I have a friend who is anti mRNA vaccines as they are so new.
Are they?
No. They are actually incredibly safe, much safer than the vaccines from last century. The big scandal from 1955, where an improperly killed polio vaccine gave polio to 40,000 kids, leaving 51 paralyzed and 5 dead, is literally impossible with mRNA vaccines.
As a doctor, I consider mRNA vaccines to be one of the most exciting developments in vaccine history. It has the potential to make vaccines something that a developer can encode, much like a programmer writing a computer program. The possible applications of this are insane.
Something tells me mRNA is irrelevant. It’s a common talking point among anti-vaxxers, and is typically nothing more than an excuse. It’s also a form of gish-galloping, where they pile a bunch of bullshit on you and make you defend it.
Ask them some follow-up questions like these. I suspect the trend will become clear.
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What are your thoughts on the more traditional non-mRNA covid vaccines, such as the ones from J&J or Novavax (or whatever you have in your area)?
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When was the last time you got any vaccine, including a flu shot?
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If you had the choice today, would you get the well-established vaccines such as polio or measles, mumps, rubella (MMR)?
Once you have these answers, you’ll know if they are truly concerned about mRNA being new or if it’s something else.
J&J might be a bad example as it’s a DNA vaccine.
Wait, DNA and not mRNA?
Yes. Pfizer and Moderna made mRNA vaccines. Johnson & Johnson and Oxford-AstraZeneca made DNA vaccines with an adenovirus vector. Novavax made a protein subunit vaccine.
That’s the point.
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Your friend is an idiot. MRNA vaccines are not new. Scientists have been working on a vaccine since SARS, which is similar to COVID (aka SARS-CoV-2). One of the reasons why medication can take so long to reach the public is that it takes money, which likely come from grants, which take time and have limited amounts to go around. When the pandemic broke out, countries around the world threw money at these labs. Everything else pretty much stopped, so they didn’t have to wait for an understaffed and underfunded FDA to approve it.
Getting the vaccine is much better than slowly suffocating because the virus destroyed your lungs. Herd immunity only works when enough people have been vaccinated and clearly we haven’t reached that yet since people are still getting infected, reinfected and dying.
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?
It sounds like the research isn’t new, but there hasn’t been any widely available vaccine since COVID. And given that mRNA vaccines aren’t the only option, it seems safer to stick with a more traditional vaccine.
You’re correct on everything but the last part. Herd immunity doesn’t mean its erraticated. Just means the majority won’t get infected. Which is the case.
Scientists have been working on them for decades, they are fine. Your risk of dying or getting injuries from not getting the vaccines is way, way higher.
They’ve been given to billions of people at this point and with a sample size that large it’s surprising how safe they are.
Why, are they OK with other vaccines?
Listening to an antivaxxer is a mistake - every time.
The risks of any specific vaccine must be judged against the risk of actually getting whatever disease. If the vaccines for whatever disease were as/more likely to fuck you up than the disease, then there wouldn’t be any point, and they wouldn’t get approved.
I listened to a podcast 2 years ago that explained the history of covid/vaccines and where covid came from. I really wish I could remember what it was called but it was fantastic, I sent it to my family members who were anti-vax
This Podcast Will Kill You
They did a whole series on Covid including the history of development of vaccines
They are not really all that new. The research for mRNA vaccines began over 50 years ago.
mRNA vaccines are among the safest vaccines ever made. There is nothing in an mRNA vaccine that can make you sick. What they are is instructions for your immune system on how to recognize certain viruses when it sees them. You can literally email the mRNA sequence to a different lab and, provided they have the right equipment, they can make the vaccine without ever needing a sample of the virus.
The mild symptoms some people get is the immune system activating and building the viral antigens specified by the mRNA vaccine, but there is no danger of getting Covid-19 or any other disease from the Covid-19 vaccine.
One side note: while I know you are using the medical definition of “mild symptoms”, please be aware that this doesn’t match the colloquial definition. You can be absolutely miserable for several days (and a number of people are) and still be considered mild. Unless you get into symptoms like difficulty breathing or hospitalization, it still counts as mild.
Fully agree with everything you wrote.
The immune response can be bad for some people. There are risks and side effects. They just happen to be massively outweighed by the benefits.
The vaccine does not cause illness but an inappropriate immune response can. The symptoms can be bad but generally are milder than the equivalent response to covid. Those at higher risk to vaccine side effects seems to be a similar cohort to those at risk of more severe reaction to covid.
Something I found interesting is why it took 50 years (which is a detail anti-vaxxers never seem to know) for a usable result to reach the open market. There have been a ton of studies and trials trying to get a useful vaccine, but very little of it (historically) was successful. This wasn’t because of any health risks, but rather because they weren’t effective enough. The mRNA simply broke down too fast for your immune system to react.
If you are concerned about safety, you should be applauding mRNA over the older methods.
The question you should be asking is “are mRNA vaccines riskier than getting the diseases they’re intended to prevent”
Your question is a good response to the people who ask “Should I get the covid vaccine?”.
Their question is a good response to the people who say “I’m not anti-vaccine, I’m anti-THIS-vaccine”.
The approved mRNA vaccines went through the same approval process as any vaccine. And once approved, they are monitored for safety like any other vaccine. Between pre-approval testing and post-approval monitoring, we would have detected any issues. So the proof is in the pudding — lots of countries have approved them and none have found risks that are worse than the disease they protect against (currently only COVID but there are more mRNA vaccines in the works).
There’s also no reason to fear the way they work. Other vaccines introduce antigens (molecules that your body doesn’t like and produces antibodies to attack) in various ways — sometimes with a weakend virus, sometimes with a dead virus, sometimes just the antigens themselves. mRNA is just another way to introduce antigens so your body learns to fight them. For a little while your body follows the instructions in the mRNA to produce the antigens, and then your body learns to attack those antigens. It’s not all that different from the way other vaccines work. mRNA breaks down pretty quickly in your body so it’s not even in your system for very long, and there’s no mechanism in the body for mRNA to produce lasting changes. So it’s a lot like you got a cold: for a little while the cold makes your body produce molecules, then your body fights it all off, and then in the end there’s no permanent change except your body learned to fight off that particular antigen.
No. It’s too late in the game for your friend to be that stupid. Maybe find smarter friends.
The logical issue your friend is ignoring is that the disease (covid) is proven to be highly dangerous. The vaccine might be slightly dangerous (depending on who you believe). But clearly there are no remotely credible claims of hordes of people dropping dead of mRNA vaccines like there are for covid. So just from a lesser risk stand point, your friend should get the vaccine.
The fear for some is because of how fast tracked the mrna vaccine was, but mrna research by any means is not new. The idea has been in the air for decades and saw very limited trials when the Ebola outbreak happened, but due to it not spreading, there was no need to mass create mrna vaccines at the time at a commercial/global scale.
It wasn’t exactly “fast tracked,” a little misleading phrase (not helped by the official name of the operation called “warp speed”) that I think makes people more nervous than they need to me. This kind of implies they didn’t go through the same testing as other vaccines. They have gone through the same stringent criteria as any other vaccine at this point. A lot of what was done to speed things up was the government subsidizing and risk guaranteeing, so multiple steps in vaccine testing and deployment could be done in parellel rather than in series. Normally you wouldn’t be mass producing experimental vaccine doses or medications before you know they work, or else you’ve wasted a ton of money. To speed things up the government basically said they would cover the losses on the vaccines if they ended up being useless. This allowed production of these vaccines to start being distributed as soon as the research was complete. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been churning out millions of doses already with a lot already stockpiled and giving doses of it to icu staff only three days after it got emergency authorization (full formal approval would follow about nine months later).
Honestly people get way more nervous about vaccines than they really need to be. Some of the lowest risk things we use in all of medicine. Though not that they shouldn’t be, since they’re deployed on such a mass scale.
Unless the friend has training as a microbiologist or something similar their belief is inconsequential. And even then they would be in the vast minority in their field (like a geologist that believes oil doesn’t come from the heat and compression of ancient organic matter).
A lot of people are afraid of new things they don’t understand. The hope is that people realize that the fear is irrational and listen to experts in the relevant field.
A lot of people are afraid of new things they don’t understand. The hope is that people realize that the fear is irrational and listen to experts in the relevant field.
That would be me, highly reluctant to try the new possibly risky thing until many other people have done it. But I DO realize my fear is (mostly) irrational, so after a bit I gather my courage and do the thing anyway. For covid mRNA vaccines, I skipped the first round, and watched the news carefully for word of people dropping dead. It didn’t happen, so I caught the second round of vaccines in my area about a month later. I was still afraid, but considered it my civic duty to reduce the spread to the greatest degree in my ability. And since then I’ve got every “booster” I was eligible for. As an old person, I’m eligible among the first, lol.
I’m not convinced there aren’t some under reported risks to the vaccine. But I still consider it my civic duty to help prevent the spread of something much riskier, covid.
@bernieecclestoned@sh.itjust.works @stinerman@midwest.social Every time I hear someone saying people are afraid of change, I always suspect they’re just butthurt because they get inordinate benefit from that change. People actually love change, and enthusiastically embrace it, when it’s a change for the better. Nobody is afraid to unwrap their birthday presents! People aren’t afraid of change; they’re afraid of marketing bullshitting them, of charlatans with yet another form of exploitation who are all whining in chorus about how much people fear change.
So… don’t worry about being reluctant to take risks, I say. It might be irrational, but it also might not be wrong. Try to do what’s best for you. If vaccines are less risky than covid, then you’ll fear them less than covid, assuming these vaccines even prevent covid in the first place. If I want to convince you to take a vaccine, it’s on me to give you the power to determine for yourself whether I’m full of shit. Just demonizing you as a redneck luddite and blaming you for making people sick isn’t going to accomplish anything.
Anyone remotely blaming me for making others sick does not know me. I took the covid vaccine the second time it came to my area, which was just a month after the first round and when it was still only being given to “high risk” people like me. I certainly don’t think it keeps you from catching it entirely, any more than the flu vaccine does. But I’m wholly convinced it reduces severity. And like flu vaccines, it appears to my non-scientific observations that, as covid evolves, the vaccines may not always “catch” each iteration of covid perfectly well. People I know are, again, getting sicker when they get covid. And yeah I absolutely believe in N95 masks worn properly; despite having a job where I’m in close face-to-face quarters with my customers I’ve not had covid (to my knowledge).
The fact that I don’t embrace change the first time it shows its face probably has more to do with being 70 years old. If what I’m doing now already works well, I’m in no hurry for change unless it’s helpful.
