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Re:mRNA vaccines – a new era in vaccinology (2018) by 01100011 on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @12:46AM (#26885514)
Lots of good responses to assuage your fears. The one thing I don't see a response to is the auto-immune angle. Let's assume that the mRNA vaccine quickly goes away, but the whole point of it is to train your immune system to attack the spike protein. How confident are we that the spike protein isn't naturally occuring in any human cell type in any population of humans on the planet? Can we say with near-certainty that the likelihood of an autoimmune issue is non-existant?

I'm not very worried about it. I just received my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine today(some soreness at the injection site and fatigue ~12h after). I just would like to hear the response to that concern in case someone tries to argue that angle with me.

Re:mRNA vaccines – a new era in vaccinology (2018) by rflrob on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @02:45AM (#26886147)
We actually know the primary sequence (i.e. order of amino acids) for every gene in the body. It’s trivially easy (a senior undergrad in bioinformatics ought to be able to do it with little or no handholding) to look for genes with even a vaguely similar sequence. Protein folding is a hard problem, but the space of possible solutions is large enough that it’s unlikely that an unrelated sequence would have a similar enough structure to be recognized by the same antibodies.

Most variation between populations is not so much what genes are there, but how at what level they are expressed, point mutations, and short repeats (all of which are unlikely to create totally new structures). For there to be a population that had spike protein expressed, there would have to have been some sort of horizontal gene transfer into the germline (which is relatively protected from mutations for precisely this reason) at some point in the past. There’s reasonable atlases of human genetic variation (see, for example, the 1000 genomes project), so if there was some large population of people with any obviously new viral sequence, we’d see it.

Plus, if a person somehow, miraculously, had a protein that looked like Spike, their immune system should already be tuned to ignore it. (I have a PhD in biology, but immunology was not something I have much expertise in, so take this with a grain of NaCl).

Re:mRNA vaccines – a new era in vaccinology (2018) by thehappypm on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @10:29AM (#26890118)
And, that person who has a Spike protein naturally would be in pretty deep trouble if infected with Covid -- since the immune system wouldn't trigger on the spike! Though antibodies can also attack non-spike things.
Re:mRNA vaccines – a new era in vaccinology (2018) by AareyBaba on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @02:18AM (#26885992)
Biology is messy and you can not say for certain that there will never be a group of individuals with an autoimmune issue. That is why vaccines go through several clinical trial phases. I recommend listening to this lecture about the process: https://youtu.be/35Idb_lCU4o?t=61