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Comment by lalaland1125 | Hacker News Reader

What did he say that you would consider to be wrong or unverified?

I'll bite. He says it's crazy conspiracy theories. I have family hospitalized with blood clots after receiving the vax. She's out now, but that hospitalization will lead to a personal bankruptcy. It's not crazy conspiracy theory when your own family starts seeing negative effects. After watching what happened to her, nobody else in my family has any desire to get vaxxed. Nobody in my family is "anti-vax" as we've all gotten vaxed at birth, have voluntarily gotten flu vaccines in the past, etc. It's anti-this-vax, because it is not fully tested, and has caused real harm to people.

What happened to "First, do no harm"?

The vaccine has saved far more people than have died due to the blood clots.

That's reassuring from a public health perspective, not so reassuring from an individual perspective. When it comes to one's personal risk, you have a sense of control over not getting COVID, and/or are personally at low risk of severe complications, which can weigh in favor of avoiding a vaccine with extremely rare but serious side effects.

You can, but almost always people weigh this up incorrectly.

Linus is responding specifically to the allegations made that the mRNA vaccines change your genes "into a new humanoid race", which I think can reasonably count as a conspiracy theory.

Additionally, I don't believe the mRNA vaccines are the ones linked to blood clots (a big part of mRNA vaccines is that they should be safer and more effective!), but I'm sorry to hear about your family member's hospitalization.

I think vaccination is the best thing we can do cost/benefit wise and recommend it wholeheartedly, but I respect those waiting for more testing if they continue to take appropriate precautions. Good luck to you and yours!

Do you recognise how rare a reaction that is? Compared to adverse effects of the disease itself?

I’m sorry your family member had this serious but exceedingly rare reaction to the vaccine, but here’s the thing: when, exactly, do you propose making the call to go ahead and get your family vaccinated? When vaccines are provably 100% safe? Probably not. So how about five nines, 99.999% safe? Well, no, apparently that’s not good enough for you, because that’s roughly what we’ve got. When it comes to fatal reactions to the vaccines, it’s past six nines. And of course, that still means that out of 330 million Americans, we could expect 33 to die from the vaccine! That’s dozens!

Compared to over a half a million dead and still counting from Covid-19.

Again, it sucks that serious, life-threatening side effects from the vaccine are possible, and sucks more than you’ve been personally touched by them. But the chances are still literally orders of magnitude greater that you will suffer serious, life-threatening side effects if you get Covid-19. Including blood clots. More people have been hospitalized by or even died from blood clots caused by Covid than they have from the blood clots caused by the vaccines. By a lot.

Just curious, what are the safety numbers for other commonly deployed vaccines like the ones for influenza, etc...?

About 1 person in 1 million (so 300 americans) will possibly suffer (there is a weak link) GBS, a rare disorder where the immune system begins to attack the nervous system.

More commonly, people suffer allergic reactions (Up to a few hours later) which can be deadly. Allergic reactions aren't rare.

>exceedingly rare reaction

In my personal case, it's 1 in 8 vaxxed that I know personally with bad reaction and accompanying devastating financial consequences.

I also don't really consider the reported thousands dead, tens of thousands of ER visits, and thousands more hospitalized and/or permanently disabled as exceedingly rare. These are CDC numbers from the VAERS database,

https://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/findfield.php?TABLE=ON&GRO...

>when, exactly, do you propose making the call to go ahead and get your family vaccinated?

When it is proven safe.

From about the 200 people I've got on my spreadsheet to track this shit (because I'm not a very busy person and it's a nice way to counter antivaxxers), I've got 0 people who have been hospitalized. Most people simply suffer from a strong, but expected, side effect of a vaccine. After all, their immune system is indeed fighting off what it thinks is a serious threat and expending a lot of resources for that.

You get similar (but weaker) side effects from Influenza shots.

If you look at the write-ups on that link, btw, and not simply if the person was hospitalized, you see that most cases simply end up in observation overnight and most suffer rather mild symptoms you'd experience from a strong immune reaction. A lot of cases are marked as "not recovered" but the writeup says "Headache for 45 minutes, gave ibuprofen."

Even better, most of the deaths are labelled as an allergic reaction and in some cases it's 80+ year old people dying.

Well. "medalerts.org" is the "National Vaccine Information Center", a notorious source of vaccine misinformation, pushing the thoroughly discredited theory that vaccines cause autism, and lately -- surprise -- being widely criticized as one of the worst pushers of Covid-19 misinformation. A substantial amount of their funding comes from Joseph Mercola, which, well, yikes. (Why I say "yikes" is left as an exercise for the reader.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Vaccine_Information_C...

But VAERS (the "Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System") is from the CDC, right? Great! Except that it's an open database -- anyone can submit a report and there is no verification. While this doesn't make it useless, it does make it ripe for abuse. "One of the main limitations of VAERS data is that it cannot determine if the vaccine caused the reported adverse event," cautions the FAQ on the VAERS website itself. A lot of information back in the vaccines-cause-autism scare days was literally being added to VAERS by personal injury lawyers.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/may/03/vaers-governm...

>a notorious source of vaccine misinformation

Are you suggesting their information isn't the same as the CDC? Have any proof of it?

>But VAERS (the "Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System") is from the CDC, right? Great! Except that it's an open database -- anyone can submit a report and there is no verification.

Again, do you have any proof that there is a conspiracy to fill the VAERS database with fake data about covid vaccines? Or is this all just a theory of yours?

There's no evidence that what you are saying is true. There is a hospital bill that has to be paid, due to a covid vaccination in my family. That's hard evidence for me that covid vaccines are not safe.

Nothing is safe. It's always a trade-off. I guess people are downvoting you because they think you misjudge the trade-off.

All due sympathy to your family member, but there is potential for serious side-effects in almost every medical intervention. It's true that these vaccines received emergency authorization, so the known unknowns are greater in number than usual, but this vaccine appears to be safer than many commonly prescribed medications. It's as irrational to be anti-vax as it is to be anti-medications. First do no harm does not imply a guarantee against all potential harm in all cases for all people (the world is too complicated to guarantee such a thing).

(I do think Western medicine is slavishly focused on medications and relatively blind to prevention but that's a separate issue)

There's a fund for those harmed by vaccines (sorry, don't remember the name). Your relative should apply for compensation from that fund. (If I understand correctly - and I might not - she won't even have to prove that the vaccine was the cause of the clots.)

Well, there's a lot of evidence for mRNA transfer between species in other kingdoms; read on about reverse transcriptase[1] that is literally how some viruses spread when they enter the human body. Whether that mechanism still goes on when some of the components are missing, well, we presume it won't happen but there's not enough and definite evidence for that.

And for those who love appealing to authority, I do have bachelor and master degrees in bioscience, unlike Linus and most of the readers here, so :^)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_transcriptase

Edit, happens all the time, in many different contexts:

[2]: https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article/23/4/735/620265

[3]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/193963607018768...

[4]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00294-018-0844-6

[5]: https://www.spandidos-publications.com/ijo/19/5/1015 <-- not sure about this one, I only skimmed it

I could go on and on, but you get the idea, if there's something you learn (or should learn) in biology is that the exception is the rule.

Edit 2: Lol, would love to read you comments on this: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2105968118

The mRNA in this case has chromosomes that cannot be replicated by nature. You might try researching the mRNA vaccine.

That's what you don't seem to get.

I'm not saying it does happen, neither am I saying it does not happen. There's not enough evidence, that's it. Why is that so hard to grasp?

And there's evidence of it happening in plenty of other contexts, so one wouldn't be crazy to believe that at least, in principle, it could happen here as well.

> And there's evidence of it happening in plenty of other contexts,

No, there isn't; “mRNA chromosomes” aren't a thing. The comment you replied to made as much sense as “the server rack isn't duplicated on the hard drive”; there's no evidence of it happening, because no possible real-world event corresponds to those words.

What? But I just put some references here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27466738

Those are peer-reviewed published papers ... and you chose to ignore them? Laughable.

Those references don't say what you think they say. What is an mRNA chromosome, then?

>There's not enough evidence [to prove it doesn't happen]

What is your idea 'enough evidence'? Do scientists have to gather up every possible reverse transcription gene in the known universe and test them?

In principle, anything can happen. Specific cosmic rays can hit my desktop's memory/CPU in such a way that my computer will display a giant smiley face for the next 10 seconds. After all, cosmic rays are known to corrupt computations in plenty of other contexts.

I can even propose more than 1 possible pathways for that to happen!

>Do scientists have to gather up every possible reverse transcription gene in the known universe and test them?

For sure there could be a more practical way, but even if that's the only option well ... science is rigorous, man. Hence why we still have the theory of evolution and the theory of relativity. If you don't like it and wish to go back to "just believing" ... well, good luck, we won't miss you.

This is very wrong. You mean nucleotides, not chromosomes – but they don't need to be replicated, so long as the codons are. The custom not-found-in-nature nucleotide is equivalent to a natural one, for all purposes except being detected by the immune system.

The mRNA is at no point transcribed into DNA. I think this is what you meant – but it might help if you researched the mRNA vaccine before posting internet comments!

I don't really understand the science here, so I'm hoping you'll clarify for the lay-people like me.

Setting the technical issues aside, what's the bottom line? I think OP's general point was: "This is not dangerous in the way some people believe it to be dangerous".

Do any of your corrections change that outcome/conclusion in a meaningful way?

(I'm not asking to call your comment into question, but because I don't know how to adapt my understanding based on these two comments).

I think wizzwizz4 only corrected the (quite big) factual problems of the grandparent. But about the claim of “the vaccine can modify our DNA”, I think this reply is great: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27467454

Basically, while there are known mechanisms for mRNAs to getting converted to DNA, these quite complex mechanisms don’t just exist there. And the mRNA injected gets destroyed in ~half an hour. Basically, if there would be a constantly working mechanism for converting mRNA to DNA, our genome would constantly grow significantly since all sorts of mRNAs are constantly created inside cells.

It seems that according to these papers, if there was vaccine mRNA in the reproductive tract immediately prior to or immediately after fertilization, then theoretically the spike protein could possibly get integrated into the offspring’s genome. But how could the vaccine mRNA end up in the reproductive tract? Seems unlikely. It’s intramuscular, not in a vein. The implications of sperm-mediated reverse transcription are quite unsavory regardless.

That is one of the dumbest possible interpretations you could make from those references.

The point was to show (to unfamiliar readers) that there exists plenty of mechanisms by which RNA -> DNA could happen, and it has been extensively studied and characterized.

The context is a guy claiming the mRNA vaccines will create a “humanoid race” with no evidence and everyone rushing to the other side and saying there’s no situation where exogenous RNA can ever be integrated into the genome, also without evidence. I doubt anything like this occurs with the mRNA vaccines, but you helpfully exposed this dialectic with the links.

That’s just misrepresenting. While there exists pathways for RNA->DNA, they are a niche occurrence happening on evolutionary timescales. It is not at all applicable to the 30 minutes of mRNA half-life of the vaccine.

And even just playing with the idea of our genome having the spike protein’s gene, it would either just sit there doing nothing (remember it is injected into muscle tissue) or get expressed. The former case would cause no problem (no descendant would inherit it as the gonads are not affected), and the latter would be trivial to see with a continuous immune response.

>the 30 minutes of mRNA half-life of the vaccine.

I think you'll find it's much longer that that for the vaccine. Apparently it hangs around about a week. The mRNA is modified to last longer than natural mRNA.

There is still an awful lot we don't know about cellular biology, so I'm always a bit baffled when people that should know better say that this or that is (virtually) impossible. Fortunately, we're running the largest phase 4 clinical trial in human history, so in 25 years or so we'll have some absolutely great longitudinal data.

mRNA is continuously produced by every living cell in your body. How come then that you don’t get ridiculously many duplicated copies of the created mRNAs, something that only happens at an evolutionary timescale? You have multiple orders of magnitudes more naturally created mRNA, why isn’t there a concern for that?

how do you know what is produced and called "just mRNA" is the exact same kind of thing that is the mRNA in your body? You can test to verify that it has all the characteristics of mRNA. However, you obviously can't 100% confirm that it does not have characteristics that is not in "natural" mRNA, since the list of characteristics mRNA does NOT have is infinite.

What do you mean produced? As in the pharmaceutical factory? You can quite literally have a look at it with an electron microscope, and there are trillion other ways to chemically verify that. Also, we can reprogram bacteria to manufacture any protein for us - molecular biology is very advanced. Why do you feel the need to question very basic “problems” that were more than certainly thought about and solved by the many experts working on it for decades? You can question whether the engineers of a car engine though of heat dissipation but you would find it sort of dumb, wouldn’t you?

> trillion other ways to chemically verify that

Trillion? Did you not read what I said about being able to verify the behaviors you want and not the side effects you don't yet know exist? Are you telling me that electronic microscopes are used in such a way that people actually look into individual massive molecules and... what count the atoms?

This is questioning a new technique that's not tested for more than a year for the purpose of being a vaccine. You can tell me that this is in theory safer than traditional vaccines all you want, but by my dumb logic, theory is just that. Traditional vaccine was tested for multiple generations of humans, this was not. I am not advocating traditional vaccine or anything just maybe, maybe, don't feel so sure about things in a field that has so much we don't know yet. mRNA is code created from convoluted processes not exactly like programming code that human specifically write with limited known behaviors.

So you don’t believe that we can manufacture nucleotide-perfect sequences of RNAs? Than I have to break it for you, we absolutely can, to the point where you can simply order a specific sequence online without much trouble.

I just don’t understand why would you trust a car engine all that much more vs medicine. Do not blindly trust anything, but questioning uncontroversially held beliefs by a whole field is just cocky.

Mechanic is quite simplistic comparing to life science to me. Every single component of the car was built by a spec made by human. We dont borrow components of nature that oporate at a scale we're not fully able to inspect, to produce code we dont fully understand, then claim that the code does exactly what we want and nothing else.

Aside from that, cars were also tested for more than 1 year you know?

I mean, I guess my follow up question is... where does the reverse transcriptase come from? My understanding is that the mRNA, by itself, isn't a retrovirus capable of integrating itself with your DNA. It's not built for it. There's no mechanism for reverse transcription in the mRNA in the vaccines, and the mRNA doesn't go near the nucleus of the cell, instead swimming around in the cytosol until a ribosome picks it up.

It usually comes along with the virus, but there's some in our body as well [1]. Whether they work on the same mRNA targets or not is an open question.

[1]: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fchem.2016.0000...

>we presume it won't happen but there's not enough and definite evidence for that.

What evidence are you looking for here? Any specific analytical protocol that you have in mind? I am curious to know what you're referring to.

As you know, the body doesn't just tolerate foreign mRNA like that (TLR3, TLR8 activation, RIG-I etc, microrna silencing, etc). So ironically, the vaccine has to first defeat our body's immune response, and then let the immune response work so that we get protected. That being said, the mRNA in the vaccine is structurally different from naturally occurring mRNA in that its been carefully engineered as a delivery platform. I am not intimately familiar with the studies you link to, but we can't just form a causal link because "its rRNA" - you need to evaluate it a bit more in the appropriate context.

In all of your comments here you're being pretty ridiculous - you've read some books and articles, but are painting stories here in such a credulous fashion that makes me think you haven't actually done much work with cells and viruses. I was a genetic engineer for 20 years and engineered plenty of viruses for therapeutics, including plenty of retroviruses.

The existence of reverse transcriptases in nature does not imply that there's a plausible path to an mRNA vaccine reverse transcription event, even the presence of a known reverse transcriptase in say, an HIV infected cell - they'll have radically different priming systems, etc.

We have plenty enough evidence for core molecular cell biology processes to call out some ideas as radically improbable.

>In all of your comments here you're being pretty ridiculous [...]

Well, that says more about you than me, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

>I was a genetic engineer for 20 years and engineered plenty of viruses for therapeutics, including plenty of retroviruses.

Your website and LinkedIn say otherwise ... unless you were doing it as a hobby? Sure, then.

Given all your (presumed) experience, what's your opinion on this: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2105968118

The paper you link to is overexpressing LINE1 on plasmid in HEK293 cells and coinfecting w. sars-cov-2 - not exactly a natural setup! They see some nucleocapsid fragment integration and limited expression, but it's a pretty forced experiment, honestly. Also the whole virus is very different from the mRNA payload of the vaccines. Having a random chunk snagged by an overexpressed retrotransposon is a far cry from a meaningful integration event. Though LINE/Alu transposon integrations are an interesting driver of evolution on million-year timescales.

(and: not a hobby. I was at UCSF, Stanford, and helped start several biotechs. You would have more traction here if you acted a little more thoughtful with those trying to talk to you.)

I just looked at each of the papers you cite, and none of them support the claim of mRNA transfer between species. They talk about reverse transcription of RNAs in the same cell. (Which kingdoms - there are only three - are using mRNA for gene transfer?)

The last paper you cite shows that if you reverse transcribe a virus, you can get it to integrate into the genome, which is not very surprising, but it there is no evidence that this has happened in nature. And I have no doubt that people are checking - running PCR on genomic DNA of infected individuals.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com