If you have such grave and serious concerns, then it a moral imperative that you share them with the NIH and FDA immediately. I wonder, however, why the people who ARE vaccine makers don’t share those concerns (it’s like saying, I’m not a physician but I read a lot of anatomy books so I know how to take out your appendix better than the surgeon does.”).
Thank you for contributing to the fear-mongering and pseudo-intellectualism that is causing people to be reluctant to get the vaccine, therefore almost guaranteeing thousands more deaths, economic devastation or both.
If you have serious concerns, share them in the appropriate forum. I’m not a vaccine maker either, but I am a vaccine giver and I trust the system. Sometimes you have to choose between multiple less than ideal choices and you’re not going to get a vaccine with a proven 30 year safety record when the virus has only existed for a year.
I just recently saw a COVID patient in her 50s. The nurse said “please come see her now. Her sat is 42% with a good waveform.” She is not atypical for the “sick COVID patient.”
For better or worse, most of the medical side of this pandemic had taken place behind closed doors. You may see the refrigerated morgue trucks or pictures of the defeated healthcare providers but most people who don’t work in the hospital haven’t seen the sick COVID patients because we’re trying to limit transmission. Yes, we make exceptions for children, patient’s who can’t communicate and end of life, but for the most part you’re not going to see the people dying from COVID so for a lot of people that means it’s not “real.” Trust me, it’s very real. They’re not just putting mannequins in the refrigerated trucks.
With any new vaccine there are always concerns, but this would have to be the worst vaccine ever to be worse than COVID. Have you seen the short-term follow-up for COVID survivors? Have you seen how many still aren’t able to go back to work after 3 months (they have jobs, they just can’t physically do it)? How many are still having elevated troponin and signs of ongoing myocardial injury weeks to months out? How many will likely be permanently disabled, yet they survived.
Read the discussion section on this article. The adenovirus vector doesn’t stay around forever. You kill the adenovirus eventually and, often, the body does it so effectively that more than one dose of the vaccine is required.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31605-6/fulltext
Dr. Steingar, I respect your knowledge and experience but please consider the effect of your comments before posting them in a public forum. Your words affect people’s choices, and possibly their lives.
First, I'm not a vaccine maker. Set of skills I don't have. I do stuff vaccine makers don't, though what I do isn't as useful in the middle of a pandemic. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are very, very new technology. Folks have been working on mRNA vaccines for many years (actually, mRNA therapeutics. The ability to temporarily deliver gene products is going to be BIG). It sounds like they finally came of age at just the right time. Only mRNA vaccines could be made in the time frame we're looking at. By the way, the mRNAs get cells to temporarily produce a viral protein. The immune system reacts to protein, you have immunity.
Gene therapy has been around for three decades. I heard seminars about it as a young graduate student. I recall one seminar where the speaker talked about using retroviruses to deliver therapeutic genes. Retroviruses were thought to be better for gene therapy because they integrate into the genome, thus becoming a permanent part of the cell. I asked what would happen when the retrovirus jumped into an essential gene. While I was silenced then, I came to the opinion that retroviral gene therapy was dangerous and was going to kill people. I was at the NIH when it did.
After that debacle the gene therapy folks switched to a new virus, the Adeno-associated virus. This virus doesn't integrate into the genome, but the viral DNA can stay in cells a very long time. Thus you have a way to safely and stably deliver genes into human cells, a very good thing, normally. However, I (and only I, so far) think that this isn't a good thing for a vaccine. I suspect that Adeno-associated viral vector is going to remain in cells for a long time after you have immunity to COVID. As such you're going to have cells making a viral protein that the immune system is actively reacting to. If the cells make the protein the immune system can react to them. That's autoimmunity, a Pandora's box I'd rather not open.
I hope to Odin I'm wrong, I really do. The Russian vaccine was made the same way, though I can't be certain of the viral vector employed. If I'm right a lot of people are going to get very sick. If I'm right confidence in vaccines is going take a BIG hit. I've never been so hopeful to be wrong in my whole life.
