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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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The vaccine, afaik, doesn't 'go into your blood', but mostly stays in the muscle or the lymphatic system.

I mean for some value of 'mostly' -- but it's measurable all over the place:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210404123801/https://www.pmda.go.jp/drugs/2021/P20210212001/672212000_30300AMX00231_I100_1.pdf

(Japanese report is in Japanese, but the pharmokinetics tables on pgs 16-17 are in English; notable areas with high concentrations of the nanoparticles are the liver, adrenals, ovaries, and bone marrow)

And anyway, that concern also applies to most other vaccines.

Other vaccines don't cause your cells to produce viral subunits; this is the new part, which carries unknowns.

Understanding the effects of vaccines, and pharmaceutical products generally, depends a lot on experiments and measurement - biology is really complex and one can't be confident in anything without testing. A vaccine or pharmaceutical that, 'in theory', should work great will often not, or have significant side effects, and a lot of knowledge has been built up on testing for and avoiding them. So none of what's been written above proves covid vaccines are good - the process of creating them and testing them was much more complex, tremendous amounts of niche domain knowledge is required to create and ensure safety for a vaccine, and none of us have that - it just rebuts specific claims that they're harmful.

The first part is all true -- but it doesn't seem to add up to much of a rebuttal, given the novelty of the mRNA aspect.

(Japanese report is in Japanese, but the pharmokinetics tables on pgs 16-17 are in English; notable areas with high concentrations of the nanoparticles are the liver, adrenals, ovaries, and bone marrow)

Not sure about marrow, but COVID can infect liver, adrenals, and gonads.

In what percentage of cases?

Cursory search doesn't reveal a study that studies exactly what you want to find, that is, percentage of uptake by extrapulmonary organs/percentage of cases with uptake in such organs.

There is reasonable evidence, however, for extrapulmonary infection-related changes during COVID for patients that look suspiciously like direct infection, though, which leads to multi-organ failure in some cases (e.g. 36% of autopsied patients in this study, and multi-organ viral infection found in autopsies. This proves less - it might not be directly caused by cells infected with the virus, especially since some are just - but some of it likely is. Qualitatively, we see extrapulmonary infection via the stated mechanism - virus gets into bloodstream, ACE2 is everywhere, etc.

To quote a paper focused on hepatic COVID manifestations as an example:

Overall, the proportion of COVID-19 patients with abnormal liver function on admission has been found to range from 37.2 % to 76.3 %. . . . mild AST and ALT elevation, which can be accompanied by a slight elevation in the total bilirubin (TBIL) level. The elevation in the TBIL level was found to be more significant in severe/critical patients . . . A mild decrease in albumin levels has been observed, with no significant change in prothrombin time. Levels of the cholestatic liver enzymes [gamma glutamyl transferase (GGT) and alkaline phosphatase (ALP)] have been shown to be increased by 21.1 % and 6.1 %, respectively. The abnormal increase in ALP in patients with severe COVID-19-associated liver injury was not obvious during hospitalization, but the proportion of patients with GGT levels exceeding 3 times the upper limit of normal could be as high as 58.1 %.

...

Abnormal liver function in COVID-19 patients is mainly caused by direct damage to the liver induced by SARS-CoV-2, drug-induced liver injury, hypoxia reperfusion dysfunction, immune imbalance and cytokine storms ( Fig. 1), while the activation/exacerbation of preexisting liver disease can exacerbate COVID-19-associated liver injury . . . SARS-CoV-2 has broad organotropism, and SARS-CoV-2 RNA expression has been detected in the liver and in many other extrapulmonary organs . . . Transmission electron microscopy identified typical SARS-CoV-2 virus particles in the cytoplasm of hepatocytes, and hepatocytes infected by the coronavirus showed obvious cell membrane dysfunction, mitochondrial swelling and endoplasmic reticulum dilatation...

Liver enzyme dysfunction is fairly nonspecific, but change in albumin and bilirubin levels indicate an impact on enzymatic activity and synthetic function of the liver. (There's also a few more interesting things in the paper, but probably out of scope here.)

You could likely find similar things for quite a few organ systems. Not perfect, mind you, and many drawing data mostly from autopsies (which would select for severe cases), but it gives you a picture of how widespread the infection goes; the GI survey, for example, finds 41% patients having fecal shedding of virus (though the study also selected for people with GI symptoms).


This is not even comparing like-to-like, given that we would be comparing estimated uptake on the one hand and metabolic dysregulation on the other, when I don't think there's been any evidence or studies on multi-organ dysregulation and/or failurepost mRNA vaccine. Purely speculating here, I would expect that COVID invasion of extrapulmonary organs that nevertheless don't result in significant dysregulation and/or organ damage in mild cases to be quite a bit higher than levels of active multi-organ disease.

It's also not including indirect effects from COVID that are nevertheless dangerous, like RAAS system dysregulation from ACE2 downregulation post infection, or cytokine storm, or clotting, or whatever weird shit it does to the vasculature. (IIRC quite a lot of the severe illness comes down to COVID impacts on the vascular system, which predictably has impacts everywhere even if it doesn't preferentially infect organ X or Y.)