throw9678

I know just enough to be dangerous :) I actually have an autoimmune disease, so that's the reason for my question, specifically wondering about the chance for an MRNA vaccine triggering or deepening autoimmune disease.

So if I understand you correctly, the self-recognition system is something built-in and doesn't change in response to foreign antigens? Or in other words, it's only the recognition of foreign molecules that will change, but this shouldn't affect the production (or culling) of T-cells that are super-sensitive to host's own self-antigens?

PS. And thank you and thanks to others for answering newbie questions on this thread! :)

As mentioned in the Nature article and in another poster's comment[1], MRNA vaccines have been known for a while now (decade+ ?), and studied on animals, with some limited phase I / phase II human studies. But nobody's gone through a full phase III before covid hit, so that kind of a wide fan-out is new and exceptional because of the emergency nature of the disease.

But I don't think they're unconcerned. I think it's a combination of lack of decades-long longitudinal studies, and also that previous phase I / II studies haven't throw up significant red flags.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25403560

If you (or others) would humor a newbie question - assuming that host cells start expressing the spike protein, and the immune system learns to react to it, what are the chances that it will also learn to react to other proteins expressed by those cells, which are not related to the virus, and basically learn to attack its own cells?

In other words, is there a worry of MRNA causing auto-immune reaction/disease due to those proteins getting expressed by host's own healthy cells?