mRNA vaccines “an unsafe medication?”
This just blows me away every time I read one of these articles about what people are thinking about Covid vaccines. And then there is some pseudo-authority who is reinforcing the false paradigm on whether the vaccines works.
“Sick, sick, sick,” Digby’s Hullabaloo, digbysblog.net
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo calls the mRNA vaccines “an unsafe medication”. This is incorrect and irresponsible. Someone should ask Ron DeSantis if he would consider Dr Ladapo for US Surgeon General because that by itself would be a reason not to vote for him.
https://t.co/tXPli0EFWZ— Jonathan Reiner (@JReinerMD) September 15, 2023
Irresponsible isn’t the word for it. It’s medical malpractice and will cause untold suffering and death among Florida’s vulnerable populations. The state is full of old, white Republicans who watch Fox, some of whom are going to believe this and get very sick and possibly die. And there are plenty of others who will hear this from the state Surgeon General and believe him too.
Ron DeSantis is no better than Donald Trump and in this instance is actually worse. We must fervently hope that this campaign will have destroyed his political career. The grotesque bad judgement (or cynical calculation) in hiring this quack to be the surgeon general of the state totally disqualifies him from ever having lives in his hands again.
We’ve been masking up for a week, get boosted Monday
What with viri that haven’t seen a human since before we were human thawing out of the thawing tundra and moving to the south and bugs and bacteria fleeing the heat north and to the higher elevations, the next pandemic will be organic population control
We are fleas agitating the hide of a far greater organism who can take care of herself …
TB,
Yes sir.
The country is highly polarized now. Unfortunately this polarization seems to have pretty clear demarcations: tell me what you think of BLM and I’ll predict what you think about human global warming; tell me what you thought of the Rittenhouse verdict and I’ll predict what you thought about the Chauvin verdict; tell me what you thought about the ‘Hunter’s laptop is Russian disinformation’ and I’ll predict what you thought about vaccine passports. Ladapo may be irresponsible, but his statement here is far less influential in brewing up vaccine hesitancy than trying to use OSHA to oblige tens of millions to accept a vaccine or put their families’ income at grave risk. Vaccines were pretty well taken up for the first year, but declined dramatically since. We here are mostly quite logical and maybe have problems accepting just how many people now have a ‘holistic’ approach to even disconnected things. ‘The CIA bribed its analysts to say it came from animals, so I don’t trust those vaccines’. That’s reality much more than folks are listening closely to Ladapo.
“tell me what you think of BLM”
Bureau of Land Management?
Not a fan. Too beholding to mining and water-controlling interests.
Dave,
Think Eric was referring to the other protectors of wild mustangs, Black Lives Matter.
Eric:
Your positions are supposition, conjecture, and innuendo. they are not a foundation for going forward with the rest of your comment.
If you do not take the vaccine, that is your choice. Your choice is not a basis for a future decision of intermingling with the rest of the population. The virus will spread and the science is and was clear on how it impacts cells.
“In late 1776, as Gen. George Washington led his troops through the opening battles of the American Revolution, it was not necessarily the enemy fighters who posed the biggest risk to the fledgling U.S. Army.
“An estimated 90% of deaths in the Continental Army were caused by disease, and the most vicious were variants of smallpox, according to the U.S. Library of Congress.
“That’s why Gen. Washington made the controversial decision to order the mass inoculation of his soldiers, an effort to combat spread of the disease that was at the time a major deterrent to enlistments and posed the risk of debilitating his army and tipping the balance of power against America’s first warfighters.”
https://www.health.mil/News/Articles/2021/08/16/Gen-George-Washington-Ordered-Smallpox-Inoculations-for-All-Troops
Thanks to vaccination, hundreds of millions of Americans are spared the scourges of smallpox, polio, whooping cough. If you are an adult male, be glad for the mumps vaccine.
Vaccination against pandemic disease is a responsibility of all patriotic Americans and a matter of national security.
Nobody is advocating forcible vaccination, but if you opt out, you are opting out of employment, public schools, military service. Any employer can and should have the right to deny employment to someone who refuses to protect their fellow employees by being vaccinated against a potentially fatal communicable disease. This isn’t “fascism” or “communism,” this is public health and self-preservation.
The Florida Surgeon General’s advice to Floridians is just another reason for those of us particularly at risk due to age or underlying health issues to avoid Florida “like the plague”.
If the hypothesis that “the vaccine is safe” had a consumer risk (risk of accepting the hypothesis when it had a probability of being false) threshold what was it and was it acceptable?
If the hypothesis that “the vaccine is effective (what is effective: prevent spread, prevent severe disease, prevent death)” had a consumer risk (risk of accepting the hypothesis when it had a high probability of being false) threshold what was it and was it acceptable?
Everything is rushed and not transparent.
@paddy,
Everything is rushed because people die in a pandemic and vaccines prevent deaths. As for transparency, the evidence for vaccine safety and efficacy is out there and freely available if you choose to read it.
You might start by reading the results of the phase I (safety) and phase II/III trials (efficacy) for both the Moderna and Pfizer mRNA vaccines. Now that tens of millions have been vaccinated, the hypothesis that mRNA vaccines are unsafe or ineffective has been falsified by evidence.
Joel,
Please provide links to studies designed to determine and that show the vaccines are safe.
I see studies about higher incidences of adverse effects, from NZ most recently….
I have a paradigm for rushed work.
”You want it bad you get it bad”.
Here is NZ study report out:
Adverse Events Following the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech) in Aotearoa New Zealand – PMC (nih.gov)
The incidence of myocarditis in the young has been known for quite a while. It is an area where doctors have already been warned about increased vigilance. Years ago now. It was my understanding that they recommended only the J&J non mRNA vaccine for those under 25, because of the increased possibility of myocarditis.
@paddy,
If you read the NZ paper to the end, you’ll see this:
“These findings provide further reassurance on the safety profile of the vaccine, particularly from a New Zealand-specific context. Importantly, studies have found that the risk of myo/pericarditis following SARS-CoV-2 infection is substantially greater than after COVID-19 mRNA vaccination.”
@paddy,
Here you go. Just the first link that came up after about five seconds on google:
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/is-the-covid19-vaccine-safe
paddy:
I am sure Joel will correct me if I am wrong. He is the expert here on this topic. We are fortunate to have Jack amongst also. He is the expert on the law.
The clinical trial(s) information is out there and can be found. One only has to look.
“The clinical trial(s) information is out there and can be found. One only has to look.”
In a matter where a medicine or vaccine is being recommended for an entire adult population, the specific CDC recommendations and published clinical trial results should be immediately available.
I am sorry, but I do not need a dozen or hundred pages to be attached to every government announcement. Links are good enough. Knowing CDC.gov is good enough. Even the manufacturers provide a summary before they link you to the study details. If you want to look fine, but don’t wave that in my face, thank you.
@Jane,
Exactly.
Ask questions, but then look at the answers. In the age of the internet and search engines, answers are easy to come by.
@ltr,
They are immediately available. But you have to actually look.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/well/live/covid-vaccine-booster-fall.html
September 11, 2023
What to Know About the New Covid Shots
The updated shots are now available in the U.S. Here’s who should get them and what to expect.
By Knvul Sheikh
Two new Covid shots have received the green light from the Food and Drug Administration as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The vaccines, developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, are recommended for everyone 6 months and up and are currently getting shipped to pharmacies across the country.
The vaccines provide much-needed protection as Covid cases continue to rise in some parts of the United States. Although the numbers of Covid hospitalizations and deaths have slowed over the last year, the virus has evolved and mutated into more than two dozen different variants. Most people’s immunity has also waned.
Less than 20 percent of Americans got the previous booster — a bivalent shot that arrived last fall and was designed to protect against the original virus as well as Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5. And while some parts of our immune system have long memories, the antibodies that help prevent infections decrease significantly in a matter of months.
The reformulated Covid shots can better help fight off the latest set of subvariants circulating in the U.S. Here’s what to know before you roll up your sleeve….
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/well/live/covid-vaccine-booster-fall.html
“Less than 20 percent of Americans got the previous booster…”
The need is for the CDC to be convincing, and what information is needed to be convincing should be made readily available.
@ltr,
Define “convincing.”
When the CDC Board finds a medicine or vaccine generally important, the obligation of the CDC becomes to present clear and compelling or convincing reasons for the public to use the medicine when necessary or to be vaccinated. This is what the obligation of the CDC relative to the general public is.
When taking, say, prescription eye drops, the packaging I have seen always comes along with as much information as an adult might need to take the drops with confidence. Necessary information is always, immediately, provided a user of eye drops….
@ltr,
Obviously, the mRNA has met that bar, and the inescapable fact that millions have been vaccinated with no major problems and well-documented protection supports the CDC.
Where do you think the CDC has been wrong about mRNA vaccines? I notice you didn’t provide a definition of “convincing.”
Good grief; I never ever criticized the CDC or the Covid vaccine makers or vaccines. I only suggested what seems necessary for general public compliance. What I suggested is of course entirely proper.
@ltr,
Maybe you should try Google. Are you familiar with this search engine? It’s free. I used it to find this CDC link within about two seconds:
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2023/p0912-COVID-19-Vaccine.html#:~:text=CDC%20recommends%20everyone%206%20months,be%20available%20later%20this%20week.
Maybe you should try Google. Are you familiar with this search engine? It’s free….
[ How absurd.
Please, do try to be polite.
Please try. ]
@ltr,
I was and am polite. You appear to be helpless in finding information easily available on the web. I was trying to be helpful.
Please try to be polite. Please try.
Joel:
We find many answers to many posts on AB. It baffles me that other info. cannot be found. Google is far better than Bing at doing so. The plain unencumbered info-finder. Plagued with a lot of info unrelated to posts. And having to cleanup aisle 7 as a result.
People:
The Covid vaccines have been successful. That and masking and staying out of public or just as distant from people as you can be. The vaccines are not a guarantee. You are not trump where they will rush you off to an upper tier hospital and a half a dozen doctors will come in and care for your fat-*** body.
I look at costs. I see the subsidies and the profits without regard for the subsidies. This part was a joke.
I didn’t know dead horses could be flogged so
I’ve seen it, upfront and personal. If you want to put yourself through that ~ couple weeks on a ventilator, maybe lose sixty pounds, real good chance that if you live you won’t live the quality of life you lived before ~ go ahead on it, you’re wasting air my grandkids need to survive …
At this point, if some people still refuse to get vaccinated, I’m inclined to just look upon it as natural selection in action. There’s only so much one can do.
Infidel:
Is the ignorance so great that some would rather risk this type of death? The issue is not just practicing their independence. It is an independence threating those around them. Are they that ignorant of the threat they are making to others? I wish we could avoid them. Instead we have to stay away, indoors so as not to take ill.
@Infidel,
If it were only so simple, we could afford to be cynical. But every infected person is a feedlot for the next variant to emerge and every unvaccinated population is a superspreader event waiting to happen.
Even those of us who are vaccinated can still be infected. Vaccination doesn’t sterilize you for infection, it just keeps you out of the ED or the morgue.
It is every American’s civic duty to be vaccinated. This is a national security issue.
Feeling coerced? Conscription is coercion, too. The draft is another manifestation of the national interest. Fortunately, a shot in the clinic is safe, while a shot on the battlefield is not.
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/the-long-history-of-mrna-vaccines
The Long History of mRNA Vaccines
Published
October 06, 2021
By Chris Beyrer
Messenger RNA, or mRNA, was discovered in the early 1960s; research into how mRNA could be delivered into cells was developed in the 1970s. So, why did it take until the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 for the first mRNA vaccine to be brought to market?
There’s a big gap between when the first mRNA flu vaccine was tested in mice in the 1990s and when the first mRNA vaccines for rabies were tested in humans in 2013. What was happening in the interim?
The early years of mRNA research were marked by a lot of enthusiasm for the technology but some difficult technical challenges that took a great deal of innovation to overcome.
The biggest challenge was that mRNA would be taken up by the body and quickly degraded before it could “deliver” its message—the RNA transcript—and be read into proteins in the cells.
The solution to this problem came from advances in nanotechnology: the development of fatty droplets (lipid nanoparticles) that wrapped the mRNA like a bubble, which allowed entry into the cells. Once inside the cell, the mRNA message could be translated into proteins, like the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, and the immune system would then be primed to recognize the foreign protein.
So, what happened once they figured out this technology?
The first mRNA vaccines using these fatty envelopes were developed against the deadly Ebola virus, but since that virus is only found in a limited number of African countries, it had no commercial development in the U.S.
Then COVID-19 hit … what happened then?
Remember, the COVID-19 pandemic spurred manufacturers to develop dozens of potential vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 and brought tremendous increases in funding. Some of those vaccines used traditional methods involving adenovirus as the spike protein delivery system—such as the Johnson & Johnson vector vaccine.
Thanks to decades of research and innovation, mRNA vaccine technology was ready. With COVID, this technology got its moment and has proven to be extremely safe and effective. Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine is the first mRNA product to achieve full FDA approval in the U.S…
{ a little more at the link. I was actually looking for a different article that explained how the first positive proof of concept test for an mRNA vaccine was performed in 1989, but considering the source and my lack of free time now, then I settled.}
@Ron,
One key was the chemical modification of the mRNA so as to stabilize it without affecting its function as a messenger. The name Moderna reflects this. Mod(ifi)e(d)RNA.
@Joel,
OK. My key point to the post was to demolish the prevalent perception that mRNA was a sudden development, which has tended to spread fear and loathing on the vaccine trail. An old dentist friend of mine told me just a couple of weeks ago that she was afraid to take the mRNA vaccines because they were developed so quickly. Although a bit true for Covid-19 specifically, not true for mRNA in general. Our lame stream media does a good job of reporting technical information to the public by eliminating the most illuminating key technical points. If we treat everyone as if they are stupid, then pretty soon they are.
@Ron,
As a professor for 36+ years, I’m all about educating people. And I take a back seat to nobody here in my experience and success with that project. But as they say, lead, horse, water, etc.