11 ms·

Absolutely agree with everything Linus says here. But I'm almost equally concerned that there's an awful lot of people on the pro-science bandwagon who don't ac

• tptacek 5y ago
  Why would you expect a nurse in a COVID ward and an anesthesiologist to have strong answers on this question? Vaccinology is laboratory science. My son works in a vaccinology lab; as far as I know, nobody there has been to med school.
  • Quillbert182 5y ago
    They may not have the answers, but you would think they would have a better idea of where to look than someone with no medical experience at all.
    • ceejayoz 5y ago
      People think that, but there’s basically nothing in nursing or anesthesia training that’s gonna deal much with the nitty gritty details of vaccines and how they’re developed and tested. 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.)
      • lethologica 5y ago
        It’s a starting point though. How often do you get to your answers immediately without having to go through some dead ends and wrong turns? That’s how learning works.
        • ceejayoz 5y ago
          > It’s a starting point though. 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.
          • macksd 5y ago
            Everyone seems to be missing the part of the story where I actually got connections and introductions to others in the medical field and got an answer, and the part where an anesthesiologist actually gave me what turned out to be a pretty good guess at the answer because they DO understand biology in general better than me and hey do have to learn a lot about the immune system even if they specialty isn't vaccines. 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.
• bad_alloc 5y ago
  > But I'm almost equally concerned that there's an awful lot of people on the pro-science bandwagon who don't actually support science, but simply don't tolerate dissent or questioning, and that's unscientific and potentially harmful too. 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.
  • macksd 5y ago
    True. Perhaps dissent is a poor choice of words here, because I was never against the vaccine - I would default to supporting a vaccine. More - I didn't get why everyone was so optimistic about them and asked to know more. Even that was blasphemy to a few people - but ironically not to the people who are medical experts in SOME way.
    • Quekid5 5y ago
      > but ironically not to the people who are medical experts in SOME way. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
  • Amezarak 5y ago
    I think it's unfair to characterize people who are skeptical about mRNA and liquid nanoparticle technology as anti-vax, but this is what people (including Linus) are doing. 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-lipid-shells-mRNA-vaccines/99/i8 https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/drug-delivery/Without-li...
• refulgentis 5y ago
  TL;DR you heard claims of vaccines' prophylactic effect lasting for years, from somewhere unnamed, and you correctly heard from people in the medical field that no one has any idea of how long it'll last, we're barely 6 months into have a sizable cohort to analyze this with in the US, which itself is far ahead of most of the world. Another massive factor is we have no idea how fast the virus will mutate. Edit: oh, the irony of going -3 for this comment on this article...what's wrong people, lay it on me
  • XorNot 5y ago
    We have a fairly good idea about how it will mutate actually. COVID is probably one of the most heavily studied and sequenced viruses ever, and a lot of research has been published on likely mutagenic pathways. 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.
    • harry8 5y ago
      Do you have anything on the Astra-Zenaca vaccine and how well it works against the do called "South-African" variant. There was a story that they'd stopped a trial because the results were so bad. Do we have any harder data?
      • refulgentis 5y ago
        Yes, Astra-Zeneca has been shown to be repeatedly poor against variants, a big story in the UK right now is whether the increase in cases and sense of being behind the US is due to gov't overly committing to a shoddy vaccine, or if it's variants burning through unvaccinated populations. 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.
• signal11 5y ago
  As far as I’m aware, there is no direct experimental evidence over a long duration as the virus is novel and the vaccines new, but for now we have this: Antibody Persistence through 6 Months after the Second Dose of mRNA-1273 Vaccine for Covid-19[1] 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. [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2103916 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2103916 [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
  • azinman2 5y ago
    It's also not like this is the first vaccine, or even the first mRNA vaccine. So we have analogs and precedents we can use. My understanding is that was heavily used in the clinical trials before roll out -- an understanding from previous vaccines that if someone majority were to go wrong it would go wrong in the first few months, and not 5+ years later.
    • dnautics 5y ago
      > So we have analogs and precedents we can use. 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.
      • azinman2 5y ago
        > 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.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
• IvyMike 5y ago
  There are a LOT of anti-vaxxers who disingenuously couch their advocacy as "I'm only asking questions". It's no surprise when you've seen a 10:1 ratio of bad actors to good (or worse), one might get a little exasperated. 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.
  • chris_wot 5y ago
    Is that a book?
    • IvyMike 5y ago
      Yes: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/How+the+Immune+System+Works%2C+6th+Edition-p-9781119542124 https://www.wiley.com/en-us/How+the+Immune+System+Works%2C+6...
    • cwt137 5y ago
      Yes. https://www.amazon.com/How-Immune-System-Works-dp-111954212X/dp/111954212X/ https://www.amazon.com/How-Immune-System-Works-dp-111954212X...
  • newsbinator 5y ago
    That's fine- whether or not their question is disingenuous, it's almost always a reasonable question that has been asked and answered by researchers, or that has been asked and not been able to be answered (e.g. what are the long term effects of mRNA vaccines?). 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".
  • walrus01 5y ago
• gameswithgo 5y ago
  9 out of 10 times when someone claims people have been dogmatically unwilling to consider ideas that run counter to scientific establishment, those people were just responding to profoundly insane anti-science ideas (earth is flat, covid is fake,global warming is just the sun etc). Their responses may seem glib, because they don't feel the ideas are deserving of serious discussion, but usually they understand things just fine.
  • CompMan411 5y ago
    Let’s not forget microchip tracking and Jewish globalist overlords.
    • cnq102 5y ago
      Originally it was about storing the vaccination history on the person's skin: https://news.mit.edu/2019/storing-vaccine-history-skin-1218 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.
• amelius 5y ago
  If you read Linus's post then it seems that no mRNA sequence (not necessarily a vaccine) can ever do harm when injected into the body, but I doubt that is the case. I hope someone who is knowledgeable about the subject can explain whether that is true or not.
  • papa_bear 5y ago
    Sure there is potential for harm. Most mRNAs just tell your cells how to make certain proteins, and there are tons of harmful proteins. You could be instructing your cells to make potent poisons, or instructing them to make all of the proteins necessary for an entire functional virus. But the person he's responding to is citing methods of harm that aren't realistic.
  • klyrs 5y ago
    No, he said that (in general) mRNA is flushed from your system within days and that (in specific) these vaccines don't permanently alter your DNA. That's nowhere near claiming that "mRNA can't ever do harm."
  • smolder 5y ago
    I only got that he was arguing it won't make permanent changes to our genome, which was the claim he was replying to, and he's correct. The spike protein is damaging to cells when present at all, but still very apparently much less dangerous when exposed via vaccine than an actual infection. And, as you know, cells die and get replaced all the time. I think people who are aware of it sometimes gloss over how the spike protein does some damage simply because they don't want to stoke unreasonable fears.
  • nneonneo 5y ago
    Natural mRNA sequences tend to contain uracil, which the immune system is not a fan of (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1525001616326818 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S152500161...). The innate immune system generally attacks extracellular mRNA because of this. The mRNA in vaccines are specially modified to bypass the immune system and be taken into cells, at which point they will be translated into spike proteins and be expressed on the cell’s surface. In conjunction with an adjuvant, the immune system will recognize this as a threat and begin producing antibodies. 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.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Netcob 5y ago
  Ever since the pandemic started, useful information was few and far between. I know that numbers scare people, but so much of this is basic risk assessment. The facts are extremely pro-vaccination, but good luck finding them! 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.
  • bitL 5y ago
    Typically a vaccine is aborted if it kills just a single person during its clinical trial.
  • kaba0 5y ago
    There is also the issue of estimating very rare events. You need significantly more data to do so with any reasonable accuracy.
• avl999 5y ago
  Why are you expecting your nurse and anesthesiologist friends to answer questions about mrna technology and then taking it to mean something when they can't answer? That's like reading a paper about an advancement in compiler parsing technology asking an average Software Developer who has spent the last 3 years of his career doing React apps to answer detailed and specific questions about ambiguities in the said paper? 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.
  • macksd 5y ago
    I didn't take it to mean something that they didn't know answer. But as relative experts in the medical field, they considered it a good and valuable question. 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.
• ufo 5y ago
  Most of the times I've seen those ~6 months numbers being quoted, they were lower bounds. We have 6 months of data saying that immunity lasts at least this long. 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.
• zmmmmm 5y ago
  > there's an awful lot of people on the pro-science bandwagon who don't actually support science, but simply don't tolerate dissent or questioning 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).
• Angostura 5y ago
  > and was wondering why we expected the immunity after the vaccine to last longer than natural immunity. 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.
• whakim 5y ago
  I get what you're saying, but the logical conclusion of all this is that no one can know anything at all unless they're an expert in that specific thing. But that's why we have experts in the first place - so that we can determine what is most likely to be true without necessarily needing to deeply understand it first hand. So sure, perhaps there's some small chance that the vaccines don't work the way they're supposed to or the earth is flat. But "expert consensus is X" is a pretty good heuristic for "X is correct." And while I'm not defending random trolls on Facebook, this does happen to be a pretty sensitive subject right now because there is a pretty significant proportion of the population who won't get the vaccine precisely because they don't believe in expertise.
• _ph_ 5y ago
  You are right, not tolerating questioning is unscientific and harmfull. Asking questions is the one way how you can learn things and also, I find it extremely useful for myself to answer scientific questions. Becauses it forces yourself to review the matter at hand, sort out your own thoughts about the problem and refine them to a point where you can deliver a satisfying answer. Often enough that leads to deeper insights. 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.
• lamontcg 5y ago
  > 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? 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/journal.ppat.1009453 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 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6530/741)
• chrischen 5y ago
  The thing is, any random person can be a genuine skeptic by simply having a lack of expertise in the subject. It’s much more interesting to hear from s skeptic that is more than a layman, otherwise we’d just be inundated with skeptics.
• bsder 5y ago
  A couple of comments: 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.
• lettergram 5y ago
  https://americasvoice.news/video/DHUF0DZxs4KXyGX https://americasvoice.news/video/DHUF0DZxs4KXyGX 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
  • fastball 5y ago
    I too have degrees in bioengineering, and I'm interested: given the function of an mRNA vaccine, by what mechanism do you think it would be possible for the cure to be worse than the disease in this case? Said another way, if you are guaranteed to either get COVID-19 or an mRNA vaccine, would you really prefer to get COVID-19? If so, what are you worried about in the vaccine that SARS-CoV-2 does not have? 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.
    • lettergram 5y ago
      I’ve had covid19, wasn’t a big deal, more mild than the flu I had the year prior. In fact, half the people I know got covid19. The only people I know who ended up in the hospital were a couple of family members who were vaccinated. 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 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-hospital-covid-ivermectin-lawsuit-20210503-odktw5zntnarhnyvdemjbr2xfy-story.html 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.
• notatoad 5y ago
  If you have academic curiosity about that vaccines that's fine, but it is irresponsible to be voicing that in a way that could discourage people from getting a vaccine in the middle of a global health emergency. 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.
  • Aachen 5y ago
    I see what you mean and was wondering the same myself, but I'm not convinced it's really for the best to say we should not be asking questions and apply self-censorship as a general rule during some period that lasts multiple years.
• fastball 5y ago
  For the curious who were left a little lacking in an answer to OP's question: 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.
• AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  I think part of the problem is that the science keeps changing as we find out more. Were masks going to help with Covid? No, then yes, then kind of drifting back toward maybe no. 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.
• the_af 5y ago
  > 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. 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!)
• DoctorOW 5y ago
  The average pro-science person on Facebook primarily is approached by an anti-science person looking for public confrontation. I didn't see your post, but I'd imagine looking around you could find many questions similar to yours being asked in bad faith. While I agree your question _isn't_ bad faith, the surface level hallmarks are there. Question about the expedited testing process, context includes a reason to worry about safety if there isn't a scientific answer, then concluded by anecdotes of stumped medical professionals as if to give credibility to the concerns. I'm aware that a close read of this post shows you have a genuine question, but I can also see why it blends in well in a sea of "But we don't know the vaccine is safe" posts.
• notabee 5y ago
  So my hypothesis is that groups of experts, or expert-adjacent, that are used to dealing with the public pelting them with questions and then ignoring them anyways, will be prone to shooting down smart, good faith questions too. 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.