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I am going to do my best to write a post to follow up on last week's mRNA vaccine hypothetical. Last week, the idea of 25% of the population "dying" from the vaccine would have social consequences, and people discussed. I noticed a lot of in-the-weeds back and forth on the vaccines, and luckily, a paper came out today to establish a non-hypothetical.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22014931
I am having a lot of trouble with this. The pfizer vaccine is associated with an increase in Pulmonary Embolism, which is a blood clot in the lungs. There is severe disinterest in classifying these types of blood clots. I noticed that the scientific establishment went very far to profile "microclots" of the COVID-19 disease, but noticed that clotting incidences during Flu were never really elucidated or investigated. Science is a man made, bumbling golem. Blood clots in the lungs, according to my traditional reading of Physiology, would generally mean you can have blood clotting disorder anywhere you have blood. The Heart, The Brain, and the Lungs just have the worst, smallest pipes for these clots to be detected in.
A note about Covid being a clotty disease - covid blood clots are "amyloids" that cause "long covid" - then what are blood clots that appear during a flu sequalae? These probably have never been investigated or characterized. Covid is more clotty than flu - but are we considering that Covid causes severe sleepiness and lethargy? Do activity levels while infected affect blood clotting patterns during respiratory illness? (admittedly speculation - but have you ever taken a 16 hour plane flight? Look at this article about flu vaccines preventing blood clots, from 2008. They probably do - because all respiratory viruses increase chance of clotting? Well, that's fine, but I bet vaccines aren't supposed to cause clotting.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081109193332.htm
That's all I found. Can you help me with information on clotting from the Flu?
There has been some debate about the "naturalistic fallacy" in arguing that a Covid-19 infection can be characterized as less risky than receiving a Covid-19 vaccination. I keep encountering ostensibly "pro-vax" individuals who are claiming that getting myocarditis from the vaccine is a no brainer, if you are protected against myocarditis from Coronavirus. However, we have no clear mechanisms here, except we saw autopsy results in Germany that prove there can be sudden death after vaccination from the myocarditis related arryhthmia/dysrhythmia. This type of myocarditis is not proving to be common at all with Covid-19 reinfections - I understand that for your first encounter with the virus, your odds profile is completely different. If you already had Covid-19, you have natural immunity. Any further mRNA vaccination is offering a risk without a benefit, now that your immune naivety is broken. If we had more traditional vaccines, perhaps an increased rate of myocarditis or blood clots near the lungs will be decreased, for a similar benefit. Why can't this be broached? Covaxin exists but was rejected by the FDA. The public health monolith seemed to block the chance to be "anti-vax" and win by scoring protection from the virus without being subject to a genetic-based biotechnology
We keep getting dragged down by considering every SARS-2 infection as potentially lethal, when this was really never true. I believe this has created a pervasive "magical model" of viruses where the virus touches one of your cells, and suddenly has a key to every organ in your body (please rebut me). This becomes true when infection reaches a tipping point and moves further than your lungs, but Omicron, combined with the fact that so many people have Natural and Artificial (oh sorry 2019 term - vaccine induced) Immunity, the virus is being kept very mild, and I am highly suspicious of anyone who presents a sequalae based on unique characteristics of SARS-2, when it infects your upper respiratory tract, like the hundreds and thousands of respiratory virus strains that were ostensibly new, and passed through us dozens of times. The true nature of the human ecology and it's interaction with reparatory viruses, since the group Mammalia existed, suddenly seems like a especially dangerous aberration in our times (edit note - typo and word change for group).
It seems "pro-vax" are using some type of time fallacy that hasn't updated. What human is encountering SARS-2 with a naïve immune system in 2023? Why would you take a vaccine that can be compared to the risk getting your first exposure to a new group of coronaviruses in 2023? Then arguments can hit "we didn't know at the time," but this is extremely unsatisfying to people who had these exact suspicions during the vaccine drive, and got sick very early during the "it's just a flu" media push of Feb. 2020 (I was of course, masking in Feb. 2020, sigh).
Am I outing myself as a desperate Mottian by being so befuddled by the seeming lack of interest in a new type of vaccine that can cause heart damage at comparable rates to a novel coronavirus infection. Imagine updated IFRs if you include the recirculating infections going around now.
Please come debate. I noticed more "pro-vax" on this board than usual - I'm ready for you. Let's be clear.
mRNA seems to be the problem. Check the wikipedia article for "solid lipid nanoparticle." Kind of short. A few years of science (okay, I know the line was "decades," which is not impressive compared to centuries of other vaccines). mRNA spreads throughout your body via your blood stream, and this is a technology flaw in the mRNA platform.
J&J, while still newer, did not show any concerning safety signals, and was eventually pulled because it cannot be updated efficiently, and humans become tolerant to the vectors. Or, J&J caused blood clots, killed people, and was pulled/discouraged to direct people to 'safer' mRNA vaccines. I would get more viral vectors, but probably only if I was going somewhere exotic and expected an encounter with a pathogen of special interest to me. J&J platform was also a human virus and will be treated by your immune system as a virus. You, and your mammalian ancestors have naturalistically encountered viruses since the beginning. This is not a fallacy!
Novavax - this one does not rely on stable lipid nanoparticles, but involves a novel nanoparticle that helps arrange spike protein to look more like a "virus." This is important.
Covaxin - the FDA rejected this vaccine because the one's we had were so safe. This was the exact moment I sunk permenantly into my rabbit hole. The FDA and other public health stakeholders created some type of technology embargo against a traditional Covid vaccination methods. The reasons could be many, and I think are becoming deeply cultural, and I'm excited for the conversation we're about to have. Based on centuries old concepts of presenting antigens 'as they are' (insert latin term) rather than conjuring them at the ribosome in the cell, which has been of interest for less than a median human lifetime in the USA.
So in essence, rather than ask you what you think a 54% increase in Pulmonary Embolism incidence after Pfizer vaccination, I am broaching a large anti-mRNA topic, and throwing down. I have placed plenty claims that I expect to be rebutted. If I have seemed at all to sneer or to be uncharitable, I apologize, and would be happy to reword. I wanted to put forward a spirited defense of "anti-mRNA vaxxery", not denigrate anyone on the other side.
You cite the unadjusted PE RR of 1.54, but after they adjust for the fact that patients receiving the Pfizer vaccine were older and more likely to be in nursing homes than the controls, the RR fell to 1.15. Given the small RR, the fact that they made many comparisons, and the fact that no such increase was observed for the Moderna vaccine, with a similar mechanism of action and higher dose, this is very likely to be either spurious, or possibly related to a Pfizer-specific adjuvant rather than to the mRNA LNPs.
Also, that autopsy paper you're tricking out all over the thread is not the smoking gun you think it is. It's been known and widely acknowledged that the mRNA vaccines are associated with myocarditis and pericarditis mostly in young males at a rate of about 5 per 100k, compared to 150 per 100k in infected patients. If you live in a country with a high chance of infection, such as the US, vaccination greatly reduces risk even when ignoring all the other sequelae of COVID-19 infection and considering only myocarditis risk.
There's been a group of people who clearly have a deep ideological and emotional investment in mRNA vaccines being far more harmful than COVID-19, and who have demonstrated a tendency to grossly misinterpret various data, anecdotes, or urban legends in order to provide support for that claim. After chasing down numerous such claims and finding that they don't hold up, I usually just don't bother. When I do, it's more in the spirit of, "How specifically did was this nonsense rationalized?" rather than out of wanting to see whether it's true. Anti-vaxxers just have no credibility left.
Everyone in the myocarditis study was not a young male. It just proves, that sudden death after vaccination can be downstream from the very "well understood" and "mild" myocarditis that the vaccine is associated with.
You are tricking out old Covid morbidity statistics against your best possible analysis of mRNA. For the right age group, you could see a 1 in 2,000 risk of heart damage.
Anyone who's heart stops after vaccination, could have died from the vaccine. The vaccinators did not study the vaccine long enough to even know this until part-way through the campaign, when it became "a known issue that doesn't hold up."
A lot of people had investment in mRNA stopping transmission, and that was why this rare side effect of "some heart damage to young people" was being hand waved. During the "we are getting herd immunity phase," It seemed like you would accept any risk to young patients to stop community spread. That's concept has collapsed, and you're trying to say that the vaccine is only somewhat as deadly as the disease you are actually trying to vaccinate against!
5 per 100k, 150 in 100k. Think of ALL the unreported covid cases that were mild or asymptomatic. You are showing me the best possible rate of myocarditis, and it holds up next to a disease. That's not great vaccine, even if you think an 85 year old in 2020 should have obviously received it (and then it wore off by mid 2021).
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To me that seems the opposite of what's happening. It's not the anti-mRNA-vaxxers who were arguing for, and implementing various measures to discriminate the vaxxed, and using grossly misinterpreted data, anecdotes, or urban legends to do it.
At best, I guess, you could argue both sides are doing it, but the asymmetry in actually implemented policies seems to point to an asymmetry in who is more emotionally invested.
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It'd be a bit easier if you could summarize with some bullet points of the claims you're actually throwing down to be rebutted - it's a fairly long and meandering post.
Note that COVID has an RR of 2.2 for pulmonary embolism, the patient population for which is likely heterogeneous (vaccinated, unvaccinated, vaccinated + infection, etc). Does vaccination significantly reduce that number in such a way as to be net beneficial along this single axis? I'm not sure we could power that study, particularly now that everyone is some mess of vaccinated/infected/vaccinated + infected and we can't reliably differentiate them anymore. On the one hand, rates of PE are fairly high in hospitalized patients, who are the ones who would have most benefited from vaccines - on the other hand, the same study doesn't note much of a change in PE risk in hospitalized patients after vaccines became widely available. Moreover, the slow pace of updating the vaccines combined with decreases in COVID virulence make the calculus very difficult in whether the vaccines even provide significant benefit at this point - a point being reported on in the MSM.
Note also that the major caveat of the paper you link is that they're forced to compare to historical data, so we're effectively comparing PE rates in two historical periods - one of which saw the emergence of a major new respiratory virus causing PE! From the paper you linked:
Also:
Be careful drawing facile conclusions from large correlational studies like this. And not to be a paternalistic douchebag (feel free to ignore if you know better) but you might find it helpful to skim the discussion of a paper if you aren't familiar with the field to at least get a feel for the limitations or alternative explanations of the study.
There's plenty of papers: Here's a review that will have a summary and a couple dozen primary references if you're interested. Many primary papers investigating the mechanisms as well.
What study are you referencing? The last time I looked into myocarditis it was vanishingly rare, a tiny number of deaths were attributable to it and those individuals seemed to have many other medical conditions. Usually sudden death after vaccination would be related to anaphylaxis due to an allergy to some vaccine component, whereas the myocarditis takes a few days to develop.
As well say this for tetanus, flu, rabies or any of the other viruses we need boosters for. Immunity wanes particularly quickly for respiratory viruses. Note also that the Moderna booster is a half dose, so modulo some weird memory effects likely has lower rates of adverse events.
I don't think we know the risk of myocarditis after reinfection; it's almost certainly lower, but I could only find two case reports so it's difficult to draw any conclusions or calculate the relative benefit of vaccination. Moreover, tens of thousands of elderly patients die of flu every year, and I can guarantee you that they aren't immunologically naive. Natural immunity isn't a silver bullet.
I'm not sure I understand your point here.
It's true. It does seem like COVID is progressing towards being 'just another virus' that people get repeatedly during flu season and we've watched in real time the emergence of a new 'cold' virus. I'd argue it's the first time we've watched this happen with modern technology (HIV and seasonal flu strains being related, but distinct in my opinion). None of this precludes a hyper-pathological variant cropping up next year, but I suppose I'd bet against it.
That being said, we've been infected by influenza for at least 1,500 years and it's still a major public health concern. A truly protective vaccine would be a major coup, and investing resources in these problems is worthwhile even if lockdowns and mask mandates are not.
The calculus for the vaccines was just much better early in the pandemic. Who cares about PE; it's vanishingly rare. Even in your study of nursing home patients only 10,000 out of 25,000,000 had a PE, an with a fatality rate of 5% (probably needs to be adjusted upwards for the elderly population) that's 500 deaths, with maybe 100-200 of those attributable to vaccination (see caveats above). Now do the math for deaths in that population if they had all been unvaccinated and exposed to COVID.
How do you think conventional vaccines make it to your lymph nodes? Both mRNA and conventional vaccines transit from the site of vaccination to your lymphoid organs via blood/lymph.
The centuries of science around conventional vaccines in the ages before we knew what B/T cells were probably don't count for much, and I doubt the live cowpox vaccines that you'd prefer had fantastic safety profiles. The fact that you need tens of millions of doses of vaccine to maybe tease out a signal of a potential side effect is, by and large, a very good safety profile.
It was pulled because both the safety profile and efficacy were worse. And of course it's a fallacy, on par with people have always dumped raw sewage in the Thames and cholera is just a fact of life. There's strong data that the mRNA-vaccines are safer and better than J&J or other non-mRNA vaccines developed abroad, unless you put a huge premium on living 'naturally.'
I'm out of characters, but note that antigens are also 'conjured' at the ribosome with your viral vectors.
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Again, lymph vessels are more like one way valves. Yes, mRNA "pre-vaccine," and conventional "already-completed and molecularly confirmed" vaccine, are moved into your blood stream. Why are you bragging that unconverted genetic material gets a lift in the blood stream? That is aboslutley not the goal here. Lymphatic absorption is what we're dealing with.
Extremely anachronistic view of medical science. Dodges the gap in genomics that these vaccines depend on. Thinking now of the 2060 version of us looking at the first generation lipid nanoparticle mRNA that people took. Talk about prototype!
The efficacy collapsed just like the mRNA vaccines, this is why you're on dose number 5, and defending data from dose number 3. You have introduced an entirely new set of dynamics to your immune system, one that those who receive conventional vaccines will not be exposed to. You have RNA transfective particles leaking into your blood stream, while I do not. Guess the fallacy does much better with actually winnable man made advancements in public health.
My final statement: mRNA leaks into blood stream, J&J does not. This is a problem beyond the normal vein of risk-benefit analysis. This is malfunction analysis.
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Yes. Let's begin. I apologize for my lack of formatting, you're right, it was meandering.
Yes, there is a complete heterogeneity of the population at this point. I understand the point, and I appreciate you walking through more of the PE risk benefit. I am relatively familiar but didn't enter the weeds. I agree this is a correlational study. I am aware of the authors explanations and limitation.
They are forced to use the worst possible CFRs when we had the least tests available and the fewest eyes on the spread, compared to a disinterested, uninformed group of clinicians who would have been responsible or detecting vaccine side effects. We need pathophysiological studies and autopsies - once again extreme lack of interest in autopsy for vaccine recipients. The data is muddled, so we need firm exploration into underlying mechanisms and gaps in our understanding of mRNA vaccines.
Let's look at other studies that show problems with mRNA. I can't link them to PE myself, you need to take your pathophysiology knowledge with you into this exploration.
There is a suspicious group of studies that cast extreme doubt on the basic functioning of the mRNA vaccine as an antigen producing unit that remains in the deltoid.
First, in my healthcare facility, Anaphylaxis was less than double the increase from traditional vaccines. I would say mRNA performed very well in the realm of anaphylaxis (remember, allergic reaction 2 body systems and life threatening). I have suspicion that mRNA is responsible for allergic generation issues (e.g. anecdotal bilateral hives after vaccination) but I have no evidence. I just know that mRNA spreads its antigen creating goodness throughout the body, at a frightenly common rate. If you see sudden death as a possibility of anaphylaxis, you may be mistaken in some ways.
I am surprised you are unfamiliar with https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36436002/, Autopsy-based histopathological characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination.
Note lymphocytic infiltration of cardiac myocytes (I won't even continue on with the arrhythmogenic implications of this permeant heart damage, a.k.a. died suddenly). Yes, vaccines are supposed to enter your lymph and lymph node, but your lipid nanoparticle has different pharmacokinetics, and seems to pass the lymph nodes and enter your blood stream, whereas my J&J virus does not. This is a huge win for me, over your choice of vaccine. Let's see - deltoid goes to lymph vessel, lymph vessels carry mRNA to lymph node, some of the trillions of mRNA baubles awash past the lymph nodes and get dumped into venous circulation (right before entering the Right Atrium of the heart). This is all done before even getting a pass at the liver.
Yes, I think a bad football tackle can exacerbate the exact underlying pathology that was discovered in the German Pathology Autopsy reports. Entirely plausible.
J&J has a form of tropism to enter cells, wheras mRNA is enclosed in a non-tropic lipid droplet that can fuse with the phospholipid bilayer of much more than just a muscle cell. Lymph vessels are a one way valve that do not require deposition of mRNA payload to enter lymph circulation (then subsequence blood stream circulation.
Did you know the lymph is responsible for distributing dietary lipids to your blood stream? Are you concerned that you took a novel lipid and entered it into the system that transports macronutrients? The early applications of lipid nanoparticles were as oral form blood pressure medication. Why? The lipid nanoparticle is great as distributed systemic effectors. Your vaccine distributed mRNA as if it was a beta blocker.
The mRNA vaccine is found in breast milk: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2796427. mRNA enters the blood stream at a rate higher than other vaccines.
Spike protein is in blood stream of myocarditis patients. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36597886/
I don't think spike protein is the issue, but the signal that the antigen is in the blood stream. What exact tissue was the antigen created? Probably not exclusively in the deltoid myocytes.
Thank you. Looks like the etiology of blood clots from Covid related PE would be different from an mRNA related PE, so we need to be especially suspicious of the signal that the mRNA vaccines could cause a PE. Especially since historical data has to be used due to lack of long term safety monitoring before mass vaccination. If severe flu can cause PE, I'm extremely unmoved by severe covid causing PE. Viral pneumonia sucks and too bad antibodies can't hover inside of your parenchyma and actually generate a sterilizing immunity.
Since I will not be getting Covid Viral Pneumonia, I am very interested in the chance that this "routine medical procedure" can cause PE.
This is a horrible sign for your data, since I've seen the slides of lymphocyte aggregation in the deltoid of a cadaver, as well as in the heart of a cadaver after vaccination. What do you think of this discrepancy? This is an 11 month old reddit post, the autopsies were not completed then. I think it makes your data look unusable. As a counter to the redditor - maybe this is CIA propaganda to make the vaccine seem safe, to counter Russians propaganda to make you think the vaccine can kill you (which the Germans actually proved was true). This was all in the reddit post you linked to - not an unrelated sneer.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13947
Yeah admitted self own, this is the Prasad paper, which paints a stratified risk that is not vanishingly rare. I'm not pushing this more than my above point.
Come on. None of those vaccines involve mRNA lipid nanoparticles. Getting boosted with mRNA to seek antibody titers is aboslutely not the same thing as getting a tetanus booster in 10 years.
I mean this is a very very polite way - how did you find your way to the Motte? You started strong, but these are common misdirections on the exact argument - mRNA is a special novel biotechnology, stop mentioning vaccines that the market overwhelmingly accepted, and has centuries of application in the exact antigen deliver method (protein adjuvant). Have you ever mix and matched a measles vaccines in a year? Even when no data existed on it? Pfizer admitted you should not mix and match Comirnaty because of lack of data, you can only mix and match the EUA product. Which is...something...
Okay, you agree with me, its certainty lower. Yes, I think it would be nice to distribute vaccines to elderly patients who are vulnerable. Is this why the FDA is vaccinating pediatrics? This is just a vacuous talking point. You just called Covid a flu. Why would you get the experimental nanoparticle for "just a flu bro."
It was not really for you. You seem to get it.
Yes, more evidence that the entry of a novel, circulating respiratory pathogen into the population that targets elderly and vulnerable is entirely normal, see the Russian Flu in the 1800s. What's not normal, is becoming a fanatic for biotechnology.
The calculus was "seek herd immunity." This involved minimizing the collapsed efficacy of the vaccine mid-distribution. Once again, you love comparing every known vaccine dose to every known covid case, when we absolutely know there is more infection than can be reported into the data. Then "severe disease and death."
My calculus is: the vaccine leaks into your bloodstream, and seeking protection from severe disease and death from one respiratory pathogen with a vaccine that leaks into your bloodstream is not advisable.
What study are you proposing? In any given day, some number of vaccinated and unvaccinated people will contract a pulmonary embolism or myocarditis. If you open them up, odds are they'll look pretty similar. You're better off with population-level studies, which have been done and the answer is a few cases of myocarditis per million vaccine doses. Also skewed towards younger men, which again, affects the calculus for whether the vaccine provides any net benefit to certain demographics.
Okay; can you link the studies? I'm not really able to parse your sentence. Antigen-producing unit isn't a standard term, and it's not clear to me how that would support an argument casting extreme doubt on the extreme functioning of an mRNA vaccine.
There have been some reports of adverse events in the skin as well, just less well reported on than the myocarditis.
Can you provide citations for your claims? I'm not familiar with human data (if it exists), but in animal models the concentration is many orders of magnitude higher at the injection site and proximal lymph nodes. Very little makes it to distal tissues aside from the liver and spleen.
I confess, I don't read every new issue of Clinical Research in Cardiology: official journal of the German Cardiac Society. I laud your scholarship, though. From the paper though:
Essentially, the baseline rate of myocarditis is 1-10/100,000 people per year. Germany administered 180,000,000 vaccines. Some fraction of people are going to die for unrelated reasons shortly after getting the vaccine, and some of them will have myocarditis. I'm also confused why their infectious PCR screening panel didn't include COVID; it's always possible some of the patients were infected prior to their vaccination.
All that said, it could be true. I personally can't think of anything to definitively refute it, but it's also not particularly compelling evidence by itself.
What data are you referencing?
It's present in minute quantities barely above the limit of detection; several pg/ml. And it's not detectable after 48 hours. Or was your point just that some small amount of the mRNA vaccine can make it to the milk?
That's interesting.
See above. When you vaccinate huge numbers of people, some fraction of them will die terribly in the next few days and look bad at autopsy. You need to look at population level analyses.
The, uh, redditor is me. The usernames are the same.
You argued that boosters were risk without benefit once your 'immune naivete was broken.' This isn't true for COVID as the immunity wanes relatively quickly, and in analogous situations (tetanus, flu etc) where the immunity wanes we give boosters. It's not a comment on the relative safety profiles of the vaccines, or whether an annual mRNA booster is safer than an annual flu booster.
My school has a big brother program for struggling students. My math tutor linked me to some blogs, but they were boring and I didn't understand a lot of what they were talking about. I like the Motte because the posts are (usually) shorter and easier to understand.
It killed a million people, and Spanish flu killed tens of millions. If that's our alternative, call me abnormal and sign me up for biotech.
Well, of course. The same way we moved from random cowpox pus to live attenuated viruses to subunit vaccines to LNPs. There's problems with LNPs that, amusingly, you don't even reference here that people are working on solving. Absent singularity, 2060 will probably see us having progressed through another 2-3 generations of delivery vehicles.
You're projecting your own partisanship onto me, my friend. You're acting like we're engaging in some antagonistic dick-measuring contest to see who can win an argument, you're upset, you feel the need to insinuate that I'm stupid or misrepresent my arguments to imply that I'm agreeing with you or just being ridiculous.
I can lay some cards on the table: my position is that the first two doses were warranted, somewhere around dose 3 the calculus definitely shifted for the young and healthy, and at this point I'm unsure of the benefit for anybody and skeptical of anyone claiming otherwise in either direction. The vaccines worked well initially, but the immunity waned rapidly, we didn't update them quickly enough to maintain efficacy and new COVID strains are less virulent all of which shifts the calculus. The safety profiles for mRNA vaccines seem overall quite strong but potentially contraindicated for some demographics - it's not clear to me whether the myocarditis, for example, is related to molecular mimicry with the spike protein or inherent to any LNP vaccine. I'm open to having my mind changed if someone shares reliable data. Based on this conversation, I'm skeptical that you are, though.
Thanks for the conversation, but I'm probably done after this. If you choose to do so, I'll read your reply, but I've got some other things to get back to.
Thanks. I read all your comments.
You are detecting partisanship, as well as someone who was mandated. This is a huge deal for me. I cannot thank you enough for engaging me, it's extremely difficult to find people to debunk my own thought etc. I think you make a lot of good points and it will help me moderate as I look forward to further evidence.
I think some developments are going to vindicate me in the future, and a lot of your objections are well placed to defuse my ability to make claims at this current time. Until then, I unfortunately am bubbling with some vitriol.
Opinions I cannot prove to you the way you'd like:
Covid is safer than they can possible report.
The vaccine is more dangerous than they can ever possibly report.
Maybe take a gander:
This study finds a 1 in 100,000 death rate for the vaccine.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35653-z
Thought it was interesting, if you have not yet seen. Thanks again and have a good one.
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What is the source for the claim that there is no increased risk of myocarditis in COVID-19 reinfections? It seems like your whole argument hinges on it but you don't provide any evidence for it.
I can't lead you further to water than this. I have evidence that there is a virus recirculating, not circulating for the first time. The same way vaccine reduces myocarditis, so will infection with natural immunity. Except the vaccine also causes myocarditis: thus our impasse.
I am happy to believe that natural immunity reduces rates of myocarditis induced by reinfection. The problem is your claim relies not merely on this fact, but also on it being of a particular magnitude. Specifically that the risk of myocarditis from reinfection is lower than the risk of myocarditis from getting the vaccine. What is the evidence for this relative magnitude in reduction?
Yes, the evidence is the nature of how effective natural immunity is compared to the vaccine induced immunity, which wanes. You will receive the protection of the vaccine, and more, if you get natural immunity, therefore your next encounter will have a reduced magnitude compared than if you had just the vaccine alone.
I feel like you're fishing for exact, quantitative data - I need you to be patient as data about our current times is collected. I'll have evidence to back up thr natural immunity claim in the future, just like we saw develop in 2020-2022. This is a developing emergency, that the vaccine has had some malfunction / additional risks of heart problems that are only being discovered recently. I wish I had the long term data of our developing vaccine emergency NOW, but that's simply not an option. I'm happy you agree with my overall hypothesis though.
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The biggest evidence that mRNA was woefully understudied is the huge antibody class shift from igg1/igg3 to igg4 discovered just recently in the Pfizer max-vax cohort. This was never studied by Pfizer or the Gov, can possibly (whatever the chance) have life-threatening implications, and most importantly was not predicted by anyone except a few anti-vaxxers, notably some random autistic Indian on Twitter [1]. What’s especially funny is while this Indian dude was begging in emails to Gov to research antibody class shift, the “verified scientists” on Twitter were calling him full of shit [2].
At the least, you’d expect the manufacturer to know that such a significant change happens in the body. Not knowing this is like a food manufacturer producing shelf stable food without studying whether it grows mold.
I agree. We cannot pull any amazing anti-mRNA vax narratives from this, but we can agree that discovering unexpected changes in the antibody profile is of interest. My first thought was literally, excuse my levity, that this is "cringe."
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“Even a stopped clock...”
Neat paper, though.
IgG4 antibodies among all spike-specific IgG antibodies rose on average from 0.04% shortly after the second vaccination to 19.27% late after the third vaccination.
This induction of IgG4 antibodies was not observed after homologous or heterologous SARS-CoV-2 vaccination with adenoviral vectors. [is that traditional vaccination?]
...this class switch was associated with a reduced capacity of the spike-specific antibodies to mediate antibody-dependent cellular phagocytosis and complement deposition.
Furthermore, we observed significantly higher IgG4 levels after two doses of Comirnaty [Pfizer] mRNA vaccine compared to a heterologous immunization regimen with a primary Vaxzevria vaccination followed by one dose of Comirnaty, although the total anti-spike IgG response was comparable.
Once infection is established, Fc-mediated effector functions become more relevant to clear viral infections.
Since Fc-mediated effector function could be critical for viral clearance, an increase in IgG4 subclasses might result in longer viral persistence in case of infection.
However, it is also conceivable that non-inflammatory Fc-mediated effector functions reduce immunopathology while virus is still being neutralized via high-avidity antibody variable regions.
Some percentage of antibodies end up as IgG4, which may reduce effectiveness at clearing an infection once it gets established. This could be a real problem with effectiveness!
My eyes on this for sure. It makes sense that a vaccine vector that can enter the blood stream and deploy (mRNA nanolipid) is acting like an allergy shot.
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Depends what you mean by "traditional", but not really. I would describe viral vector vaccines as more tested than mRNA vaccines, but they still haven't made much end-use impact. What I would personally describe as a traditional vaccine would be any of:
Attenuated pathogens, such as the MMR vaccine.
Inactivated pathogens, such as the old whole-cell pertussis vaccine.
Antigen and adjuvant, such as the newer acellular pertussis vaccine.
This may also be a marker for something even weirder (maybe worse) going on - IgG4 can be associated with immune tolerance and anti-inflammatory responses. If additional boosts skew even further, this could be a real concern.
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I do wonder how much the risk associated with mRNA is similar to the risks for any drug. For example ibuprofen has a list of possible side effects that when listed out look shockingly dangerous.
Haven’t don’t any research into it and honestly have no desire to, but that’s how I’ve been generally thinking about vaccine risk. Which is to say I don’t think about it at all. Cutting out booze and making sure I actually stretch after working out likely to have much larger heath impacts for me than worrying about basis points on vaccine risk.
Any procedure is a minor procedure if its not being done on you. Ibuprofen CANNOT cause you to show ECG changes and have your heart puke out troponin
https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/ibuprofen-oral-route/side-effects/drg-20070602
Pretty terrifying list.
There is no experimental research finding heart damage in cadavers after receiving ibuprofen. Only mRNA. Not terrifying to me.
There is plenty of research showing that it does increase risks for heart attacks and strokes. The fact it doesn't do that by damaging the heart is irrelevant. The unlucky person will be just as dead after all.
The relevant information is how much it increases those risks in exchange for which benefits.
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