7 ms·

Can you provide more information about how vaccines can cause damage?

by zests 6y ago

dante_dev 6y ago
I think he was referring generically to any bad crafted vaccine. Not the one approved by authorities. Indeed any improvised drug can be harmful.
wiml 6y ago
Some vaccines in the past have been withdrawn for causing autoimmune disorders, eg arthritis.
recursivedoubts 6y ago
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/04/14/cutter-polio-vaccine-paralyzed-children-coronavirus/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/04/14/cutter-pol...
fabian2k 6y ago
I said that the immune system can cause damage. Vaccines have a very high safety standard as they are given to large numbers of healthy people, so the tolerance for serious side effects is very low. So the development there is very careful, and anything that looks too dangerous is hopefully caught in animal experiments or at worst at phase I. A well known example of how dangerous the immune system can be is the following phase I trial: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa063842 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa063842 That drug caused a cytokine storm in the participants in the phase I trial. Allergies are another example of how dangerous the immune system can be if it is triggered against the wrong targets.
- jerf 6y ago
  I have suspected for much of the last year that a lot of people are running on an unexamined "Only crazy people think vaccines cause autism -> Only crazy people think vaccines are ever dangerous in any way -> All vaccines are perfectly safe" psuedo-syllogism. This is false. Put another way, the very fact that we run such massive tests on them before deploying them is itself evidence that the wrong ones can be very dangerous. (Mostly, as I understand it, "very dangerous" to a small set of people who will have very large reactions, even if most people are fine. The ones that are very dangerous to everyone never gets past the initial phases at all, of course.) We're not doing that because vaccines are all perfectly safe under all conditions, but we just want to hold them back for a year for no reason. We're doing it because we need to be very careful with them. Though I'd also observe a non-trivial component of that danger is also because we're injecting them. Bypassing the body's co-evolved with the environment's defenses is not to be done lightly. This sort of inhaled vaccine is likely to be much less dangerous. I won't say "safe", but less dangerous; the body already has to deal with essentially arbitrary small amino acid sequences being inhaled all the time. I'd still be a bit worried about sythesizing things that we haven't co-evolved with. (If you don't know what co-evolution is, I'd suggesting taking a moment to learn about it: https://www.britannica.com/science/coevolution https://www.britannica.com/science/coevolution It's a very important part of understanding the disease landscape holistically.)
  - bawolff 6y ago
    [Deleted. I didn't fully read the parents post, and responded emotionally. That was wrong of me and I apologize]
    - yters 6y ago
      I personally know very intelligent and highly educated people who went to top universities who are convinced vaccines caused mental retardation in their children. They may be wrong, but I would not call them nutjobs.
      - bawolff 6y ago
        Being smart and being crazy are not mutually exclusive
        macintux 6y ago
        I think it’s more accurate to say that intelligence is not adequate defense against trusting the wrong sources of information, and people are extremely resistant to changing their minds once they’ve placed a stake in the ground.
        bawolff 6y ago
        I'd go with both. There are plenty of smart people who i would consider delusional. Which is separate from people stuck in their views. However, as the saying goes, science advances one funeral at a time.
      - pwython 6y ago
        > "very intelligent and highly educated people who went to top universities" Imagine trusting a "rocket scientist" to even weigh in on medical topics because they are "very intelligent" in their totally unrelated field. This is an unfortunate misconception that plagues conspiracy theory extremists who reference PhD graduates in their arguments against things like 5G brain control.... pointing to people with doctoral degrees in Music or something.
- zests 6y ago
  I have no doubts about the safety of vaccines in healthy people. I have some harmless curiosity about people who are not known to be healthy. How do you actually determine if someone is "too immunocompromised" for a vaccine? This must be a question with no good answer.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    > I have no doubts about the safety of vaccines in healthy people. I have some harmless curiosity about people who are not known to be healthy. How do you actually determine if someone is "too immunocompromised" for a vaccine? My understanding is that being too immunocompromised for a vaccine happens in two different ways: 1) the vaccine contains live virus and so there's danger that the weak immune system couldn't fight this off 2) the vaccine isn't live, so it's not dangerous on its own, but the immune system is too weak to recognize it, so it doesn't build any immunity to the real thing. (One doctor I was talking to said the mRNA ones should be good here, because your own body produces so much of the lookalikes that even a weak immune system should notice it - and then you're much better prepared to fight the real thing off faster.) Only the first is immediately dangerous, so the standard seems to be to just stay away from those. I'm not sure if much is commonly done for the second, in terms of looking for response, but you can get tests for measles antibodies and such, so that would probably be how?
    - gus_massa 6y ago
      The MMR vaccine has live virus, and before injecting the kids the nurse make a few additional questions about the health of the children and IIRC about the people that live with the children. (Like: Does someone in the family have cancer or is immunosuppressed? I don't remember the details.) It's safe, but they must check that the nearby persons are healthy.
  - matthew_stone 6y ago
    High-risk populations such as the immunocompromised are tested in a Phase 4 trial.
- Symmetry 6y ago
  That's true in general but I'd be very surprised if an inhaled rather than injected vaccine that didn't use any adjuvants or live virus was going to cause a serious problem.
  - pazimzadeh 6y ago
    Pretty sure omitting adjuvant would probably tolerize you to the peptide, which means you'd be more susceptible to COVID.
bawolff 6y ago
For vaccines in general, i imagine it depends on the type a lot. Live vaccines for example have the obvious risk factor of maybe giving you the disease, but i dont know much about the topic. I imagine for this article the biggest risk is you make something other than you expect and poision yourself, or you just make something that does nothing. (IANAexpert)
- m-ee 6y ago
  You can actually do much worse than nothing with antibody dependent enhancement. Let's say you make something that at first glance appears similar to the virus but is a little off. Maybe you chose the wrong proteins, or maybe you used an inactivated virus and the inactivation step damaged some key part of the virus. You inject the vaccine and your body learns how to make antibodies for this particle. Now the real virus shows up, your body goes "Aha! I've seen this before let me make those antibodies." But it wasn't trained on the real virus, so the antibodies it makes aren't actually effective against the real thing. The virus replicates and your body makes more and more antibodies but they do nothing to stop it. Meanwhile the the antibodies are running rampant in your body causing inflammation and blood clots. This has happened before with vaccine candidates, and is analogous to what goes in on severe covid. The body tries to respond to the invading virus but does so ineffectively and causes potential deadly damage.
  - ntr-- 6y ago
    Isn't it possible your body would have the same response if it was exposed to a variant of a virus that it already has antibodies for? Maybe the explanations are simplified but I don't quite understand how the immune system could fail to recognise permutations of proteins or any other differentiating factor between COVID-19, its variants and mRNA vaccines; nor what makes this specific example of vaccination riskier.
    - Vecr 6y ago
      Your immune system is not intelligent. Through natural selection it has evolved to be able to handle some things, but it can't see permutations like that, as they are not something it evolved for, it's all chemical/physical matching.
m-ee 6y ago
The goal of the vaccine is to train the immune system to recognize the real virus when it shows up. If you get it wrong, the vaccine may not simulate the virus very accurately which can lead to a number of issues. You may not mount an immune response when the virus shows up, or worse the vaccine may have improperly trained your immune system and you create antibodies that are ineffective against the virus but wreak havoc on your body. This has happened before with vaccine candidates like RSV or Dengvaxia. It can be deadly. That's not even getting into the issues that may arise from skipping all the GMP/GLP guidelines. They can be tedious but exist for a reason.
passivate 6y ago
Well, a vaccine is a rather vague and generic term. Are you talking about an FDA approved product? An experimental vaccine? A vaccine whose use is contra-indicated for certain people? etc. etc. If I may - perhaps one alternative question is "Can an unapproved vaccine product cause harm?". With that re-wording, the answers become a bit more clear. Yes, chemicals used in the formulation maybe toxic, or the final vaccine might give rise to an auto-immune response, or could induce anaphylaxis in certain people. There could be cell debris/endotoxins that a purification process doesn't remove properly and causes problems. Maybe the vaccine contains an attenuated pathogen that can "revert", etc, etc.

Can you provide more information about how vaccines can cause damage?

by zests 6y ago

Can you provide more information about how vaccines can cause damage?

I think he was referring generically to any bad crafted vaccine. Not the one approved by authorities. Indeed any improvised drug can be harmful.

wiml 6y ago

Some vaccines in the past have been withdrawn for causing autoimmune disorders, eg arthritis.

recursivedoubts 6y ago

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/04/14/cutter-polio-vaccine-paralyzed-children-coronavirus/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/04/14/cutter-pol...

fabian2k 6y ago

I said that the immune system can cause damage. Vaccines have a very high safety standard as they are given to large numbers of healthy people, so the tolerance for serious side effects is very low. So the development there is very careful, and anything that looks too dangerous is hopefully caught in animal experiments or at worst at phase I. A well known example of how dangerous the immune system can be is the following phase I trial: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa063842 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa063842 That drug caused a cytokine storm in the participants in the phase I trial. Allergies are another example of how dangerous the immune system can be if it is triggered against the wrong targets.

jerf 6y ago
I have suspected for much of the last year that a lot of people are running on an unexamined "Only crazy people think vaccines cause autism -> Only crazy people think vaccines are ever dangerous in any way -> All vaccines are perfectly safe" psuedo-syllogism. This is false. Put another way, the very fact that we run such massive tests on them before deploying them is itself evidence that the wrong ones can be very dangerous. (Mostly, as I understand it, "very dangerous" to a small set of people who will have very large reactions, even if most people are fine. The ones that are very dangerous to everyone never gets past the initial phases at all, of course.) We're not doing that because vaccines are all perfectly safe under all conditions, but we just want to hold them back for a year for no reason. We're doing it because we need to be very careful with them. Though I'd also observe a non-trivial component of that danger is also because we're injecting them. Bypassing the body's co-evolved with the environment's defenses is not to be done lightly. This sort of inhaled vaccine is likely to be much less dangerous. I won't say "safe", but less dangerous; the body already has to deal with essentially arbitrary small amino acid sequences being inhaled all the time. I'd still be a bit worried about sythesizing things that we haven't co-evolved with. (If you don't know what co-evolution is, I'd suggesting taking a moment to learn about it: https://www.britannica.com/science/coevolution https://www.britannica.com/science/coevolution It's a very important part of understanding the disease landscape holistically.)
- bawolff 6y ago
  [Deleted. I didn't fully read the parents post, and responded emotionally. That was wrong of me and I apologize]
  - yters 6y ago
    I personally know very intelligent and highly educated people who went to top universities who are convinced vaccines caused mental retardation in their children. They may be wrong, but I would not call them nutjobs.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      Being smart and being crazy are not mutually exclusive
      - macintux 6y ago
        I think it’s more accurate to say that intelligence is not adequate defense against trusting the wrong sources of information, and people are extremely resistant to changing their minds once they’ve placed a stake in the ground.
        bawolff 6y ago
        I'd go with both. There are plenty of smart people who i would consider delusional. Which is separate from people stuck in their views. However, as the saying goes, science advances one funeral at a time.
    - pwython 6y ago
      > "very intelligent and highly educated people who went to top universities" Imagine trusting a "rocket scientist" to even weigh in on medical topics because they are "very intelligent" in their totally unrelated field. This is an unfortunate misconception that plagues conspiracy theory extremists who reference PhD graduates in their arguments against things like 5G brain control.... pointing to people with doctoral degrees in Music or something.
zests 6y ago
I have no doubts about the safety of vaccines in healthy people. I have some harmless curiosity about people who are not known to be healthy. How do you actually determine if someone is "too immunocompromised" for a vaccine? This must be a question with no good answer.
- majormajor 6y ago
  > I have no doubts about the safety of vaccines in healthy people. I have some harmless curiosity about people who are not known to be healthy. How do you actually determine if someone is "too immunocompromised" for a vaccine? My understanding is that being too immunocompromised for a vaccine happens in two different ways: 1) the vaccine contains live virus and so there's danger that the weak immune system couldn't fight this off 2) the vaccine isn't live, so it's not dangerous on its own, but the immune system is too weak to recognize it, so it doesn't build any immunity to the real thing. (One doctor I was talking to said the mRNA ones should be good here, because your own body produces so much of the lookalikes that even a weak immune system should notice it - and then you're much better prepared to fight the real thing off faster.) Only the first is immediately dangerous, so the standard seems to be to just stay away from those. I'm not sure if much is commonly done for the second, in terms of looking for response, but you can get tests for measles antibodies and such, so that would probably be how?
  - gus_massa 6y ago
    The MMR vaccine has live virus, and before injecting the kids the nurse make a few additional questions about the health of the children and IIRC about the people that live with the children. (Like: Does someone in the family have cancer or is immunosuppressed? I don't remember the details.) It's safe, but they must check that the nearby persons are healthy.
- matthew_stone 6y ago
  High-risk populations such as the immunocompromised are tested in a Phase 4 trial.
Symmetry 6y ago
That's true in general but I'd be very surprised if an inhaled rather than injected vaccine that didn't use any adjuvants or live virus was going to cause a serious problem.
- pazimzadeh 6y ago
  Pretty sure omitting adjuvant would probably tolerize you to the peptide, which means you'd be more susceptible to COVID.

bawolff 6y ago

For vaccines in general, i imagine it depends on the type a lot. Live vaccines for example have the obvious risk factor of maybe giving you the disease, but i dont know much about the topic. I imagine for this article the biggest risk is you make something other than you expect and poision yourself, or you just make something that does nothing. (IANAexpert)

m-ee 6y ago
You can actually do much worse than nothing with antibody dependent enhancement. Let's say you make something that at first glance appears similar to the virus but is a little off. Maybe you chose the wrong proteins, or maybe you used an inactivated virus and the inactivation step damaged some key part of the virus. You inject the vaccine and your body learns how to make antibodies for this particle. Now the real virus shows up, your body goes "Aha! I've seen this before let me make those antibodies." But it wasn't trained on the real virus, so the antibodies it makes aren't actually effective against the real thing. The virus replicates and your body makes more and more antibodies but they do nothing to stop it. Meanwhile the the antibodies are running rampant in your body causing inflammation and blood clots. This has happened before with vaccine candidates, and is analogous to what goes in on severe covid. The body tries to respond to the invading virus but does so ineffectively and causes potential deadly damage.
- ntr-- 6y ago
  Isn't it possible your body would have the same response if it was exposed to a variant of a virus that it already has antibodies for? Maybe the explanations are simplified but I don't quite understand how the immune system could fail to recognise permutations of proteins or any other differentiating factor between COVID-19, its variants and mRNA vaccines; nor what makes this specific example of vaccination riskier.
  - Vecr 6y ago
    Your immune system is not intelligent. Through natural selection it has evolved to be able to handle some things, but it can't see permutations like that, as they are not something it evolved for, it's all chemical/physical matching.

m-ee 6y ago

The goal of the vaccine is to train the immune system to recognize the real virus when it shows up. If you get it wrong, the vaccine may not simulate the virus very accurately which can lead to a number of issues. You may not mount an immune response when the virus shows up, or worse the vaccine may have improperly trained your immune system and you create antibodies that are ineffective against the virus but wreak havoc on your body. This has happened before with vaccine candidates like RSV or Dengvaxia. It can be deadly. That's not even getting into the issues that may arise from skipping all the GMP/GLP guidelines. They can be tedious but exist for a reason.

passivate 6y ago

Well, a vaccine is a rather vague and generic term. Are you talking about an FDA approved product? An experimental vaccine? A vaccine whose use is contra-indicated for certain people? etc. etc. If I may - perhaps one alternative question is "Can an unapproved vaccine product cause harm?". With that re-wording, the answers become a bit more clear. Yes, chemicals used in the formulation maybe toxic, or the final vaccine might give rise to an auto-immune response, or could induce anaphylaxis in certain people. There could be cell debris/endotoxins that a purification process doesn't remove properly and causes problems. Maybe the vaccine contains an attenuated pathogen that can "revert", etc, etc.