COVID questions and concerns

 

There are so many wild claims surrounding COVID due to politics and news/sensationalism that it is hard to find real truths.

There are things I would like answered about COVID and the related vaccines that would help me make better decisions. I do believe I should have the right to make the decision and not the government.

With answers to pertinent questions, there would be less room for some of the outrageous public statements previously made.  So far, the public messages are often conflicting and appear aimed at causing fear and mass public reactions through peer pressure.

• What criteria define variants of COVID? 
• How similar is COVID to any other virus?
• How many "variants" are there and when/where were they identified?
• If a person has COVID (vaccinated or not) and are asymptomatic, can they still transmit it?
• The vaccines are not 100% effective regardless of which one or how many boosters?
• What risks are not advertised and are there still unknown risks related to mRNA vaccines? 
• Why are mRNA vaccines considered safe?
  

If a vaccinated asymptomatic person has COVID and can spread it - then I wish more would be done to spread the truth instead of covering it up. 

Even if there is no direct safely issue; are there other considerations which no one thinks about or discusses?  One that I do think about is whether such global vaccination can result in faster formation of worse variants.  This may not be a great comparison but MRSA bacteria seems associated with antibiotic resistance produced over time. I know there are significant differences between these but could there end up being similarities in long term effects?  

These COVID vaccines were pushed very quickly into use on a global population. The CDC says it followed all protocols - and if the vaccines were similar in nature to all preceding vaccines then that would mean more to me. 

Some general/background messenger RNA (mRNA) information extracted from various sources.

Messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA for short, is a single-stranded molecule that carries genetic code from DNA to a cell's protein-making machinery. Without mRNA, your genetic code wouldn't be used, proteins wouldn't be made, and your body wouldn't work. If DNA is the bank card, then mRNA is the card reader.

So how wide spread were mRNA vaccines before COVID?  Let's refer to some online sources to try and understand the "when used, how many exist and what the use was".

• https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243
• Pre-COVID article.
• First successful use was 1990 in mice. The successful goal was finding that it caused protein production in the mice. Another successful study was done in 1992.
• Used in some human/non-human cancer therapy. 
• https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/52424.html
• Provides some timelines
• https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211122-could-mrna-make-us-superhuman
• General comments on amazing timelines and results.
• https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/the-long-history-of-mrna-vaccines
• Some history behind things.
• https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/five-things-you-need-know-about-mrna-vaccine-safety
• Some more info regarding safety

 

Notes regarding COVID vaccines as first ever mRNA vaccines approved for human use.

We've now seen that process play out in real time. On 10 January 2020, Zhang Yongzhen, a professor of zoonoses at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing sequenced the genome for Covid-19 and published the next day. Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March. On 16 March, using Zhang's sequence, the first mRNA vaccine began its phase one clinical trial. The US Food and Drug Administration approved the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine on 11 December, 2020, making history as not only the first ever mRNA vaccine approved for humans but also as the first to have a 95% efficacy rate in clinical trials. Approval of the Moderna mRNA vaccine followed close behind on 18 December. The previous title holder for "fastest ever vaccine", the mumps vaccine, took four years.

One article indicates that safety benefits include:

• mRNA is non-infectious, non-integrating platform
  
• degrades due to normal cellular processes (so has a "life span")
• its "in vivo" half-life can be regulated through the use of various modifications and delivery

A summary of the benefits:

It is, therefore, safer to produce, more quickly and cheaply, compared with traditional vaccines. You no longer need huge bio-secure labs growing deadly viruses inside millions of chicken eggs. Instead, just one lab can sequence the proteins of the antigen and email it around the world. With that information a lab could make "a million doses of mRNA in a single 100ml test tube," says Blakney.

This does leave me with the question of what can go wrong? How easy would it be to abuse this? How easy would it be to turn the technology from vaccine to pathogen (production)? I highly doubt this is something that can ONLY be used to improve health. Who has or will have the ability to abuse this and in what ways?

Some statements extracted from the articles that gives me pause and makes me wonder if we are not wandering into scientific areas which we don't even fully understand but claim are safe include the following. I won't claim to fully understand everything said here - but in a scientific article related to these "vaccines" I find it difficult to be comforted when the the articles include statements with wording of "we don't understand".

Although the paradoxical effects of innate immune sensing on different formats of mRNA vaccines are incompletely understood, some progress has been made in recent years in elucidating these phenomena.

The mechanisms of mRNA escape into the cytoplasm are incompletely understood, not only for artificial liposomes but also for naturally occurring exosomes

A recent study demonstrated that sustained antigen availability during vaccination was a driver of high antibody titres and germinal centre (GC) B cell and T follicular helper (T_FH) cell responses⁸⁴. This process was potentially a contributing factor to the potency of recently described nucleoside-modified mRNA–LNP vaccines delivered by the intramuscular and intradermal routes^20,22,85. Indeed, T_FH cells have been identified as a critical population of immune cells that vaccines must activate in order to generate potent and long-lived neutralizing antibody responses, particularly against viruses that evade humoral immunity⁸⁶. The dynamics of the GC reaction and the differentiation of T_FH cells are incompletely understood, and progress in these areas would undoubtedly be fruitful for future vaccine design .

Potential safety concerns that are likely to be evaluated in future preclinical and clinical studies include local and systemic inflammation, the biodistribution and persistence of expressed immunogen, stimulation of auto-reactive antibodies and potential toxic effects of any non-native nucleotides and delivery system components. A possible concern could be that some mRNA-based vaccine platforms^54,166 induce potent type I interferon responses, which have been associated not only with inflammation but also potentially with autoimmunity^167,168. Thus, identification of individuals at an increased risk of autoimmune reactions before mRNA vaccination may allow reasonable precautions to be taken. Another potential safety issue could derive from the presence of extracellular RNA during mRNA vaccination. Extracellular naked RNA has been shown to increase the permeability of tightly packed endothelial cells and may thus contribute to oedema¹⁶⁹. Another study showed that extracellular RNA promoted blood coagulation and pathological thrombus formation¹⁷⁰. Safety will therefore need continued evaluation as different mRNA modalities and delivery systems are utilized for the first time in humans and are tested in larger patient populations.

 Some side effects comments

Before we get too carried away, however, questions remain around mRNA vaccines. Currently we need regular booster shots – and these shots tend to hurt your arm, sometimes with fatiguing side effects. At the time of writing, we are less than a year into real-world use. Anaphylactic reactions (albeit with no deaths) have been observed in approximately 2 to 5 people per million vaccinated in the United States: slightly higher, 4.7 per million, with the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine compared to 2.5 per million vaccinations from the Moderna vaccine. According to one analysis, while still low, this is 11 times higher than with the flu vaccine.

These leave me wondering if this wasn't the largest global "lab rat" test  performed on humans.

I'm not a doctor, biologist or even chemist but the statement "if something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't true" has kept me out of plenty of trouble over the years.  It is obvious that huge sums of money are involved in mRNA research and so are politics - both of those don't inspire me to be comfortable with this "silver bullet".  

Note that I wrote most of this up on 2022/1/17.  Today, 2022/2/07, I ran across this article which was posted on linked-in. That article does a much better job describing a concern of mine than my post does but in doing so it appears to confirm one of my concerns.

I hope the politics and big money are taken out of the analysis of this technology and only the true benefits and hazards are used to decide its future direction. Until then, I'm leery of fully believing every mainstream message but also can't deny that the technology probably did help some individuals.  

Thanks for reading. Please research these types of things yourself and don't put faith where it doesn't belong.

Scott