This is true. Some of the extremely rare auto-immune issues that have impacted people who have been vaccinated for specific flu viruses in, IIRC, 1976 and 2009, were thought to occur at even higher rates and severity with people who contracted the virus. So, vaccination might impact you, but likely worse the the virus itself due to the greater amount of virus in your system.
I am not a scientist, but I would expect that the mRNA vaccines would have less of a chance of having an auto-immune reaction since they contain only one of the many proteins contained in the actual virus.
To GP’s point, lack of diversity in clinical trials can result in medicines that vary in efficacy and safety in the broader population. The ability to customize a therapy to an individual would help reduce the impact of this issue.
1000 years ago you probably could have said that indigenous subsaharan Africans and Americans are different subspecies of homo sapiens simply because one group has darker brown skin and lives in Africa, and one has lighter brown skin and lives in the Americas (phenotype difference + range difference is all it takes). But today the "native range" of every ethnic group is essentially global due to airplanes and immigration, so you'd probably say we're all one subspecies. But either way, the label "subspecies" conveys far less information than people sometimes assign it.
There exist even special medicine to account for genetic differences in Black people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isosorbide_dinitrate/hydralazi...
This is the angle that, for me, is suppressing my innate concern for a widescale and rapid application of a brand new immunological therapy. It's extremely targeted and feels like the future. I can imagine a day where the FDA approves the process rather than the instance of mRNA-based therapies, allowing for highly personalized treatment.
This was recently noted in a AMA by virus experts on reddit.
Sure, but aren't the proteins produced by the vaccine virtually identical to the ones produced by the actual virus?
If so, the calculus looks like this:
1) Take the vaccine and accept the (unknown, but apparently quite small) probability that something in your body will react very negatively to the generated viral proteins.
2) Get the virus, accept the probability (also unknown, but the same as in 1) that something in your body will react very negatively to the viral proteins, plus accept the additional risk of being infected by the actual virus.
I guess the third possibility would be to refuse the vaccine and gamble that you won't get the virus, either.
If that's generally true, the difference here would be that the part of the spike protein topology that is typically bound to other proteins in an actual infection would be accessible to the immune system in the case of a vaccination. I think that is where the differential risk could occur with a vaccination that wouldn't occur with an actual infection (however small that might be).
In my daughter's case, something happened when she was about 14 years old that caused her body to determine that the beta cells in her pancreas were invaders and have to die, so I'm just tuned into this kind of possible side effect.
If the virus is destroyed and released into the extracellular environment, its proteins can dissociate and are further fragmented and processed by the immune system. What’s usually presented to T cells are small antigen pieces as opposed to the whole virus/protein.
Virus takes over the cell, makes the cell to manufacture components of the virus and to assemble viruses, until this disrupts the cell so bad that the cell dies and typically bursts. Surely at this point, not only assembled viruses, but also components at different stages of production, are released?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_viruses#Life-c...
OT, but what does this mean or refer to? I'm curious :)
Corny but fun, they had a few good ones.
I was wrong, its the nucleocapsid protein, not the membrane one, but that's even weirder as the N protein is only found inside the virus particle..
We also don’t fully understand what causes autoimmune disease, but various environmental causes have been explored including bacterial and viral infections. Presumably if a viral infection could trigger an autoimmune response in certain genetically predisposed groups, then so could a vaccine designed to mimic a virus.
Unfortunately the incentives in our medical system are not designed to find cures for autoimmune diseases, although they are very much incentivized for palliative care, so progress has been painfully slow in understanding the deeper complexities of the immune system.