5 ms·

Personally, I’d rather take the J&J which uses old, proven tech. In 5 years we will know a lot more about nRNA vaccine long-term safety, and I’ll be much more

Personally, I’d rather take the J&J which uses old, proven tech. In 5 years we will know a lot more about nRNA vaccine long-term safety, and I’ll be much more comfortable taking an nRNA vaccine at that point. When I’m eligible, I still may take the nRNA, but my preference is on older tech at this point. I fully acknowledge that the nRNA is extremely likely to be safe, but it’s just my preference

geuis 6y ago
mRNA, not n. It’s short for messenger RNA.
bawolff 6y ago
Adenovirus vaccines are also a newish tech (not that anything wrong with that, that's why we have safety testing). Its not as bleeding edge as mRNA but its definitely not a traditional vaccine
- zeku 6y ago
  Don't tell him that. He's willing to get any vaccine at all and the world desperately needs to be vaxxed. If people want to take adenovirus vaxs because they feel its safer I say just let them.
  - manwe150 6y ago
    I think what continues to surprise me (after talking about these for months now) is his underlying assumption that the third choice is a likely option. While the continued rate of spread seems to suggest to me that really we have a near binary option: 1. get injected with some vaccine soon, expose your body to a controlled amount of slightly noxious chemicals and hope your body learns how to eliminate them before they degrade on their own 2. contract COVID-19 soon, expose your body to those same noxious chemicals, plus a bunch of others that help it spread throughout your body and cause damage and linger, possibly for weeks or sometimes until you die (excluding extreme options, like living alone for the next 5 years far from other humans, or dying of a mundane cause sooner)
  - Mountain_Skies 6y ago
    Informed consent is very important in medicine for good reasons.
dirtyid 6y ago
Yeah, I'd personally hedge for 50-70% shots based off tested techniques that inoculates against severe cases. I'll also bias towards options with less onerous cold chain requirements. No part of covid response has been trouble free so far, vaccines rollout will be no different. Have had several front line / medical friends advice to bias away from Pfizer due to behind the scene incompetence. Currently Pfizer is limited to hospital settings in my country due to excess requirements, and guess what, hospital staff has been running ragged for over a year.
gojomo 6y ago
Some think the Adenovirus-vetor vaccines have more risk of certain side-effects, especially if (by chance or a prior vaccination) the person was previously infected by a related Adenovirus. By contrast, the mRNA vaccines do the same thing in the end - get your cells to appear infected & emit the target spike proteins – in the narrowest possible way, via a subset of the changes an Adenovirus infection causes.
- angry_octet 6y ago
  As I understand it, the risk is not to do with the adenovirus but with the use of PEG (polyethylene glycol) or similar analogues, to make the active ingredient last longer, which may cause an allergic reaction[1] to sensitized people. The AZ vaccine does not use PEG (nor J&J, Novovax IIRC). The complication with the adenovirus carrier is that you immune system may attack the carrier so effectively that you don't get enough exposure to the coronavirus protein that it is carrying, and hence don't develop a strong enough immune response to it. This causes problems determining how people will respond to varied treatment schedules (delay of the booster shot, mixing of vaccines, etc).[2][3] The mRNA vaccines do not get your cells to 'appear infected'. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcTEmHlvY10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcTEmHlvY10 [1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/suspicions-grow-nanoparticles-pfizer-s-covid-19-vaccine-trigger-rare-allergic-reactions https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/suspicions-grow-nano... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1525001604013425 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S152500160... [3] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/02/taking-two-different-vaccines https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/02/ta...
  - timr 6y ago
    There are a number of direct risks related to the Adenovirus itself. Multiple adenovirus vaccine programs have been scrapped over the years because of these issues: https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/Adenoviral-vectors-new-COVID-19/98/i19 https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/Adenoviral-vect... For example, famously, one Ad-based HIV vaccine was found to increase the chances of getting HIV. People still theorize that it might be due to the vector itself: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32156-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... (that said, these platforms are certainly better validated than the mRNA-based vaccines. There's an approved rabies virus vaccine based on adenovirus.)
singingfish 6y ago
I don't see any a-priori issues with mRNA safety - mRNA is by design an ephemeral product with no chance of self-replication. Its long term efficacy on the other hand is yet unknown and the supply chain issues are significant (it's a result of mRNA being an ephemeral cellular product being stored artificially). Of course if you made an mRNA virus to produce some sort of toxic cellular protein then safety would be an issue - which is what the phase 1 and 2 trials are about. Phase 4 is about finding the one in a million adverse reactions.
neuronic 6y ago
God! This is such a huge misconception it's concerning that people still need to be this concerned. You don't have to hold back on the mRNA vaccine. There is no such thing as long term issues that *suddenly appear after months or years". It simply can't happen because they don't have pharmacodynamics and you don't take them that regularly. They are not the same thing as medication. Long term side effects like after the polio vaccine in the 70s always occur IMMEDIATELY after vaccination. Hours to days, maybe a week. These vaccines are in your body for a short period of time before they produce the spike protein from the mRNA instruction. All effects happen very fast. If you get vaccinated you might feel ill within the day. So why did we only notice some effects of vaccines much later, for example narcolepsy in swine flu? Answer: it's all statistics. Some side effects have a chance of only 1:60.000 or even much less. Do you know how long it usually takes to vaccinate enough people to find something that occurs only in one out of 60.000 times? The answer is months or years. But for COVID we have already vaccinated millions of people in multiple countries with multiple political systems and ideologies in power. No serious issues whatsoever. I know people who did get pretty sick for 2-3 days (basically bad cold) from the mRNA vaccine but that's GOOD. They are not infected, it's just a short term immune reaction that will disperse without causing serious harm and it shows the vaccine does what it is designed for: invoke an immune response. And 2 days of symptoms are much better than 3 weeks with symptoms including hospitalization and long term effects due to an active virus in your body.
- dnautics 6y ago
  > Long term side effects like after the polio vaccine in the 70s always occur IMMEDIATELY after vaccination. Sure, but this is different. Suppose a target cell happens to be expressing a retrotransposon that by chance binds to the mrna vaccine and integrates it into host dna in an inopportune spot, could cause elevated risk of cancer years from now. I think it's highly unlikely, and plan on getting an mrna vaccine myself but there are whole classes of side effects we can't simply rule out because "traditional vaccines show immediate effects"
  - neuronic 6y ago
    Please, stop posting smart sounding misinformation. > mRNA technology is new, but not unknown. They have been studied for more than a decade. mRNA vaccines do not contain a live virus and do not carry a risk of causing disease in the vaccinated person. mRNA from the vaccine never enters the nucleus of the cell and does not affect or interact with a person's DNA. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/hcp/mrna-vaccine-basics.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/hcp/mrna-vaccine-basic...

geuis 6y ago

mRNA, not n. It’s short for messenger RNA.

bawolff 6y ago

Adenovirus vaccines are also a newish tech (not that anything wrong with that, that's why we have safety testing). Its not as bleeding edge as mRNA but its definitely not a traditional vaccine

zeku 6y ago
Don't tell him that. He's willing to get any vaccine at all and the world desperately needs to be vaxxed. If people want to take adenovirus vaxs because they feel its safer I say just let them.
- manwe150 6y ago
  I think what continues to surprise me (after talking about these for months now) is his underlying assumption that the third choice is a likely option. While the continued rate of spread seems to suggest to me that really we have a near binary option: 1. get injected with some vaccine soon, expose your body to a controlled amount of slightly noxious chemicals and hope your body learns how to eliminate them before they degrade on their own 2. contract COVID-19 soon, expose your body to those same noxious chemicals, plus a bunch of others that help it spread throughout your body and cause damage and linger, possibly for weeks or sometimes until you die (excluding extreme options, like living alone for the next 5 years far from other humans, or dying of a mundane cause sooner)
- Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  Informed consent is very important in medicine for good reasons.

dirtyid 6y ago

Yeah, I'd personally hedge for 50-70% shots based off tested techniques that inoculates against severe cases. I'll also bias towards options with less onerous cold chain requirements. No part of covid response has been trouble free so far, vaccines rollout will be no different. Have had several front line / medical friends advice to bias away from Pfizer due to behind the scene incompetence. Currently Pfizer is limited to hospital settings in my country due to excess requirements, and guess what, hospital staff has been running ragged for over a year.

gojomo 6y ago

Some think the Adenovirus-vetor vaccines have more risk of certain side-effects, especially if (by chance or a prior vaccination) the person was previously infected by a related Adenovirus. By contrast, the mRNA vaccines do the same thing in the end - get your cells to appear infected & emit the target spike proteins – in the narrowest possible way, via a subset of the changes an Adenovirus infection causes.

angry_octet 6y ago
As I understand it, the risk is not to do with the adenovirus but with the use of PEG (polyethylene glycol) or similar analogues, to make the active ingredient last longer, which may cause an allergic reaction[1] to sensitized people. The AZ vaccine does not use PEG (nor J&J, Novovax IIRC). The complication with the adenovirus carrier is that you immune system may attack the carrier so effectively that you don't get enough exposure to the coronavirus protein that it is carrying, and hence don't develop a strong enough immune response to it. This causes problems determining how people will respond to varied treatment schedules (delay of the booster shot, mixing of vaccines, etc).[2][3] The mRNA vaccines do not get your cells to 'appear infected'. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcTEmHlvY10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcTEmHlvY10 [1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/suspicions-grow-nanoparticles-pfizer-s-covid-19-vaccine-trigger-rare-allergic-reactions https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/suspicions-grow-nano... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1525001604013425 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S152500160... [3] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/02/taking-two-different-vaccines https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/02/ta...
- timr 6y ago
  There are a number of direct risks related to the Adenovirus itself. Multiple adenovirus vaccine programs have been scrapped over the years because of these issues: https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/Adenoviral-vectors-new-COVID-19/98/i19 https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/Adenoviral-vect... For example, famously, one Ad-based HIV vaccine was found to increase the chances of getting HIV. People still theorize that it might be due to the vector itself: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32156-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... (that said, these platforms are certainly better validated than the mRNA-based vaccines. There's an approved rabies virus vaccine based on adenovirus.)

singingfish 6y ago

I don't see any a-priori issues with mRNA safety - mRNA is by design an ephemeral product with no chance of self-replication. Its long term efficacy on the other hand is yet unknown and the supply chain issues are significant (it's a result of mRNA being an ephemeral cellular product being stored artificially). Of course if you made an mRNA virus to produce some sort of toxic cellular protein then safety would be an issue - which is what the phase 1 and 2 trials are about. Phase 4 is about finding the one in a million adverse reactions.

neuronic 6y ago

God! This is such a huge misconception it's concerning that people still need to be this concerned. You don't have to hold back on the mRNA vaccine. There is no such thing as long term issues that *suddenly appear after months or years". It simply can't happen because they don't have pharmacodynamics and you don't take them that regularly. They are not the same thing as medication. Long term side effects like after the polio vaccine in the 70s always occur IMMEDIATELY after vaccination. Hours to days, maybe a week. These vaccines are in your body for a short period of time before they produce the spike protein from the mRNA instruction. All effects happen very fast. If you get vaccinated you might feel ill within the day. So why did we only notice some effects of vaccines much later, for example narcolepsy in swine flu? Answer: it's all statistics. Some side effects have a chance of only 1:60.000 or even much less. Do you know how long it usually takes to vaccinate enough people to find something that occurs only in one out of 60.000 times? The answer is months or years. But for COVID we have already vaccinated millions of people in multiple countries with multiple political systems and ideologies in power. No serious issues whatsoever. I know people who did get pretty sick for 2-3 days (basically bad cold) from the mRNA vaccine but that's GOOD. They are not infected, it's just a short term immune reaction that will disperse without causing serious harm and it shows the vaccine does what it is designed for: invoke an immune response. And 2 days of symptoms are much better than 3 weeks with symptoms including hospitalization and long term effects due to an active virus in your body.

dnautics 6y ago
> Long term side effects like after the polio vaccine in the 70s always occur IMMEDIATELY after vaccination. Sure, but this is different. Suppose a target cell happens to be expressing a retrotransposon that by chance binds to the mrna vaccine and integrates it into host dna in an inopportune spot, could cause elevated risk of cancer years from now. I think it's highly unlikely, and plan on getting an mrna vaccine myself but there are whole classes of side effects we can't simply rule out because "traditional vaccines show immediate effects"
- neuronic 6y ago
  Please, stop posting smart sounding misinformation. > mRNA technology is new, but not unknown. They have been studied for more than a decade. mRNA vaccines do not contain a live virus and do not carry a risk of causing disease in the vaccinated person. mRNA from the vaccine never enters the nucleus of the cell and does not affect or interact with a person's DNA. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/hcp/mrna-vaccine-basics.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/hcp/mrna-vaccine-basic...