Thanks for all that, WingedMedic.

I have been reading about the concept and mechanisms of mRNA vaccines for some time, but I’m not enough of an authority on the subject in particular or in general to risk trying to explain them without getting things garbled. Unless things suddenly go horribly wrong, and there has been no indication of that in the trials involving tens of thousands of participants thus far, I suspect that the method will be common in the future, and that will be good news for the fight against future diseases and hopefully for those that have no way of being prevented now.

This is what has struck me in particular about their safety which should be easy for anyone to understand:

quote:

Originally posted by WingedMedic:
However, based off of the science, long-term side effects seem even less risky to me than traditional vaccines, especially those that introduce live viruses (ex: shingles, MMR) to the body.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m not anti vaccine. I work for a company that makes flu vaccine. I highly doubt anything nefarious. But something is bothering me greatly about this Pfizer vaccine. First they took no government money to create the vaccine. They do benefit from the government guarantee to purchase a certain number. So the benefit to them is only once they have a product to sell.

What perplexes me is how they have a manufactured supply ready to ship immediately upon approval. You don’t mass produce a product if you aren’t sure it will be approved. The results they reported were very recent. They had to be manufacturing these doses before they even had test data. This is making me put on a tinfoil hat.

^^^^^^^^^^^
My understanding is that the money came from Germany.
LINK: https://www.bloomberg.com/news...erlin-not-washington

I'm getting it this week and my wife gets it Wednesday. She works in an ER and I'm a fireman in DC. There's been hundreds of my coworkers that have tested positive and many have been quite sick. One guy even twice. Luckily there have been no deaths in the dept but it's just a matter of time. It's a no brainer for us really. Our daily exposure to it made the decision quite easy. There were many days at work where I saw body after body and people on the verge of death from it and I don't want to contribute to more.

quote:

Originally posted by frayedends:
I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m not anti vaccine. I work for a company that makes flu vaccine. I highly doubt anything nefarious. But something is bothering me greatly about this Pfizer vaccine. First they took no government money to create the vaccine. They do benefit from the government guarantee to purchase a certain number. So the benefit to them is only once they have a product to sell.

What perplexes me is how they have a manufactured supply ready to ship immediately upon approval. You don’t mass produce a product if you aren’t sure it will be approved. The results they reported were very recent. They had to be manufacturing these doses before they even had test data. This is making me put on a tinfoil hat.

My understanding is that they didn't take the OWS money for R&D, but did have a guaranteed purchase agreement with the US government. Those pre-made doses would have been dumped had the trials not gone well and they would not have been out the manufacturing cost.

This year is the first in many that I got the normal flu shot.

If I could get this one today...next week...next month I would pass. I want to see how people react to it first.

It was funny that UPMC is not making their employees take it...

I probably will take it at some point but since I am not in high risk group I can wait

I'll be so far down the list of being able to get it I'll be able to see how it affects others long before I take it. But if it was available to me today I would still take it. I'm not a conspiracy theorist.

Too many things don't add up.

The first mistake is to listen to anything the main steam media is saying.
It wasn't that long ago I believed the media was bias. I now believe it goes well beyond that.
If it wasn't for the masks everyone is told/made to wear and the 24/7 Corona apocalypse News, many might think things were pretty normal and the Pandemic didn't exist. Just another average Flu season. Most of the small Mom and Pop businesses might disagree with me because they are the ones getting shut down. For good in many cases because they didn't get the small business loans that turns out many of the largest Companies received. Last I heard, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin refuses to disclose recipients of coronavirus aid.

The players involved, the money involved, the quick payoffs at the very beginning disguised as the CARE act. Doctors, Hospitals, Nursing Homes getting financial incentives to diagnose patients with Covid 19. The wide spread censoring of news ,Facebook posts, Tweets and the list goes on and on.
Make no mistake. This is a collaboration between the US Government, Big Business, Tech Companies, W.H.O., U.N., etc..
Call me a conspiracy theorist. I really don't give a Fuck. Too many people have already died because they couldn't get treatment for a whole host of other illnesses.

If you can catch it twice how does a vaccine help? Also, isn't there some new strain in Europe now?

quote:

Originally posted by frayedends:
I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m not anti vaccine. I work for a company that makes flu vaccine. I highly doubt anything nefarious. But something is bothering me greatly about this Pfizer vaccine. First they took no government money to create the vaccine. They do benefit from the government guarantee to purchase a certain number. So the benefit to them is only once they have a product to sell.

What perplexes me is how they have a manufactured supply ready to ship immediately upon approval. You don’t mass produce a product if you aren’t sure it will be approved. The results they reported were very recent. They had to be manufacturing these doses before they even had test data. This is making me put on a tinfoil hat.

I saw a piece on OAN or Newsmax that the Chinese were deeply embedded in all the companies developing vaccines. That ties in with your post, in my opinion.

quote:

Originally posted by WingedMedic:
Messenger RNA, not memory RNA. Those who have a solid understanding of cellular biology, know that a lot of these claims that "it modifies your DNA" and other conspiracy theories have absolutely zero standing.

Yes, the mRNA makes it way into your cells, the "instructions" are then read by the ribosomes, which make a copy of the spike protein (the protein found on the surface of SARS-CoV-2), then the mRNA is broken down by the cell (it's a one time thing, your body won't "keep making the protein).

Your immune system then recognizes the spike protein attached to the outside of the cell as foreign, attacks it, and creates antibodies to recognize it as a threat.

At no point does the mRNA make its way into the cell nucleus (where DNA is stored), so there is no way for it to "modify your DNA" as some people claim.

Yes, there are common short-term side effects (just like as with every vaccine). However, based off of the science, long-term side effects seem even less risky to me than traditional vaccines, especially those that introduce live viruses (ex: shingles, MMR) to the body.

That said, I will be getting the vaccine in the next couple of days. I have seen many people die from COVID-19 complications, and many others with permanent lung and brain damage. Given that I'm exposed to COVID on an almost daily basis, and have done a good bit of research on the vaccine, it seems like a no-brainer to take the plunge.

WingedMedic made some good points but I'd like to take things a bit further. Let's start with some technical matters:
The primary determinant of Covid-19 tropism (the specificity of a virus to enter and then replicate in a particular cell or tissue type) is its viral spike (S) protein. Like other single stranded, naked RNA viruses, the Coronavirus has a remarkable mutagenic capability in altering S. Such changes can heighten or reduce its ability to infect specific cells in our body. The rate of this mutation is still under study but the ability to isolate the virus and sequence it (including those RNA sequences which correspond to the S region) is relatively straightforward (generally, the longer the time for the virus to replicate, the easier it is to culture & analyze the virus). As the rate of mutation may fluctuate (depending on the type of host, its environment, cell stress, etc.), its unknown exactly how long a given vaccine will be effective. All vaccines require the presentation of an antigen (a structure/molecule, such as S) to immune cells capable of recognizing such. Ultimately memory T-cells are generated that provide long-term memory against specific antigens (in other words, our immune system reacts against their associated pathogens) and it's this cell population one is attempting to generate with a vaccine.

Pfizer's vaccine has the potential to delivery more than one copy of mRNA to one's cells and each copy has the potential to generate (translate into) multiple protein antigens of S, until the mRNA is degraded. Not all mRNA is translated (into the antigenic protein) at the same rate, nor is all mRNA degraded at the same rate. The method of delivering a mRNA vaccine depends on a protein ligand or another viral vector for cell delivery... either of which may cause issues down the road for recipients, as they too might be antigenic. The goal is for the delivery method to be non-deleterious to the recipient.

This is where large unit manufacturing comes in. I chuckle at the number of conspiracy theorists who don't know a thing about biopharma on this board. A bit tangental, but if you think the Chinese can influence Pfizer, the largest pharma company in the world, outside normal market forces then please stop taking medications entirely (or perhaps you need more). Trust me, somewhere in your medicine cabinet is a drug made by Pfizer or for the parent corp by its subsidiaries or its partners. But I digress...

The large pre-market manufacturing units serve three purposes:
1. Provides reams of data for the FDA to scrutinize production to ascertain whether quality and related CMC (Chemistry, Manufacturing and Control) is sufficient.
2. Provides ample supply of single lots in case the FDA demands that trials need to continue and one doesn't want to stock out on such - ever.
3. Provides for an initial supply of a drug for market release.

Can issues still occur? Absolutely and it's a game of probabilities, which is why my earlier comment on seeing if 3 specific people take it, would make me feel more confident in the vaccine. This vaccine DID NOT go through the standard FDA review practices.

Will the vaccine change our DNA? No, WingedMedic addressed this point and please don't use mainstream media as an educational tool. Even their scientific correspondents often get things wrong and many of them will be hyping the need for the vaccine, but when one has a sign stating "life boat this way" when the general public thinks the Andrea Dorea is sinking rapidly, people will pay attention. It's all about their viewership numbers.

Besides outlining some things where I'm not in alignment with WingedMedic, it's incredibly rare for a live, attenuated vaccine to cause harm... in fact, harm was caused in the past when so-called attenuated (weakened) viruses were rushed through production and weren't attenuated at all, thus causing the disease one is attempting to prevent. While this mRNA virus has no chance of that happening, I'll defend the track record of the former type of vaccine and question Pfizer's vaccine because it is new and was rushed through the standard FDA protocols. On that point, I think we'll both agree there may be issues.

Let's hope SARS-Cov-2 doesn't mutate in such a way that its infection or its lethality increase. BTW, it's rare in the history of diseases for both to occur at the same time. The simple reason is the more lethal the outbreak under normal circumstances (where symptom presentation isn't greatly delayed), the more difficult it is for a virus (or a microbe) to effectively spread.

Hope this info helps with people's decisions regarding the vaccine, which I would take were I exposed to infected individuals or those who were suspect, but as a biomedical research executive this isn't the case and I have the luxury of waiting to determine whether issues present themselves around the newer vaccines.

Thanks, Dakor. I did not, however, interpret WingedMedic’s statement to indicate that conventional vaccines were dangerous to any significant degree, only that they may (in theory, anyway) be more dangerous than an mRNA vaccine that stimulates an immune response in a different way (as I understand all this).

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
Thanks, Dakor. I did not, however, interpret WingedMedic’s statement to indicate that conventional vaccines were dangerous to any significant degree, only that they may (in theory, anyway) be more dangerous than an mRNA vaccine that stimulates an immune response in a different way (as I understand all this).

The statement that mRNA vaccines are less dangerous than attenuated viral vaccines doesn't hold water. mRNA vaccines are entirely new and have zero track record. Meanwhile, BILLIONS of doses of attenuated viral vaccines have been delivered worldwide with little harm.

There is the slim possibility that a mRNA vaccine might be oncogenic (even teratogenic, if one is pregnant), depending on whether a generated protein interferes with cell cycle regulation. Such is not the case with an attenuated, non-replicative viral vaccine. Naturally, testing of this sort is carried out during mRNA vaccine pre-clinical studies to rule out the possibility but extrapolating cell & limited animal studies to humans can't always be performed with 100% accuracy.

FYI, I have no professional bias as my biotherapuetics firm doesn't tackle infectious diseases (not that anyone has questioned this possibility).

All right; thanks.

Absolutely I'd take it. President Trump has vouched for it, and I trust in the president.

quote:

Originally posted by BMR:
Absolutely I'd take it. President Trump has vouched for it, and I trust in the president.

I dearly love & respect President Trump, however he isn't perfect and his lack of knowledge around biomedicine may end up being his greatest weakness. One might even say that there are those in the Deep State that took advantage of this fact and used it to eliminate his second term.

quote:

Originally posted by Dakor:

The statement that mRNA vaccines are less dangerous than attenuated viral vaccines doesn't hold water. mRNA vaccines are entirely new and have zero track record. Meanwhile, BILLIONS of doses of attenuated viral vaccines have been delivered worldwide with little harm.

There is the slim possibility that a mRNA vaccine might be oncogenic (even teratogenic, if one is pregnant), depending on whether a generated protein interferes with cell cycle regulation. Such is not the case with an attenuated, non-replicative viral vaccine. Naturally, testing of this sort is carried out during mRNA vaccine pre-clinical studies to rule out the possibility but extrapolating cell & limited animal studies to humans can't always be performed with 100% accuracy.

These are important points everyone should be aware of. Professionally, I expect the mRNA vaccines to be relatively safe. However, things can go seriously wrong and the potential for this increases substantially when you don't take the time to do all the usual pre-clinical and clinical testing.

One important fact from the Pfizer Dec 10 Advisory panel meeting briefing document: The mean follow-up time after the 2nd dose is only 2 months (cut off in mid November). The trial is designed with a 2 year follow up as is typical for these kinds of programs so additional data should come available as time passes.

Good info in this thread. Thanks.

I like my DNA just the way mother nature built it. Don't fool with mother nature - you think we would have learned that by now.

When this saga started 9 months ago my wife and I joked about it paralleling the movie "I Am Legend". And here we are.

quote:

Originally posted by Graniteguy:
I like my DNA just the way mother nature built it. Don't fool with mother nature - you think we would have learned that by now.

When this saga started 9 months ago my wife and I joked about it paralleling the movie "I Am Legend". And here we are.

Link to original video: https://youtu.be/B3xY6Ffy_wE