Hacker News Reader

Comment by biotico | Hacker News Reader

> Unlike DNA vaccines, mRNA vaccines do not have to cross the nuclear envelope, they pose no risk of genomic integration, and they work in both dividing and non-dividing cells.

This reads too much like a whitepaper / marketing material.

Of course mRNA doesn’t cross the nuclear envelope. It doesn’t mean that it’s not a potential danger to the cells, though.

I’m not anti-vax. But, I don’t want to gloss over the danger with vaccines that were fast-tracked and now will be given to a few billion people.

What could go wrong? Lots, but if we don’t take it, that could be much worse.

View on HN

The "vaccine was rushed" thing is really all too common, and not at all a fair assessment of what happened. We got here a lot faster in many different ways.

1. Moderna only took 2 days to develop this COVID vaccine. [1] That was thanks to major advancements in vaccine development over many, many years. It wasn't just Moderna, other vaccine candidates were developed extra quick too thanks to advancements in science.

2. This vaccine was developed taking advantage of research done on very similar human coronaviruses over decades, starting from SARS in 2002.

3. Most diseases just aren't very prevalent in the population. For instance, if you created an ebola vaccine, there were a total of 14,000 cases globally between 2014 and 2016. Determining the efficacy would take years. On the other hand there have been 82 million cases of COVID since March. 19.2M in the US alone -- that's a prevalence of 5% (!!). It doesn't take long to prove the vaccine works when 1 in 20 people in the US have or have had COVID.

4. Most of the time human and animal trials are done back-to-back to reduce risk. With the government footing the bill and high confidence you can do them both at the same time.

All in all the result is a vaccine much faster but with all the usual rigor.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/moderna-designed-coronavirus...

>All in all the result is a vaccine much faster but with all the usual rigor.

It's not all the usual rigor because vaccines can have side effects that only show up one or more years later, and it's literally impossible to test for such side effects without observing people who've taken the vaccine for at least a year afterwards.

Pretty much anything can have side effects that can only show up at a time interval longer than the measured time interval, that’s kind of the Nyquist theorem, the thing is, these kinds of vaccines have understood risk profiles. Yes literally anything can happen literally anytime, but we can guide our fears based on past experiences.

I would turn it around and say unless you have some reason why you would think that this particular vaccine design methodology will lead itself to having longer lead time side effects, a year of study is just fine.

> literally anything can happen literally anytime, but we can guide our fears based on past experiences

Excellent.

Not so fast... fear / gauging safety isn’t strictly based on past experience, it’s also based on past inexperience.

The reason humans range from support of radical change to support of status quo when it comes to the known and unknown is a level of awareness that logic and experience can be defied for a better outcome in some situations.

Our level of scientific understanding during our lifetime may always be as that of those that believed that Earth was generally flat or those that had only just accepted that the Earth revolved around the Sun in what seemed to be a circle; both theories were and still may be held by some as truths, and perhaps to some benefit, but both are widely accepted to be incorrect now.

Fear is the mind-killer, but don’t confuse our innate questioning of what seems best and obvious to some for ignorant lack of acceptance of known truth. We can neither say there is no truth, nor that we know it, until we know it, and the jury is out about who knows it, except for those that believe in it being able to be known by someone.

At the current rate of infection, that would probably mean at least 80 million infected (more like 400-500 million in 1 year, since the infection rate now is much, much higher than that in February), and at least 1 million dead (again, more like 5-10 million due to the increased infection rate).

Even the worst vaccines we have had a defect/side effect rate much lower than that, I think the narcolepsy inducing one did it 1:10000 or even less. And it was narcolepsy, not death.

Bad vaccines seem to be better than Covid by several orders of magnitude...

They are so fragile that the risk of danger is much lower than with DNA based therapy.

It's not just marketing: there was a COVID DNA vaccine competitor and it lost.

As any biologist knows there are exceptions to almost all rules. It's not strictly correct there is zero risk of genomic integration, it's just very low. However there are some 4500 annotated retrocopies in the human genome, so spliced mRNA did cross back into the nucleus and was integrated in the genome at least this often in the human germline (with the help of retrotransposons).

Of course the likelihood of this happening, and then causing problems in vaccinated individuals are extremely small. Maybe even almost impossible as the mRNAs for the vaccines are heavily modified.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com