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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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