I have a friend who is anti mRNA vaccines as they are so new.
Are they?
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.
Thanks, that’s what I thought. They always point to the recorded side effects and I always counter with the fact that the disease is a lot lot worse than the cure, and that it’s a classic trolley problem. If the equation is kill one to save a million, you always kill one.
Or am I missing something?
and that it’s a classic trolley problem
that’s not a trolley problem. The trolley problem is an ethics debate about whether it’s more ethical to allow multiple people die or take the action of saving that multiple people, condemning another to die instead. Not taking action, however, is itself an action- a choice- that is being made and the problem is entirely disconnected from real life…
The question of “vaccinate or not vaccinate” is an entirely different question. the question is, should you take an exceedingly small probability of manageable risks (allergic reactions, sore arms) to mitigate a rather high probability lethal risk (long term hospitalization, coma, death. death like symptoms.)
in the moderna vaccine, There’s a 10% chance your arm is going to have swelling/redness/soreness. 1.2% chance that the area effective is large enough to even really notice. and for the more severe risk of alergic reactions, that’s 2.5 cases per million doses, and is easily managed simply by maintaining the 15 minute observation after injection. (during which time staff are on hand to deal with the anaphylactic shock, which makes it substantially unlikely to cause permanent harm.)
the pfizer-biontech vaccine has similar mild reactions, that usually clear up in a single day, and a whopping 11 cases per million doses for allergic reactions (and 80% of those cases happened to people with an already diagnosed hypersensitivity to the PEG.)
this is compared to the probability of, you know, dying, from being unvaccinated. Per the CDC… yes, the vaccine is highly effective and extremely safe.
The trolley problem is a bit different because its result depends on what kind of person you are.
People who think logically will always pick the option that kills less people. Some people who are emotionally driven hate the idea that manipulating the lever means you are first hand causing the death of said one person, whereas the 5 people, while who could be saved, didnt die outright because of a situation you as the person created.
It’s not about who created the situation, it just exists for whatever reason. It’s about intervening.
hence
hate the idea that manipulating the lever means you are first hand causing the death of said one person
that act on its own is intervening into the situation vs the other which is not.
because of a situation you as the person created
Maybe I misinterpreted your comment here; the situation exists not because of anything, it’s just there. The binary choice (or is it truly binary if there are supposedly three?) is the conundrum.
The situation they created was to kill one person, versus the situation that existed was that 5 people would die.
The difference is between action and inaction and the fact that it’s easier to say “you caused something” if you took some action than if you simply didn’t take an action.
I love pointing out to your “emotional” people … that they are choosing to not act, and therefore responsible for those five people dying.
the proper answer is to flip the switch, and then do everything else you can to save that one person- like running to stop the train, or getting the person off the tracks, or maybe getting one of the five off the tracks and sending them to run and stop the train (buying you more time?) while you go and get the next guy off the tracks…
Alternatively, if you wanna be misanthropic,
im using the term emotional as its usually what’s tied with pathos when talking about pathos/logos/egos. Hence some (as not all people who run on emotional decision making) will make a conscious decision to not pull the lever due to the above situation.
some people will convince theirself that the feigned ignorance of the switch is their way out of the situation because they absolutely despise the fact that they had anything to do with the direct death of someone. Originally I never thought of this mindset (as im very logic oriented) till I met someone who answered the question that way in person and broke down their reasoning. It’s never an all emotional person thing, but some will willingly choose to not act in self preservation of their sanity.
… but some will willingly choose to not act in self preservation of their sanity.
That’s where the trolly problem is problematic. It’s fundamentally designed to force a choice where one or more people will die.
In real life there really are not any choices typical of that binary choice- and more importantly, choosing to not do something will haunt you even more than the opposite.
How often do we stew over lost opportunities? Roads not taken?
its a question with a binary choice, choosing to change the situation defeats the purpose of the choice regardless of the situation. it’s possible to modify the choice in such a way that the question of binary choice became a situation, e.g seeing a camera feed and a button at some remote location.
Philosophical questions are often impractical.
Guilt and emotions are also often illogical. We can rationalize all sorts of things. In this case, it’s easy enough to rationalize that we had no hand in creating the situation; we played no part in the results and bear no responsibility. We can wash ourselves of any guilt.
We already do this constantly- there is surely some suffering in your city and your life. Homeless people, starving children, whatever else. I’m betting that you, personally, could do something (or something more) to help them. Whether it’s picking up a hammer with Habitat for Humanity, or choosing to spend a little extra to get the “Slavery-free” chocolate instead of the regular kind. But you don’t. None of us do, at least not all that we reasonably can. Why is that? I’m making a choice to do nothing on these, how is it any different?
Deaths were not mentioned at all.
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.
Herd immunity means it’s effectively eradicated, meaning that enough people are protected from it that the virus cannot readily find new hosts and basically “dies out” in the areas in which herd immunity is reached. That’s why severely immunocompromised people, eho often cannot get vaccines or cannot mount a response even if they do get vaccines, do not get, e.g., polio. If only the majority didn’t get the virus, those who are susceptible (the minority) still would, but this doesn’t really happen (in places where herd immunity is reached). Other places around the world may still have the virus floating around, but after a while at the herd immunity level in a location/ country, it is effectively eradicated.
On top of what Legge said, herd immunity is for people who cannot get vaccines because of things like autoimmune diseases. who need to rely on the vast majority of people to be vaccinated to prevent the spread to them. It’s not for people who ‘just don’t like vaccines’ but have no medical reasons to avoid them
I am well aware of that. It doesn’t disprove anything I’ve said and Legge is wrong. So good job?
The question you should be asking is “are mRNA vaccines riskier than getting the diseases they’re intended to prevent”
Both questions are legitimate and worth asking, preferably in order: are they risky? Is the benefit better than not taking it?
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”.
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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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.
Is your friend stuck in 2021?
The covid vaccines are three years old now. Millions of people have had 3 or 4 shots, or even more.
In what world are they “new”.
Ok just going to make the counter argument if that’s ok?
They are new compared to traditional vaccines like polio and smallpox
Their view is that vaccines are now unnecessary because of herd immunity, (I’ve got them to concede that hospitals or the economy would have collapsed without vaccines), and that they are just being used up because govts signed contracts.
Their view is that the side effects risk is now higher than the benefit.
So how many years does it take to no longer be new?
The Polio vaccines are also new compared to the Smallpox vaccines.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t have sufficient data on their safety and effectiveness. And we have comparable levels of data on the mRNA covid vaccines.
So would you say that vaccines are still needed for all, or just for people like me who are immunosuppressed?
Herd immunity only works if the herd is immune. If only a portion of the herd is immune, the rest of the herd will spread disease.
It requires a critical mass to work, and it protects those who can not get the vaccine for medical reasons (like allergic reactions, etc.)
It also only works if the herd remains immune. We are now seeing a return of diseases that had previously been eliminated (not eradicated), due to a decline in vaccinations. Examples include measles and whooping cough.
It’s basically the flu vaccine in my opinion.
People at risk stand to beneffit most, but it doesn’t need to be mandated .
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.
They been around for some time. Sped up testing significantly during COVID but with COVID they have a massive data set to verify it’s safety. Likely factors more then most drugs. I am personally pretty confident in the usage of RMA proceedures.
Nope
No on the contrary, mRNA is really brilliant, in my very limited understanding, instead of injecting you with a weakened disease, you get the learning process against it instead. This is actually a lot safer than other types of vaccine, and many times safer than getting the virus without having the vaccine.
I live in Denmark, and Denmark chose to use mRNA exclusively because they are both the safest and provide the best protection, Denmark is also one of the countries that have had fewest problems with COVID in the world, because we have very high rate of mRNA vaccinated people.
So you don’t have to experiment yourself, it’s already been done on a massive scale, and the result is clear.
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
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.
No. It’s too late in the game for your friend to be that stupid. Maybe find smarter friends.
Your friend is dumb. Get smarter friends. Sorry to be blunt, too many years dealing with ignorance celebrated as though it’s a desirable trait.
Unfortunately I’m at the age where more friends are dying than I’m making new ones lol
I see… in that case you probably can’t actually do anything except cut them out. Many if not most older people get stuck mentally in a very real physical way. They literally cannot change their minds.
