The key thing you should notice about the COVID vaccine detractors is their inability to distinguish between vaccines and the wildly different technology between the different vaccines, alongside their inability acknowledge the geopolitical hurdles for any of their conspiracies. If a German-company made vaccine is part of an insidious plot, then should you get the Oxford one developed in the UK? If Bill Gates is influencing vaccines in some strange scheme, does the conclusion mean you should trust the Russian Sputnik vaccine more instead due to the geopolitical impossibility of a Bill Gates plot being involved? The absurdity basically cancels itself out, just get the shot you are offered.
Bill Gates on the other hand says these vaccines are too complex and that safety and security issues[2] make it impossible for anyone else to produce these vaccines.
The media keep saying "even mRNA vaccines that are new don't enter the nucleus or alter DNA." Guess which could do that? The viral vector vaccines that have custom DNA run in the nucleus, which then produces the mRNA. This MedCram video[3] explains it better than me. Everything around the messaging for vaccines in mainstream media is so misleading if you look at the science. I don't know how someone couldn't be at least a little suspicious.
I have longcovid btw, I'm not getting the shot. People repeat BS to me like the vaccines will cure longcovid. They offer no proof whatsoever, no plausible method of action, and go off the media narrative how it "could help some people." I'm on longcovid forums, I trust the anecdotal experiences there than anything in the media.
[1] https://en.tempo.co/read/1445856/16-million-sinovac-vaccines... [2] https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/bill-gates-b... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qT7wLxkvU#t=1m30s
Both I and my wife had the J&J vaccine a couple months ago. We had a period of about 12, maybe 18 hours of feeling like we had a light case of the flu, and fine since. The J&J and AZ vaccines also use your cells produce spike proteins but do it with a different way (adenovirus vector) than the mRNA vaccines.
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 spiked protiens themselves mutate is it reasonable to assume an autoimmune diseases may result as the cells or protiens accumulate in my organs, limphnodes, fat cells or other areas?
This is an honest concern that I am hoping can be resolved, rather than be dismissed or attacked.
That's incorrect, in the sense mRNA does not alter your genetic material.
> why can't the spiked protien during it's production or the cells producing it mutate also?
They could, but they only exist for a short while and don't create new things. When the virus mutates, it can pass the mutation on to the new "child" viruses. Mutations that make things worse (for us) are super rare, so it only matters if there is also some method to preserve the mutation, select the ones useful to the virus, and make more of them. With the vaccine, it only acts for a short time and cannot "spread", so any mutation is immediately lost.
> If these production cells can mutate or the spiked protiens themselves mutate is it reasonable to assume an autoimmune diseases may result as the cells or protiens accumulate in my organs, limphnodes, fat cells or other areas?
Probably not. There is no method for the mutation to become dominant and take over, so you would have a single mutated cell which isnt enough to affect anything. Ignoring that, the vaccine acts for a short time, so stuff wouldn't generally accumulate because of the short time frame where the vaccine is causing spiked proteins to be created. After the vaccine is used up in your body, no more spiked proteins are created.
Note: I am not a doctor, my understanding may be flawed.
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.
The first one, some of your cells get told by the mRNA/adenovirus vector (depending on if you had Moderna/Pfizer or J&J/Oxford) to make some 'rona spikes. Your immune system amped up a little bit and your cells feel bad for a bit because of having to spew out spike. Your immune system, which is a little amped up, sees all this and starts to formulate things to kill the spikes (antibodies) and starts to send out other immune cells that clamp down on the cells that are making the spikes.
The second shot? Your cells get the call from the mRNA/adenovirus vector and start spewing out spikes. Your immune system recently saw this so it _really_ starts spewing out more antibodies to get rid of the spikes and more of the other cells to get rid of the spike producers. It it is really ready for the fight and wants to make sure you're ready for the fight in the future too.
The negative side effects are your immune system causing parts of your body to do things it doesn't usually do (like raising your body temperature to help kill off cells that are making these "rogue" spikes).
As every medical expert has been saying for months now, the vaccine doesn't effect your DNA.
The immune response is what causes the side effects, and the immune response is stronger with the second dose (this follows intuitively from immunity being more robust after 2 doses).
The mRNA molecules in the vaccine just contain the instructions for the spike protein. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source... has a good breakdown of what specificly it makes.
To use an analogy to a computer - DNA is like the hard drive (long term storage but slow), RNA is like RAM (short term, degrades easily, but easy to transport and gets info where it needs to go), ribosomes are like the CPU (executes the code in the RNA, outputs a protein). Normally, DNA gets copied into RNA, which instructs the ribosome what protein to make. The vaccine is like inserting a fake message. The ribosomes see RNA and follow the instructions, but the RNA came from the vaccine instead of the cell's DNA. This is one of the reasons why the vaccine is so safe, because RNA just naturally breaks down very quickly in the body.
Booster generally causes more side effects, because the body has seen the spike protein before (from the first vaccine) so it recognizes it faster and mobilizes a more robust response. In a certain sense, its already done a practise run, so the body kicks things into high gear right away.
[IANAD]
After I read it, I noticed that it was the first time anyone had ever tried to explain _exactly_ how these new vaccines worked, like down to the molecular level.
Most explanations I had seen were usually extremely high level (literally just "the RNA gets read by your cells, which then produce the spike protein, then the RNA is destroyed") or used analogies (as you have done here).
I don't consider myself a conspiracy theorist, but I admit I had been harbouring some concerns/fears over these new vaccines. This link is the only thing I have read that actually allayed those fears.
I think there is a lesson here.
I have a feeling that everyone fears stuff they don't understand, at least a little bit.
I know that the high level explanation is technically correct, but here's the problem: Many conspiracy theories are actually _extremely_ detailed. I have personally seen covid conspiracies that appear to be backed up by scientific papers.
This is what the truth is competing against. A basic, high level "ELI5" explanation is never going to convince a conspiracy theorist who is looking at a stack of science papers.
So I think this link is very important, more people need to read and share it.
BTW: different people have different immune systems, and their body reacts differently. I got my first dose in the morning. By afternoon I just felt tired and wanted sleep (I felt like I didn't sleep the previous night). I went to sleep and next day felt normal. For 2nd dose the same thing happened, except I felt like that one extra day. My vaccine was Pfizer.
Everyone says the second dose is worse although.
The nurse was a talker, and distracted me from watching what she was doing. I didn't see the shot go in, and I felt absolutely nothing. I only realized it was done when she said I did not bleed at all and didn't need a bandage.
Every other shot I've ever received I felt, but every other one I was also watching when it happened. Now I'm wondering if feeling them was imaginary, something my brain made up because I saw the jab and expected to feel it.
Not to detract from people who did have side-effects, merely pointing out that it's possible to have none.
A list of the variants and their DNA code? Or whatever makes them vary.
A solid explanation of how these variants are more infectious, not just saying that "The numbers show it" but instead what is the real world physical change in the shape or attack vector that makes them more dangerous, or admiting it is unknown but being studied.
True numbers of deaths caused by covid and vaccines, you can't have it both ways and say "They tested positive for the virus and died so it was covid" then at the same time say "yes they got the vaccine but people die all the time, it wasn't nessisarly the vaccine."
A genuine record of which vaccines the well to do have recieved. Eg: Celebrities, Politicians, Billionaires. I suspect there are a lot more Pfizer going in their arms but they are telling the rest of us to take what we can get.
Maybe drop the racist, sexist, political anti white, anti male, anti Trump bullshit for a while in the media, because fighting the pandemic is just so much more critical right now. Instead of being opportunistic assholes and pushing those adgendas while everyone is scared, locked down and having their loved ones die alone?
IDK there is more, like the stuff comming out about Faucci signing off on funding banned research in Wuhan or the 2015 chinese report on weaponizing coronavirii but I think the first couple items on my list would go a long way. And before I catch a bunch more hate Ill leave it there.
Why a mutation improves transmission takes a lot of investigating to understand. I am not sure why you were under the impression that we know the mechanisms. If you type something like “E484K molecular dynamics” you can find a lot of computer simulations trying to investigate the mechanism, this is standard biological research. Of course we E484K you have a mutation from a negative to a positive residue, so that might give you a hint why it’s harder for the antibody to stick.
I can assure you that here in Japan we do not care about Trump. Perhaps we should be more grateful to his good support for the Pfizer vaccine, which is the one we are now deploying at scale (after the government here did their own review of the evidence).
So now you have a slightly different protein produced by one particular cell for about 20 minutes. Big deal.
The tumor cells in your body right now are already doing a lot worse.
You're the one who is asking SOCIAL MEDIA companies (i.e. Facebook and twitter) to educate you more. "I wish the social media giants would just stop all the censorship and allow the discussions to take place."
Maybe that's the issue all along. Shouldn't have random people and nefarious state actors provide your education, but maybe go out there and read reputable sources, read peer reviewed trial data (The Lancet), read about the success of vaccinations in countries such as Israel.
Not Facebook and Twitter.
I am still not 100% convinced but a decision needed to be made and based on the information, a large amount recieved here I chose to get the jab.
okay you're just a troll. Got it. Fun...
Each of those vaccines come from a UN/WHO member country.
Geo politically power is wielded by globalist financial elites. These elites generally believe the world is overpopulated. Bill himself is well known for his this belief. Bill as an example runs a charitable foundation that only ever seems to make money.
These conspiracies are not constituted of a flat earth and aliens. They are of human hierarchies, corruption, and psychopaths.
If your idea is based on the existence of psychopathic financiers controlling organizations that every country on the planet is part of, and every vaccine production as well in those countries which use completely different technology, then you have left no oxygen in your mind for disproving anything. You've now exempted China from any scrutiny, in exchange for psychopathic financiers that would have much difficulty in collaborating with the party and maintaining status with them. You've replaced that with an insidious plot that makes zero sense and at the best requires opportunists to simply seize onto the reality. But that makes zero sense because the mRNA vaccines were sequenced within a week of getting samples in January 2020 because the technology is simply impressive and is the lifetime work of the Hungarian researcher. Ah, so many problems with this idea.
So you'd be fine with a Taiwanese vaccine then? That's the only country I know of that has significant medical R&D and is one of the few countries not in the UN or WHO.
Now you want to talk conspiracies to conceal or coverup how the virus came to be, I'm all for that but I don't think billionaires want to kill off all their neighbors just so they can have the earth all to themselves. They enjoy the power and control over people and policy too much for that.
It's because social-security/pension systems are a pyramid schemes that can't sustain themselves without ever growing population. I consider many Western EU countries overpopulated (UK, Italy, etc), Google Maps satellite images also do a pretty good job at portraying at just how overpopulated the earth is. Pop growth every decade is still insane.
Sorry, what is the downside to getting the vaccine in your mind?
We are at the the point where society needs people to receive a vaccine, or it will stop functioning. How much are you willing to personally sacrifice so that someone near you has the option to avoid getting a couple of shots that a billion other people have already received?
Factories can't run at full capacity until people are vaccinated. Our food supplies, specifically meat, are at risk until people are vaccinated. We are going to keep this society of scarcity until ~90% of people are willing to get two shots.
I only respect those that choose to be unvaccinated if they:
1. have had adverse effects to a previous vaccination (like the Anthrax garbage they injected into military personnel or have allergies to PEG)
I really thought I had more than one
Are we allowed to be skeptical because pfizer and co are making record breaking profits on an emergency authorized vaccine. That, in the USA, can only be authorized if there are no other approved treatments for covid-19.. meanwhile, the rest of the world is using ivermectin, hcq, etc to successfully treat symptoms? Can we be skeptical of the fact that the pharmaceutical companies clearly have some political influence over the medical field, and have been using that to push this vaccine? Am I allowed to be skeptical of something that is being pushed by companies that have all paid millions in fines over other previous actions? Or am I allowed to have issue with the fact that these same pharmaceutical companies have been caught paying social media influencers to promote the vaccine, while social media companies actively ban people for expressing doubt?
How about expectant mothers and women planning on having kids? There have been reports that menstruation cycles of women and women that have been in close proximity to people recently vaccinated have been adversely affected.
If you and your family get vaccinated, how do their choices affect you?
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, should be on the table in my opinion. I'm all for freedom of choice, but I'm against freeloading. No one should have to take the vaccine if they don't want to, but they shouldn't be able to participate in all the benefits of society while refusing to do their part in keeping that society functional.
>If you and your family get vaccinated, how do their choices affect you?
I was simply answering this.
If you get the vaccine and are still scared and angry at people that may not have received it, there aren't many options for you aside from indefinite total lock-down.
Rhetoric like that is almost as bad as the conspiracies floating around. Brow beating someone with legitimate concerns is not right.
Im social distancing, wearing a mask doing all the things necessary and successfully I might add to not aquire or transmit the virus. So please dont call me horrible and selfish for contemplating getting an vaccine that has been rushed through trials with no long term data and worse hearing the powers that be, say "It doesnt matter which one you get just get the first one You are offered", how is that a reasonable statement ever?
If You want to know more in depth what my concern is, I wrote it in another comment. Im going to unplug now as my head is spinning and I need to "relax a bit" obviously.
ThankYou everyone for having this frank disussion and not canceling or censoring it(even though it has cost me quite a bit of karma it has given me more perspective and I appreciate that)
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 as other vaccines. With the rollout, they've probably had more real world testing than many vaccines.
> So please dont call me horrible and selfish
You're taking an action that threatens the lives of other people based on fears about personal safety that don't seem based in reality (at least for the pfizer vaccine. If you want to argue that the blood clots for AZ are scary regardless of their rarity, fine by all means).
Most people use the term selfish to describe someone who puts their own well being ahead of the group even when their concerns for personal safety are valid. If their concerns are largely made up, i can't help but think the adjective fits.
You're argument that not taking the vaccine is not being selfish is that the risk you are taking by forgoing the vaccine is only a threat to other people not a threat to yourself??
> Im not a hero
Obviously not. Nobody here is a hero. We're talking about an injection with extremely low risk of serious side effects, not storming the beaches of Normandy.
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 the young and healthy are taking in America.
FWIW, I didn't see any legitimate concerns. I would love to hear a legitimate concern.
All I see is "but I don't know... I'm not sure...". And I just don't get it. facepalm I fully admit this could be due to a lack of imagination on my part. I often suffer from that, especially when it comes to empathy.
> Thank you everyone for having this frank discussion and not canceling or censoring it(even though it has cost me quite a bit of karma it has given me more perspective and I appreciate that)
Bravo, solidly agree. Things will only be broken more when we can't even talk with each other. Glad we can still do that. Whew. And I'll upvote your comments, should you care about the points. :)
Short term side-effects and effectivenes and such are pretty well known by this point
Cutting out a persons tongue doesn't make them wrong or prove You right, unless the argument is over who has a longer tongue.
No. Because trustworthy information is easy to find and because "I don't understand X" can be used to argue against doing literally everything, including completely ridiculous things like insisting that wifi towers be taken down due to "wifi allergies". Making a decision that harms other people because of your own personal ignorance is not free from criticism.
> and when someone does say something wrong they are silenced by bans or deleted/moderated posts
You've got dozens of posts in this thread that are not deleted and have dozens of people trying to provide you with accurate information to help. There is no conspiracy here. You aren't being silenced.
Stop fear mongering.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-c...
tl;dr: the pharma companies don't have to pay you and the government is extremely unlikely to.
For the trial to pick up the blood clots, it would probably have to administer the vaccine to at least half a million people if not more (and you would need other people for the placebo arm). If the size of your trial is a significant portion of a medium sized country, you are not really running a trial but just giving out a vaccine.
The trial established it works, and any safety concerns are rare enough that the risk of not just getting covid but getting covid and having severe illness or dying from covid, is higher for most people. There is no 100% garuntees in life, the best we can hope for is showing that the risk is less than the alternative.
If you are talking about innate immunity or cross-immunity from SARS-Cov-1 it's super rare and hasn't been shown to be relevant in most Western countries.
To see the (reduced) benefit even with prior infection just look at the numerous reports of re-infection, be it with a mutated version or otherwise, as well as the numerous reports of prior infected subjects with no or very little antibodies after a couple of months (not the full picture but still).
> People should be informed about the risks.
Show me one vaccine/medication where people were more informed than about the current Covid vaccines. We are at the point that for most folks it's riskier to drive to the vaccination appointment by car then the actual vaccination.
24/7 ads and encouragement for people to get the vaccine, almost to the point that it's a moral virtue means that tons of people are getting the vaccine, even having recently caught covid-19.
And I had never heard about this six month interval until this moment.
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...
Most of what I've seen, however, feels more like herd mentality behavior based on one's political leanings. Or people feeling they genuinely don't have a choice, given impending requirements and restrictions from their local governments and employers.
Edit: not sure why I'm being downvoted. It should be common knowledge at this point that people in their 20's, 30's, and 40's have a higher risk of automobile accident, suicide, drug overdose, etc, than of covid death.
I do understand however that society as a whole says "if you are not willing to take a negligible risk for us, we are not taking risks for you".
If I could get a shot that protected me from car accidents, I'd do that too.
(Of course there is also valid discussion of pre-existing immunity, but the more nuanced messages are not as common.)
Sinovac, the Chinese vaccine, is only 50% effective. Pfizer and Moderna are much more effective. J&J is somewhere in between. This is widely accepted but no one seems to ever ask: if I was sick a month ago, where does it fall in that scale?
The point of vaccines is to give your immune system a good enough idea of the pathogen, so that your body produces antibodies. Actually contracting the disease does the same thing, unsurprisingly.
So the question is how effective is natural infection of COVID-19 at preventing future infection? Surely it's better than Sinovac, a coin flip. No? Do you have any scholarship about this I can look at?
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting...
You don't have similar immunity efficacy studies for actual covid as hou have for vaccines, because infecting people on purpose would be unethical.
Note that your wording "coin flip" isn't right for Sinovac, either. 50 % efficacy is not huge but it is still beneficial on population level.
People have real distrust of the system that produced the vaccine and even distrust of the media that purports this disease is so deadly.
I know from your perspective scepticism is hard to understand, but it's not that God tells me science is fake or anything so outlandish. I genuinely don't trust the corporations and government selling me the story of the disease and now the vaccine, and it should be allowed that people question these institutions.
WHY??? Why do they distrust the vaccine?? Anything? Any possible reason? It's probably the safest vaccine ever made. I. DON'T. GET. IT.
Do others not hear the ambulances? Do they not see the overflow from the hospitals? Are the dead bodies some sort of elaborate deep fake?? Has the whole world gone mad???
Brother, I love skepticism. It's healthy. It's *good*. I don't blindly trust corporations or the government, as far as I'm concerned the former only wants profit and the latter only wants power.
But that's got nothing to do with it, from my perspective.
When your house is on fire you don't debate the motivations of the fire department. You put out the fire first, and THEN have time for dithering and analysis.
I'm getting my 2nd shot this week, but both mRNA and modified adenovirus vaccines have never been used for mass vaccinations before. The history of medicine is litered with interventions that were seen as totally safe and wonderful and lead to terrible consequences after some time. Push towards massive adoption of an intervention sets off my alarm bells.
All that said, personally, it seems the unknown long term risks of vaccination outweigh the more or less known risks of covid both on an individual level (I don't want to get it) and a community level (I'd rather like community spread to stop, so I can go back to being a hermit by choice); but if community spread wasn't happening near me, I would be happier not trying new medicine within a year of development.
These events sadly happen and there will always be unknown unknowns, not only, but also because of human hubris. However, it seems you are overestimating the prevalence of such events and extrapolating that to the current situation. If you take a birds-eye view on medical progress over the last 50-100 years says, it's just incredible.
> All that said, personally, it seems the unknown long term risks of vaccination outweigh the more or less known risks of covid both on an individual level (I don't want to get it) and a community level (I'd rather like community spread to stop, so I can go back to being a hermit by choice); but if community spread wasn't happening near me, I would be happier not trying new medicine within a year of development.
Agree with you. From what we know today it seems that the unknown long term risks of the vaccines are a subset of the unknown long term risks of Covid.
That said I know several people that have had it. Some elderly with existing conditions. Worst case was my aunt who got pneumonia from it. She's in her mid sixties and diabetic. She was in the hospital for a week.
Was in the emergency room with my son a few months back, not overflowing or anything, but I wasn't there to track Covid cases.
Edit: It's available on a german video on demand service maybe a vpn will work for you https://www.prosieben.de/tv/joko-klaas-gegen-prosieben/video...
it's really hard to intuit how wildly variable this disease is when you only have a couple personal data points and distrust/feel detached from the statistics being reported, but it's real.
* Mother, 50s - metallic taste for two weeks, loss of appetite, some fatigue * Father, 50s - sore throat for a week * Sister, ~20 / Grandmother, ~80 - both had similar symptoms of fatigue, body aches, sore throat, feeling hot/cold, some change to taste * Grandfather, ~85, multiple pre-existing conditions (COPD, heart failure, prediabetes, history of TIAs) - only reason we knew he had it was due to a positive test
Going off those alone, it seems unpleasant but not too dire. Then you add me in:
* Me, 30 - same symptoms as sister/grandmother for about a week, then ten days in the ICU after my O2 sats dropped to 78 overnight (and remained in the 80s on oxygen). Narrowly avoided ventilation as I responded to CPAP.
Suddenly it seems a lot more serious.
In most (all?) hospitals, Covid cases are separated from general emergency because you don't want your emergency room transformed in a constant cluster.
At the same time only a small fraction, say 10-20%, of the population has had a Covid infection. So while some are hit hard, at the same time it might not affect you and the people around you too much.
Maybe ask your family doctor/general practitioner, or you have a nurse in your network or wider family, or somebody working in a hospital or care home? Also speaking to older folks like parents or grand-parents can be helpful to get another perspective.
I too believe that anecdotes are poor evidence at best, and I completely believe others have had 180* experiences from myself.
You'll get a sniffle/fever for a few days and then be immune.
Don't put an experimental drug into your body for no reason.
Anyone who says variant or strains are a problem has merely to look at over 50% of the United States with no covid restrictions for months who are at record lows of infections and with minimal vaccines.
The variant or strain problem is a nothing burger.
I have an appointment to get my first jab in 43 hours from now and I am bouncing back and forth between getting it and cancelation.
Five years ago I would not be having these doubts but it seems like everyone has alterior motives.
I wish the social media giants would just stop all the censorship and allow the discussions to take place. I appreciate that they are trying to stop disinformation but I just can't think of one time in the past that the ones stifling free speach have ever been on the right side of history.