In any case, I've recently been reading Lauren Sompayrac's "How the Immune System Works", and it's a technical overview of the immune system. It's not going to make you into a full blown immunologist, but it will give you the answers to most the questions you ask above, and a framework and vocabulary to begin to understand deeper academic immunology works.
P.S. The immune system is FUCKING AWESOME. There's rarely a page where my mind is not blown.
Edit: I misspelled "Sompayrac"; it is now correct.
Sure, this is no fun, but this whole discussion exists because trolls exist: can we really expect anything pleasant to come out of that premise.
Someone is not a "bad-faith" actor for asking precisely the questions that are hard to answer, even if they're using those questions to support a wrong idea.
If you don't have time to answer their questions, don't answer them. If you do have time, you have a good opportunity to expose the falsehood of their ideology. But don't use ad-hominems like "sealioning".
Sure, there are some stupid questions, or questions that come with a false premise, but that's not the same as discounting good questions because they come from an anti-vaxxer.
Yes, just saying someone is "sealioning" is lazy at best, trollish on its own at worse (as I have already said in the previous post). Saying "your argument is fallacious *because* of A, B, and C", is pretty much the only way to deal with a troll (besides just banning them from the platform). In the particular example of sealioning: certainly, never assume bad-faith, but after you briefly explain and give references, it is definitely very important to also explain to the person how sealioning is a dangerous tactic - at best, you helped someone be more resilient to sealioning themselves, at worst you lost some time with a troll.
The one thing I would agree on with you: if you come in on a high horse, you have already lost the discussion, no matter whether you are talking with a troll or not.
1. Labeling someone a "sealion" doesn't even hinge on their opinion. You seem to have missed the entire concept, and instead interpreted it as a generic dismissive.
2. Uh, you don't get to just call something a "fallacy" because you don't like it (though many others are doing the same thing in this thread).
Sealioning is a reference to the specific disingenuous process of spamming the same low-effort, low-brow, easily-answered questions in every last public forum. It's a basic disinformation technique to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt.
If you look at the original comic[1], the sea lion follows the couple around in public, into their house, and even into their bedroom, without permission; that is what makes the sea lion's behavior bad (criminal, in fact). However, "sealioning" in practice refers to people responding to public internet comments with other public internet comments. To treat the latter like the former is dishonest.
Furthermore, the sea lion is objecting to unsubstantiated criticism of his species, which is a form of bigotry. Imagine people searching Twitter for criticism of, say, their race or religion and arguing back at it. I suspect that 90+% of those who complain about "sealioning" would consider that behavior permissible and probably downright virtuous (and would add that the arguing-back need not be scrupulously polite). I'm frankly surprised that "social justice"-associated people managed to decide that objecting to speciesism was worthy of mockery. I think they just really wanted some term of disparagement for their opponents, and happily accepted this one when it appeared without analyzing it too closely.
The internet is a fun place.
Edit: Well, as the comment below alluded to, I probably missed a pretty obvious piece of sarcasm... This is certainly funny in hindsight.
Basically, it is now impossible to make a point by attempting to present an absurdly extreme viewpoint in the opposite direction, because too many of us have encountered people who genuinely espouse viewpoints even more extreme. (As well as the exact one you said—no matter what it happens to be.)
If you want to present such a thing sarcastically, you're gonna have to make an explicit indication of your sarcasm (even just a "/s" at the end is usually enough). Otherwise, you're very likely to just be taken as meaning it sincerely.
But of course we all know confronting someone directly about their opinion always works.
I'm entirely pro-vaccines. However, I'm simultaneously entirely in favor of people asking questions, no matter what their intentions are. Their intentions do not matter. You either know your stuff or you do not. It's always better to draw out the eg anti-vaccine types. If something is defensible, then don't be a coward about it, don't be lazy, respond with a decent answer. Put in some effort. Use it as an exercise for your own brain, your own beliefs, your own ability to discuss and debate in an (ideally) civil society. Only the anti-vaccine arguments benefit from not doing that.
The shut-down angle always comes from cowardice and or intellectual weakness. You can tell a lot about someone by whether they're terrified of a discussion. Shut-down attempts are meant to evade personal shame (and more rarely to avoid putting in the time/effort), while preserving an intellectual or moral foundation established by someone else who did put in the effort.
Nearly all shut-down attempts come from weakness. If the position is important, such as vaccines, then that weakness only encourages the skeptics even more. They can practically sense it. The right thing to do is to engage and push back with facts (and or even links, with which all the hidden passive readers can go make up their own minds as to whether they agree or not), even if you don't have all day to argue a topic.
This is why good journalists do not invite a "flat earther" and a "nasa scientists" when discussing, e.g., climate change. Because those organizing debates have a responsibility to ensure the debate is based on facts, not on oratory skills.
For some of them, their entire method of operation is to waste your time, troll, and gain acclaim from their own hardcore fan base by doing so.
I'm sorry to say that I have no time and effort left on my part for anything other than low effort mockery and derision of people engaging in infowars/hardcore conspiracy theory stuff.
There is no way to differentiate a troll from either a fool, an extremist, or simply one who happens to not share the opinion of the reader.
In fact, by saying there is no way to differentiate, it implies the distinction is not that relevant.
There is more at stake in public debates than just the back and forth between troll/skeptic/questioner and someone responding to them.
If you benefit from such a good idea as vaccines and the rather obscenely massive benefit they have delivered to humanity, you have a moral obligation to step up and - even if rarely - throw down in a debate in their favor, when presented with such a tremendous opportunity. It requires the tiniest of efforts compared to the scientists that manage to give us these vaccines across decades of their efforts. Which also doesn't mean a person can't be lazy and free-ride on everyone else that is putting in some group effort to intellectually defend vaccines, of course. There are always free-riders.
The public skeptics and trolls are doing everyone a favor. They're being public about it. They're providing an intellectual and social opportunity that should be taken advantage of, eagerly. It's wonderful that they exist. They provide an opportunity to educate/inform, not specifically the troll or skeptic, rather, everyone else that is reading along. There is no avoiding the consequences of public debate on such important ideas, there is only to engage or give ground to the other side.
It's perfectly fine to say, "we don't know what are the long term effects of mRNA vaccines but we can guess they're unlikely to be worse than the long term effects of the thing they're vaccinating against, which you're almost certain to catch sooner or later".
Here are some links to polls about American views on vaccines. It seems unlikely you’re running into this ratio without some major biasing factor.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/02/09/he...
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2021/03/05/growing-share...
(I’ll admit the numbers in September from the Pew poll are surprising to me)
Granted, you’re further assuming the person asks questions about vaccines. In your description it seems to me that we’re already far away from scientific thinking as a society if the way we can confirm someone is anti-science is by whether they exhibit symptoms of any kind of curiosity. This sounds like what the previous commenter is talking about.
Maybe you’re saying, “people who spread doubt in the form of a disingenuous question frequently do so in a particular social environment I’m a part of.”
This specific scenario happens on my local Nextdoor groups all the time. I've answered responded with what I think is pretty clear and concise information, and then seem that same person ask the same question the very next day in a new thread. (And the next day, and the next...) I cannot help but conclude they're not really looking for an answer.
Maybe I'm a jerk, but I'd be inclined to answer the second question with "I answered that yesterday. Why do you keep asking if you aren't going to listen to the answers?" And reply with that every single time they re-asked the question.
But... Nextdoor... does that mean it's your physical neighbors? That might make me hesitate to do so. Or maybe I'd still do something like the same, but worded more gently and politely.
And they quickly reveal their bad faith, at which point they can safely be ignored.
Or, if you don't feel like discussing it, it's easy enough to say "I don't know about that, but the anti-vaccine stuff sounds like lies to scare people so I decided to trust my doctor."
If honest questions are met with hostility, while the anti-vaxxers are friendly and "helpful", guess who's going to be more influential?
(Also: My local county facebook group has no shortage of very vindictive, angry, and seeming inexhaustible anti-vaxxers.)
My point is more that these people have far more medical education than the average person I interact with on social media, and didn't look down on my question but also wanted to know. People who knew less than them and knew even less than me were mad that I would dare even ask.
Getting the perspective of the software engineer is a reasonable step, and certainly better than basing your beliefs on the rankings of the insane person.
Of course, if you have access to a vaccinologist (is this a recognized profession? I checked two dictionaries and neither contain the word), you should ask them. Or you can look up their opinion online [1]. Most will agree what the doctors and nurse said.
[1] https://health.mountsinai.org/blog/esteemed-vaccinologist-we...
Point being, it's not that straightforward unless there's someone you already know that is willing to share their contact information and they actually have the time to talk to you.
I totally see the point about going for second-best first until you know you have a question worth their time and not something that's obvious. (Although the answer in this case did seem obvious to me as a software person, or at least I'd have guessed they can see the amount of anti-covid-stuff dropping at different rates.)
Contact the department of health education of the ministry of health. You already paid for it with your taxes, might as well make use of it.
Now I see where you’re coming from with the suggestion to go straight to a qualified source instead of asking a bunch of random people.
If most of the whole world came to a screeching halt for the better part of a year and the solution turned out to be GPU drivers, I as a software engineer would become intensely interested in understanding them and would not at all be surprised if my less technical friends asked me for some pointers.
In the end, my point was that people who aren't even software engineers were telling me to stop trying to understand GPU drivers because GPU drivers are a solved problem and I should just trust NVIDIA.
I don't work on operating systems but I had a CS education, so I know enough about the kinds of things it needs to worry about that I could answer about the building blocks of a kernel in a way that I feel would be largely correct.
But a neat thing about HN is that there are people here who've been to med school and can presumably chime in.
What I can tell you personally is that vaccinology seems to involve a lot of centrifuging of rabbit poop, which is something I don't think they do a lot of in med school.
It's a feature of engineering and scientific education that there is a corpus of knowledge that every person in a discipline (say EE, or medicine) is expected to have learned (if not retained). I imagine all doctors learn quite a bit about the immune system in medical school.
Given that a "random software engineer on the street" may have a CS degree, an MBA, a 6 week bootcamp, or be totally self-taught, the example isn't analogous IMO.
A) can come across as a statement in the form of a question (e.g. "no we don't these vaccines are rediculous" etc) B) even if it doesn't, if you ask that and no one knows and other people see that, it can cause them to have unscientific doubts about vaccines, even if that wasn't intended.
It’s like asking a car mechanic about steel production. Entirely out of their wheelhouse, even if they deal with the steel daily.
(Both could comfortably tell you masks don’t cause hypoxia or pneumonia, though.)
Medical professions, the ones you interact with as a patient are essentially highly specialized mechanics for the human body.
The point is that the nurse and the car mechanic are at about the same starting point on the subject.
Being willing to learn is great, but they have minimal extant knowledge from their profession.
My point was that the less educated someone is in the medical field in general, the less willing they seem to be to entertain a genuine question, and this is the opposite of being "pro-science". It's only a step above being an anti-vaxxer because they choose better experts to listen to.
> Eventually someone referred me to their cousin in nursing school who referred me to their brother-in-law who is actually an epidemiologist...
This could've happened if their cousin was a car mechanic who had a brother-in-law with an epidemiologist. The nursing aspect of the story was irrelevant to the end result.
Dissent to the dominant opinion in any scientific field is always tricky, but that is a self-defense mechanism. Over time opposing viewpoints are integrated into the body of knowledge and may or may not replace or amend it. HOWEVER when we consider anti-vax or flat earth people they are acting in bad faith and their nonsense steals bandwith. It does not reserve respect and kicking them out harshly is a very necessary defense mechanism. Call it a memetic immune response with inflammation.
The dangerous thing about expertise in a very narrow area (which most medicine is these days) is that is bolsters confidence so much that you imagining yourself an expert in an adjacent area... not realizing that you might be missing very important fundamental knowledge.
You see this often in e.g. Nobel Disease[1], but also in more mundane settings.
Most people I know are pro-vax, have all their other vaccinations, but are leery of new technology being distributed under the same label. I think that's reasonable. I'm one of these people. I don't plan on taking any mRNA vaccine until we have a few decades worth of safety data on LNPs, although I think the technology and its development is very interesting. [1]
Does the net health benefit provided by mRNA vaccines probably outweigh the consequences of Covid? Probably, even almost certainly. But I'll stick to more conventional biotech for now.
In general, I think the average person hugely overestimates how much we know about biology and how much experts really know - they know 100x more than me, but still 0.00001% of what there is to know. We have a lot of hubris when it comes to science and technology.
[1] https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/drug-delivery/Without-li...
And I think it’s okay to ask questions, that’s how science progresses. I suspect a lot of people on social media are just super wary of vaccine trolls and sea-lioning[2], so unfortunately good-faith questions suffer.
You gotta be careful. Biology is not always "linearly interpolable" like that.
> "if someone majority were to go wrong it would go wrong in the first few months, and not 5+ years later".
You REALLY can't say that. There are plenty of medical conditions that will not manifest at all until years later.
But is that true for vaccines? We've had a hundred years of precedent.
I think the problem is that its 10-100x as expensive to refute a misinformed statement than it is to make one. So the plea for the small pool of genuinely authoritative / informed people to invest two orders of magnitude more effort patiently and kindly explaining misinformation to people just isn't practical in any meaningful sense.
We don't need to persuade them. They aren't persuadable, and in many cases they aren't there in good faith in the first place. We do need them to stop spreading lies and causing extreme harm to their communities. The most effective way to do that is to teach them that their actions - spreading obvious misinformation - are as offensive as they actually are (in that they actively harm people).
For example, the whole thrombosis / Astra-Zeneca issue, which was a big deal here in Germany. Lots of articles and discussions. Everyone was saying "don't use it on young people", but I don't even remember if they came to that conclusion because only young people got thrombosis or because the risk of dying of COVID was so much higher in old people that it trumped all other concerns.
And that's because nobody bothered to even estimate those risks. Given your age, what's your likelihood of catching COVID and getting lasting damage (including death) vs. getting thrombosis from AZ? I'm guessing that based on that, it was probably still a no-brainer to get vaccinated no matter your age.
But I think one of the central issues is the trolley problem. Somehow dying from a virus is okay because it's "natural", while having any sort of potential complication from a vaccine (no matter how unlikely) is much worse because it follows a human decision. If I'm a politician and I pass some law that indirectly (but predictably) kills tens of thousands of people, I'll be fine. If I go out and strangle a single person with my bare hands, I'm in trouble.
https://news.mit.edu/2019/storing-vaccine-history-skin-1218
Who turned that into microchips? Either the anti-vaxxers or people who want to discredit the anti-vaxxers.
In any case, the original idea is repulsive enough.
Isn't there some analogy with the immune system to be made here?
Anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers and the like function like an aggressor. They make bizarre, tiresome, persistent claims, and arguing with them earnestly is like going down a rabbit hole. Like some sibling comment said, anti-science people often dishonestly start their conversations by "asking questions" and wanting you to be "open minded", but spending time and energy on this is usually futile.
After a while, you (the "immune response" in this analogy) start taking the easy way out, no longer answering earnestly, just taking cheap shots at the flat-earther/anti-vaxxer, and just want them to shut up, stop spreading misinformation, and go away.
In the way of all this, the truth and the scientific method get simplified, dumbed down or outright destroyed, much like an out of control immune response may turn against your own body and harm it.
(I'm sure my analogy is flawed, but I kinda like it!)
For simplicity's sake, your immune system has two main things of concern here: antibodies and memory cells (B and T). Antibodies are the short-term "find and kill invaders" proteins. They're looking for a particular antigen to attack and do so well, but they don't last very long. Memory cells are basically blueprints which stick around for much longer than the antibodies (some studies indicate for decades), so that if your body ever encounters those same antigens again it recognizes them much faster and starts pumping out the antibodies much faster as well.
So, why would a mRNA vaccine result in better long-term protection than COVID-19 itself? Well, the thinking here is that because an mRNA vaccine in this case only results in the creation of the singular spike protein, the antibodies created to fight off the invader are very focused, as they're only ever going to be looking for that one protein. In the same way, the memory cells your body creates will also be very focused. Your immune system post-vaccine is therefore very well adapted at targeting that particular protein/antigen (could be an amino acid that is part of the protein).
Meanwhile an immune system fighting off actual COVID-19 might be creating antibodies and memory cells that are targeting slightly different antigens, as the overall coronavirus has 29 different proteins your immune system could be looking at to find antigens. This could result in a little bit more "overlap". e.g. You have two antibodies each keyed to a different antigen. They both find the same sars-cov-2 target and bind to their two respective sites. They're now doing "redundant work". Additionally, any antibody which is targeting an antigen that is not the spike protein is probably going to be less effective (the spike protein was targeted for the vaccine because it accounts for most of the outer surface area of the virus, which obviously makes it the best target for antibodies which must "bind" to something).
tl;dr: mRNA vaccines might be more effective than natural immunity because they are creating tools which attack only the most targetable of sars-cov-2's proteins – the spike protein. Natural immunity might give a more "diverse" response, but this is unneeded and could actually hinder secondary response if it is creating tools which are less effective.
The big problem with "natural" infection and response is that you have no idea what your body locked onto and made you immune to.
For example, my mother-in-law had measles 4 times. Her immune system clearly doesn't lock to the same piece as everybody else's.
For Covid, most of the time the lock point is the spike protein, but sometimes it's not. And sometimes it's different pieces of the spike protein. Some of which mutate quite quickly.
So, your immune system is spending a lot of energy "training" to lots of different pieces of the virus. That's what it's supposed to do.
But it's specificity isn't anywhere near as good as the vaccine which is engineered to give you a response to exactly what seems to be the most relevant chunk of the spike protein.
Of course, if the virus mutates that spike protein area, the specificity is useless. However, if that section of the spike protein mutates, the virus also gets a lot less problematic as it seems like it won't be able to bind to the ACE receptors.
Are RNA vaccines going to work without having many side effects? From what we know now, yes. We may learn something from trying it large-scale, though. (Just today there was this article on HN about men suffering unexpected levels of heart complications.)
This leads to people who are "pro science" but have out-dated science. And many people, even those who want to "follow the science", have run out of time and energy to keep following the science. So they treat "science" as frozen in time, not as a process.
And then you have people with vested interests and/or political angles. That includes the vaccine makers, and at times may include the CDC.
All in all, sorting out the science has become a real bear on this particular issue. People get tired, and freeze at the position the science supported when they gave up tracking.
I am not a doctor, but some observations from my side, what might be reasons for a different behavior of vaccinations vs. an actual infection. One point, that the vaccine is very targetted, you already listed. Then, the vaccine doesn't make you sick. Suffering through the infection might impact the ability of your immune system to build up long-term immunity. I read some article which claims that getting sick of measels does give you good immunity, but lowers your immunity against other diseases for up to two years. Also, the numbers of the time span of acquired immunity of both the vaccinations and getting infected by Covid are varying a lot. Recently I saw some claims that the infection does give you some reasonable long-term immunity.
Because the science on the immunity of coronaviruses is very poorly understood because previously they gave us the sniffles for 2 weeks and didn't cause the worldwide economy to shut down so nobody studied them well enough.
And studies had been done which seemed to showed that immune waned after 6-24 months with common cold coronaviruses.
More recent studies have now found that while people will get reinfected with HCoV-229E that immunity to an individual strain seems to be very durable/permanent and that on a scale of years the virus eventually mutates to achieve escape immunity and reinfects:
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
Note that was published as a preprint back in Dec 2020, so They(tm) didn't have this article back last summer when the question of reinfection was first raised.
6 months of immunity after natural infection was what was _guessed_ by some cautious immunologists last summer, based on the prior studies of coronaviruses. With better studies and with more time spent studying the only coronavirus that actually matters it looks pretty confident that its going to be more like years. The vaccines produce stronger results measured by neutralizing antibody titers so we _guess_ that they'll be more certain to hit those kinds of timelines. We still don't understand how long it'll take for this virus to achieve escape immunity, but the safer money is on the idea that it'll become endemic, but second time around those with natural or vaccine immunity won't be anywhere nearly as severely affected (e.g. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6530/741)
Qualified people agree that the vaccines save lives. People should get them. Unqualified people expressing their curiosity about the details is something like the guy in the backseat of a crashing car loudly wondering how brakes work. It's an interesting question, but now is not the time for it. If you aren't helping, keep it to yourself. And if you don't have any relevant knowledge or background in a related field, you should assume you aren't helping.
One reason to expect that immunity might last a long time is that people infected by Sars-Cov-1 still have plenty of antibodies 10 years later.
That said, when it comes to reinfections there is the big problem of variants of the virus. Immunity against one variant might not protect fully against another variant. It's very possible that we'll need to get yearly COVID vaccines, similarly to Influenza. But right now, it's still too soon to worry about that; we're still trying to get everyone vaccinated for the first time.
This reminds me of my aunt who calls me about random issues she is having with her Samsung tablet and then is shocked when I can't solve her problem when I "do computers" all day.
I was contrasting this with keyboard experts who berated me for asking but know even less. The former are pro-science. They have studied. They didn't know. They valud the question.
Others knew less and didn't even see why it was a valid thing to wonder about. Instead of any scientific answer, they regurgitated garbage.
Here's an analogy most people here should respond to: a family member asks, "you know about computers, why isn't my [insert some app or website] working?" Now, most of the time, do you think that they actually want the details? Even if many possible explanations leap to mind automatically, maybe it's some weird application that you've never heard of, and you really don't want to take the time at that moment to go figure it out for them. But generally, they're not asking for you to layer on the jargon and actually explain the nitty gritty details of why something isn't working, they just want you to make it work. Very seldom, sometimes that person really wants to absorb some real knowledge and learn. But that's not the common case by far.
So if most of us here are "computer people" to the lay public, then people working in many disparate fields of medical work are lumped together as "human body fixing people". Try to perspective take on what kinds of questions they usually get and from whom they usually get them.
For a large portion of the population, there is not much will to learn deeply about things. For them, science is surface level, and not much different from faith. We still need those people to "believe" in science even if they're never going to work hard to understand it, because the human animal hasn't changed that much in the past few thousand years, and people who are curious enough today to become scientists may well have been burned at the stake as witches by the same kind of people who are reflexively dogmatic today, and those doing the burning would have felt just as justified about protecting the public safety.
I get irritated with it too sometimes, and increasingly some entities like corporations are trying too hard to turn the act of science into a PR battle. It's extremely corrosive, because a lot folks know just enough to nod their heads at something that sounds good without checking whether it's a company pushing some really flaky "science" or real, solid research.
So please, ask smart questions, but also be careful where you sow doubt. Sometimes it's better to just hit the books if you really want to know something. We're not going to reach a state any time soon where everyone that claims to love science is actually going to love the act of methodically analyzing and questioning everything. We're probably going the other direction lately.
In the case of Pfizer and Astra Zeneca, the simple answer is that it is the second dose which presents a second challenge to the immune system which is designed to stimulate the longer protection, I'm quite surprised that none of your medical friends said that.
That leaves the question of how the single-dose jabs fair, and the honest answer is, I don't know.
It’s certainly possible that mRNAs could do harm: they could code for protein sequences that might disrupt cellular function, increase cancer risk (e.g. by disrupting DNA repair or even causing mutations), etc. The spike protein is none of these things - it just gets expressed on the cell’s surface - so the risk from the vaccine is low. And, crucially, once the mRNA runs out, no more protein will be produced: mRNAs are degraded after protein translation. This serves to generally limit the amount of lasting impact that an mRNA vaccine could possibly have.
But the person he's responding to is citing methods of harm that aren't realistic.
Edit: oh, the irony of going -3 for this comment on this article...what's wrong people, lay it on me
Sorry, what? We've been sequencing and tracking variants and lineages reliably since the pandemic started. This is very well travelled science. We've seen multiple notable variants arrive already, something that was predicted form the very early days of the pandemic and that surprised no one in the field.
Literally reality is the opposite of what you're saying. The virus is in fact "mutating" in more or less exactly the way that virologists would have expected, given decades of research on the subject.
One of the weirdest angles that the anti-vax/anti-mask crowd tend to take is to somehow argue that covid-19 is simultaneously "just a disease"/"not that bad" and that it's somehow some crazy unpredictable thing that defies the expectations of all of science. And both are wrong!
It's a very conventional novel disease behaving the way novel diseases do. There's a "global pandemic" among some species or another every few years (e.g. 90% of the pacific sea stars disappeared to a novel virus like 15 years ago and they're just now recovering). And that's bad, and requires action!
The media as always has sensationalized every new strain found and their behaviour is cause for concern, but researchers have not been sounding the alarm over possible vaccine escape - the evidence points to the spike protein being highly conserved, and the mRNA vaccine antibodies have remained effective.
I don't think the media has sensatialized any of the strains, and I am equally unconcerned as you. I expect I may need a booster in a year, probably in reality two, but one is safer under uncertainty.
The picture isn't nearly as rosey as OP makes it sound, unfortunately: sort of a gish gallop about knowing the rate at which we can expect buffer overflows in C, but in reply to a comment noting we don't have an ETA for ending security vulnerabilities, so they unintentionally implied the picture is good.
The mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) have both shown excellent (though in some cases reduced) efficacy against all strains [1], and the protein regions they target have not shown substantial alteration against antibody binding affinity (fun fact: this is "easy" to test - you give people the vaccine, isolate the antibodies in their blood, then test them against COVID in a petridish - so monitoring and change discovery is quick because you're not dependent on finding infected patients). The linked paper is notable, because while efficacy is effected, in tests the antibodies still ultimately inactivate the entire viral sample: no survivors means no natural selection criteria.
Given the widespread of COVID-19, the emergence of strains which do not successfully alter targetable regions for vaccines means that those regions are not easy (read: lead to reduction in fitness) to change. Similarly, the spike protein displays suboptimal binding to ACE receptors (tested by producing modified ACE receptors which have better binding) but there's been little field emergence towards a superior binding motif in any of the faster spreading strains [2], which implies again an evolutionary blockade or dead-end to improvements in that dimension.
Finally, antibody studies have found that in people who have had COVID, long term antibody production sets up in the bone marrow - this was recent research, but thats important because the basis of long term immunity is the development of immunological complexes which keep some antibody circulating. This is a hallmark of most long-lived immunities, and is for example one of the desired (though difficult to induce) end states of a potential mRNA HIV vaccine. [1]
Taken together (and again: you can also just go read what epidemiologists and microbiologists are publishing, plenty is out there) - the consensus opinion at the moment is that COVID-19 immunity is long-lived based on established science from decades of previous experience with vaccinating against viral diseases.
[1] https://asm.org/Articles/2021/February/SARS-CoV-2-Variants-v...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-70812-6
[3] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting...
You know most of the world isn't getting mRNA vaccines, and even if we quibble over 'most', it has nothing to do with your original nonsense, that somehow we know exactly when boosters for mRNA will be needed.
Jump to the 5 min mark. Dude explains some other stuff that works but is being suppressed.
For reference, I’m pro vaccine, but not one that hasn’t been tested for 10 years. Especially not for a disease that has a 99.99% survival rate in my age range. I’m appalled that anyone with an opinion (who’s educated!) can’t share that opinion, they’ve been banned.
For reference, I have a minor in bioengineering and read papers on this stuff. My wife works in genetics and I’ve assisted on and off. This virus and the vaccines are still active areas of research and what the NIH, CDC, WHO, etc act as fact is in fact just an unproven and likely correct in some and incorrect in other respects for virtually everything — from origin of disease to vaccines. We haven’t had enough time to study.
That being said, stop talking about vaccines when you’re developing the Linux kernel
Additionally, that guy saying "there are great alternative treatments but they've been suppressed!" doesn't mean it's true. I've seen neither evidence of this effectiveness nor evidence of suppression of this effectiveness, so not really sure what you expect people who care about demonstrable facts to do with that information.
Regarding the mechanism. Inflammation, we are not 100% sure where and what cells the mRNA is injected into and the spike proteins themselves have risk. Further, you’re training the body to attack these proteins... in the case of the second shot, those proteins are being produced inside your cells and being released, are we sure you won’t have an autoimmune response? We know the second shot reports the highest rate of issues. Where do spike proteins accumulate after they’re created? Etc etc
I’m not saying I know, I’m saying for most vaccines we wait 10 years because there’s the unknowns. Covid19 has very minimal risks and for those under 35 it’s less risky than the flu. In contrast based on VARES data your more likely (in that age range) to be hospitalized and die from the vaccine (depending on confounding factors)
https://vaers.hhs.gov/index.html
I’ve been bullish on people 65 and older getting the vaccine. Below that it doesn’t seem anywhere near justified.
Regarding suppression, families are having to resort to lawsuits to use safe drugs which have been shown effective in studies:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-elmhurst-hospi...
If you talk about these alternative drugs on social media your posts will be removed. Try it, post how you should try one of these drugs alongside of the vaccine.. that’s suppression.
I scanned most of the Pfizer trial and was wondering why we expected the immunity after the vaccine to last longer than natural immunity. A typical infection can last for several weeks, so your immune system is presumably exposed to the virus for a similar period of time. And after a natural infection I hear 6 months being thrown around as a typical window of immunity. But I was hearing claims of vaccines lasting for years, when they were only in the trials for less than 6 months. Why is this?
Fortunately I know a lot of people in the medical field. I asked a nurse who had been in a COVID ICU ward since this began. No idea, he said. Good question. I asked a few others: same answer. I asked several anesthesiologist friends: they did more med-school after all. Mostly no idea. One suggested that the vaccine might be more targeted and get a more potent response, maybe?
I tried casting a wider net on Facebook, and got a few nastygrams about how I was spreading uneducated FUD. I asked if they knew the answer but I was told to listen to the experts and read the science, whatever that means to these people. One friend did send me a link to a quote by the Moderna CEO that implied they have machines that can count antibody concentrations and they tracked it over time - I had no idea about that, so that was cool.
Eventually someone referred me to their cousin in nursing school who referred me to their brother-in-law who is actually an epidemiologist, and he told me it was a good question and explained all sorts of things about the various types of cells involved in the immune response and how the vaccine delivery invokes a very specific response that is, as one of the doctors suspected, much more targeted at something less likely to change, and how those immune cell types produce longer-lasting immunity. Now I was satisfied and learned something.
But those people in the middle think of themselves as being pro-science but they're really not. And the more they engage with anti-vaxxers the more ammunition anti-vaxxers will think they have and the more they'll dig into their beliefs. It's not good.