the young and that alone is enough to disprove your attempt to dismiss a very, very important topic.
By doing so you potentially have moral responsibility to men who may be missing out on critical info that could save their lives. The data supports it and the fact that many very pro vaccine countries are now stepping back their recommendation is a massive positive indicator that it’s worth discussing.
I don’t have to prove beyond a doubt it’s unsafe, just that there’s gray area. You meanwhile called any gray area dumb, and therefore need to prove beyond a doubt that it has clear benefit to young men. It doesn’t.
And yes the banning of Moderna is a huge, massive piece data because we know it’s much worse re: Myocarditis. So we basically know for a fact it’s a bad trade off for young men. Pfizer would require your own research but again it’s not clear it’s even neutral. So why argue it’s dumb to even discus? This is the sort of weird argumentation I’ve seen throughout the pandemic where it’s like a religion that can’t ever admit faults lest it all come apart. You can admit there were mistakes and are flaws, it’s ok, it doesn’t ruin your belief system at all.
Finland and Sweden suggest 3 doses for everybody over 18; Finland recommends vaccine for everyone.
None recommend against vaccine in children.
This is very, very, very far from "recommend against getting vaccination for young men" which is simply wrong (uninformed or bad faith?) They all recommend young men get vaccinated.
I was very careful to say they withdrew recommending it, which is true.
Now the interesting convo is why they did that, which you seem to be keen to avoid.
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Not to mention its easy to bring in tons more data to show it's worth a discussion. Whether countries recommend for/against is weak, but still here a strong signal because these countries have been very pro-vaccine and naturally will avoid admitting things to protect themselves, so any admission is big.
The realest question here is why? Why try and cordon this scientific discussion away as off-limits when it's clearly an evolving and unsettled story. I'm so curious to figure out exactly what's going on and follow the research. Just feels strange to come in blasting saying you know the truth and this topic is settled when it clearly isn't. Why?
> Finland, Denmark and Sweden recommend against getting vaccination for young men
"Withdrew recommending" is them reverting to a neutral stance -- "recommended against" is very much not neutral - and it's still wrong in either case because 2/3 countries you listed still recommend for vaccinating all young men.
It's so tiringly frustrating to discuss any of this with antivaxxers. Your language is so imprecise and sloppy that it's impossible to have anything resembling a productive conversation. I provided links to the actual policies published by the actual countries here and your response is just spamming with vaguely related news articles and insinuations instead of a moment's reflection that maybe, just maybe, your confidence in your understanding of any of this is misplaced.
Avoid using "anti-vaxx" to describe everyone that disagrees with exactly your opinions, it really hurts your argument.
Try defending your point rather than name calling.
I will agree my "against" wording was a bit strong but I corrected it in the last reply anyway, so again this isn't a gotcha. But I'm very much closer to truth than saying they are still recommending it, you changed the denominator to over-18.
Withdrawing a recommendation is recommending against of course - if someone says they recommend to do something, they say they DON'T recommend to do it, and I told you "the government is no longer recommending youth take it based on efficacy and Myocarditis risks" who would you think that statement more supports in this thread? My arguments or yours? It's very clear.
It's also the strongest we could reasonably expect as governments are very conservative and self-interested.
Every article linked is relevant.
Meanwhile you are doing exactly what you want to do - distract from the fact that this is a real issue by trying to bury the conversation behind a bunch of sequiturs about pedantism, language, name calling, exasperation, etc.
I think the data still supports what I said, even in that article, but also if you want to be really accurate you'd need a meta review of a variety of articles I've read now in detail, and my general intuition is its clear that < ~30yr old men are higher risk.
The mRNA-based covid shots (and the adenovirus-vector covid shots) are a wee bit different in how they operate than pre-covid vaccines.
Modified covid spike proteins are produced by host (i.e. a vaccinee's) cells. The spike proteins are anchored within the cells but "poke out" through the cellular membranes so they're able to elicit an immune system response.
The cells expressing the mod-spike are ultimately destroyed. If you review pop-sci / marketing materials produced by Pfizer and Moderna and government agencies and non-profits who promoted the shots, the fate of these cells will be glossed over, but that's what happens.
This is why it was important that the contents of the jabs stayed in the muscle tissue near the injection site and the process of translating all of the vax mRNA into mod-spike be rapid. If vax mRNA travelled around via the circulatory system and was taken up by cells in, say, the walls of blood vessels throughout the body or cells in the heart or pericardium or in other tissues, then some cells in those locales would be destroyed and, if enough cells in the wrong place at the wrong time were destroyed this way, bad things could happen. Observing vax mRNA persisting or existing weeks and weeks post-administration is not good for this (and additional) reasons.
Everything he's saying is common knowledge to anyone who has researched this topic. Having a background in bioscience would not help and most likely hurt, because people within those fields are highly incentivized to suppress bad news about their prior actions.
> If vax mRNA travelled around via the circulatory system and was taken up by cells in, say, the walls of blood vessels throughout the body or cells in the heart or pericardium or in other tissues, then some cells in those locales would be destroyed…
This is something that you would consider to be common knowledge?
To anyone who has researched this topic, yes, and many other things. How do you think the mRNA vaccines work? If you got interested in vaccines around the middle of 2021 and started finding and subscribing to the right blogs and people, you know a whole lot of things about this topic that other people don't. These sorts of threads are a bit frustrating because it involves watching people catch up to where we were 12 months ago.
Can you link me to the papers that make that particular paragraph obvious?
Also can you elaborate on why having prior knowledge on this topic disqualifies you from being knowledgeable on this topic?
Wouldn’t the papers you’ve read have been written by people in the field of immunology or bioscience? How are those people not disqualified due to prior knowledge?
edit: Also please elaborate on how I identify the “right” blogs.
Sorry this is frustrating for you. I do not regularly come to HN for biology knowledge from software devs that can’t seem to provide any sources or credentials. What GP is trying to convey comes pretty close to medical advice and “people that have studied this professionally are categorically untrustworthy” seems a bit like some uh, less than germane bullshit, to be frank.
1. The vaccines cause cells to take up the mRNA and express the spike on their surface. This is uncontroversial and covered in any detailed enough intro to how the vaccines work, see the diagram here for an example:
2. This results in the cells being destroyed. This is exactly what you'd expect if you've sat through teen-level biology classes: T cells (CD8+) identify other cells that appear to be expressing antigens and destroy them. Bioscience people hate admitting this in plain English, so finding papers stating it clearly is a complete pain in the ass. They normally only talk about "stimulating a cellular response". But this page does at least partly spell it out:
> In contrast to the older vaccine models, the Moderna and Pfizer research shows that the new mRNA vaccines produce powerful helper and cytotoxic T cell responses
Cytotoxic means "kills cells".
3. If they got into the heart, they'd destroy heart cells. Here's a case study series paper that looks at heart damage caused by vaccines:
> Importantly, infectious causes have been excluded in all patients. The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein has been detected sparsely on cardiomyocytes of nine patients, and differential analysis of inflammatory markers such as CD4+ and CD8+ T cells suggests that the inflammatory response triggered by the vaccine may be of autoimmunological origin.
i.e. the heart sac becomes inflamed because the immune system attacks it, and the immune system attacks it because of the vaccine.
> edit: Also please elaborate on how I identify the “right” blogs.
They tend to cross-link to each other a lot. Start from the Alex Berenson archives, El Gato Malo, Igor Chudov, Daily Sceptic. None are perfect but they are well network and try to build arguments based on published papers and primary evidence. If you don't like them, branch out from there. Also look on HN with showdead turned on. Many inconvenient stories about the vaccines get flagkilled.
> “people that have studied this professionally are categorically untrustworthy” seems a bit like some uh, less than germane bullshit, to be frank.
Sure, and I guess Google employees are the world's experts on ads and privacy so if they say something about those topics you couldn't possibly disagree right? Also, oil companies are the world's expert in energy, so we should do whatever they say, and so on and so forth.
Hate to break it to you but yes, people who have studied these topics professionally are categorically untrustworthy. If they say or do anything that might reduce people's willingness to take vaccines they get fired and sometimes blacklisted from their entire profession, ending their careers overnight. Any attempt to speak out is systematically suppressed by the media who have all complicit in pressuring people to take the vaccines too. No surprise that the only people who can actually talk honestly are the ones who aren't already fully committed.
Is that true? I remember my daughter had a severe bacterial infection and they couldn't get an IV in her so they did an intramuscular injection of antibiotics.
It's probably neither a good or a bad thing, it's just a "we found something that may guide our future understanding of how mRNA vaccines work". Sounds like basic research that has no direct implications.
The surprise is why this was never tested before by Pfizer or Moderna themselves. For all drugs you typically evaluate how they are metabolized in the body, and this has never been published before. Very sloppy standards.
Interesting. It seems like the mRNA itself breaks down in most cases like expected, but sometimes the particles/packages that contain the mRNA don't ever get opened, meaning the mRNA is never processed or exposed to the body.
2022-03-17: “Immune imprinting, breadth of variant recognition, and germinal center response in human SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination”
> “Prolonged detection of vaccine mRNA in LN GCs [lymph node germinal center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germinal_center] and spike antigen in LN GCs and blood following SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination”
> “Immunohistochemical staining for spike antigen in mRNA-vaccinated patient LNs varied between individuals but showed abundant spike protein in GCs 16 days post-second dose, with spike antigen still present as late as 60 days post-second dose. ”
2022-06-28: “Vaccine mRNA Can Be Detected in Blood at 15 Days Post-Vaccination”
> “A recent ultrasensitive single-molecule assay was however able to detect the S-protein in the plasma of some mRNA-1273 COVID-19 vaccinees at 15 days following injection [12], while in another study, both mRNA and S-protein could be found in axillary LNs after 60 days [13]. Moreover, extracellular vesicles decorated with S-proteins persist up to 4 months after vaccination with BNT162b2 [14]. This raises the possibility that LNP–mRNA complexes remain in circulation for extended periods of time, retaining their ability to induce S-protein expression in contacted cells.”
> “In plasma, mRNA was immediately detectable at just hours following vaccination, remained detectable when sampled at 6 and 15 days (Figure 1A, green), but was below the limit of quantification (LoQ) for one sample at 27 days. Samples from negative controls did not amplify. For subject B3, we observed a similar trend for plasma: vaccine-associated mRNA became detectable immediately after vaccination and remained significantly above the LoQ at day 14 (Figure 1B, green). Interestingly, vaccine mRNA was detected in the cellular fraction up to day 6 in some samples from our cohort, whereas for B3, it was only detectable at one day after vaccination (Figure 1A,B, orange). It has to be noted that the likelihood of detecting vaccine mRNA in the cellular fraction decreased significantly at 24 h from injection, which was in contrast to plasma in which mRNA remained consistently detectable up to day 15 (Figure 1C).”
> “mRNA vaccines use mRNA created in a laboratory to teach our cells how to make a protein—or even just a piece of a protein—that triggers an immune response inside our bodies. The mRNA from the vaccines is broken down within a few days after vaccination and discarded from the body.”
This post, a link to a peer-reviewed paper published in mid-January 2023 ("SARS-CoV-2 spike mRNA vaccine sequences circulate in blood up to 28 days after COVID-19 vaccination"), has been flagged.
This action is typical of the efforts, top-down and bottom-up, to suppress open discussion of the risks and the harm and suffering caused by many aspects of the responses to covid-19.
To the flaggers: you are abusing this site's flagging functionality, most probably in an attempt to prevent the dissemination of valid scientific research that has a real bearing on public health decision-making. Your behavior is disgraceful.
I realize it's frustrating when a story is flagged which you consider on-topic, but please don't call names ("your behavior is disgraceful") post in the flamewar style to HN. It only makes things worse.
We're so far downstream from the initial rollout that nobody seems to recall the blanket assurances that all of the mRNA in the shots would be taken up and translated into modified spike proteins in a very short period given by health authorities and putative experts during the height of the coercion campaigns.
It's much the same as with the issue of biodistribution. Most have forgotten why we were promised the contents of one of these shots remained at the injection site and how the practice of aspiration of the needle (done in Denmark, after concerns were raised, but rarely done elsewhere) was pooh-poohed. The same individuals and entities preached the stays-in-the-arm gospel and derided anyone who raised concern or produced research results indicating wider distribution, via the vasculature, throughout recipients' bodies.
The same people who promulgate the idea that VAERS and the Yellow Card system and analogous institutions are now honeypots for fake reports from Russian bots or the "Science Truster' bogeyman du jour.
Oh well. Spilled milk at this point. The revelations will continue to trickle out for the foreseeable future. Turnover in the upper echelons of regulatory and funding bodies and in academic biomed research will gradually loosen more tongues. Eventually, there may be large lawsuits and settlements. We will see.