This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
In other words, you don't know either.
The other major spike protein delivery vector used in (Western) vaccines was a chimpanzee adenovirus. That was Astrazenica and Johnson & Johnson I believe.
Indeed, but based on how it has been used before we can make an educated guess that it was probably not all cells, and probably more likely than not a subset of cells more restrictive than “cells with ACE2 receptor”. Are we really practicing radical skepticism here?
In any case, it‘s likely to get to fewer cells and stay more local than a virus would, given that it doesn’t replicate.
And it rather should dampen your worry (at least re:vaccine vs virus) here:
Since COVID is in your blood and spreads all over the place too.
Ah, the vector-based vaccines. I didn‘t read up much on them unfortunately.
It doesn't seem that radical to want to know some basic facts about the mechanism of a novel vaccine which is proposed to be deployed to pretty much everyone. 'Educated guesses' would certainly not be my preferred decision making tool.
...
You are not reading very carefully -- the mechanism and which particular cells are infected is different. Which might be fine. Or might not. I don't know, and apparently neither do you.
My point (that I apparently made very poorly) is that while it's a good thing to have a baseline sense of suspicion about things that we don't have solid proof on, we can use existing knowledge to make educated guesses and to triage what is worth more or less attention. I don't think we should be working off a binary "we know" vs "we don't".
In this case, mRNA vaccines are entirely new in practice, while the the lipid nanoparticle delivery system is somewhat new (used for other RNA drugs a couple years before COVID, in research for some three decades) but a relative known quantity; based on previous use of lipid nanoparticles, I wouldn't worry so much about it, relatively - It's a reasonably well-researched technology for its age. In fact, one of its purported benefits is that you can target it better than normal drugs due to being able to control (somewhat) what the lipid nanoparticle preferentially fuses with!
I'd be more interested in e.g. the side-cases and fail-cases of the modRNA itself, like its potential to possibly produce peptides of other overlapping reading frames. I'd also be more worried about the viral vector vaccines (if I were to be worried at all), while we're at it. If I were to be worried about the
I did take a look at the Japanese-text Pfizer pharmacokinetics report, by the way.
As far as I can see, it seems that most of it localises near the injection site, some 20% of it reaches the bloodstream, where it's very preferentially taken up by the liver and metabolised within 2 days (c.f. the injection site where the luminescent protein used as a proxy was still detectable up to 9 days after). There is also significantly lower but still detectable uptake in the ovaries, spleen, and adrenals, as well as in various other organs that go down to almost a rounding error. Most of this appears to be consistent between different animal models (rat, mouse, monkey, human). I would suggest that this is probably preferable to COVID infection?
You keep saying things like "probably" and "educated guess" -- on what are you basing the probabilities of these guesses?
(For the record I'm not overly worried about the mRNA mechanism itself either -- things like the potentially harmful nature of the spike protein itself and the unknowns around the use of viral subunits which don't/can't match the circulating variants of a rapidly mutating virus vis a vis the human immune system and evolutionary pressure on the virus itself seem more realistic -- however I do think basing safety decisions around a product intended for pseudo-manditory distribution to most of the civilized world around educated guesses is not a good road to go down, and that treating people who are concerned about long-shots like DNA integration as though they are being unreasonable is not helpful.)
Since we were discussing the targeting of the vaccines, I was making an educated guess about the targeting mechanism in particular, which is lipid nanoparticles, not the modRNA. Lipid nanoparticles are things that I've heard of for years now, as a delivery vector for treatments (e.g. chemotherapy, RNA drugs, actual gene modification treatments) targeted towards certain cells, for various cancers (either directly towards the cancer or targeted towards the immune system as a cancer vaccine), genetic diseases affecting specific organs, neurological diseases...
This isn't necessarily even to say that the vaccines are targeted! But if I wanted selective uptake for a drug, LNPs would be one of the ways I would do it. And as always, few if any things in biology work 100% of the time; you're going to have some uptake by other cells regardless of how perfect your targeting mechanism is.
I recall hearing that the Pfizer vaccine is preferentially taken up by accessory cells (or antigen-presenting cells), but can't quickly find the mechanism. It would make sense, though.
Note that I'm talking about the targeting mechanism, not the active ingredient (the modRNA).
I don't really disagree, but I do have a few things to pick on.
Again, you're talking about targeting (you ask "Are they as widespread as cells which can be hijacked by the mRNA vaccines" and "the mechanism and which particular cells are infected is different". The modRNA isn't really relevant to the targeting except whatever demands it requires to be kept stable in the delivery vector. In the case of targeting, we're dealing with a technology that's fairly well known, and often explicitly used for drugs that need precise targeting.
There are other things to be concerned about that are probably more likely than DNA integration that are also unknowns in mRNA vaccines.
Viral vector vaccines (the adenovirus ones, as you alluded to) are probably a larger risk of DNA integration than modRNA vaccines are. I'd worry about that one first.
It doesn't make sense to compare COVID favourably vs the vaccine in terms of DNA integration, given current information.
It also doesn't make sense to compare COVID favourably vs the vaccine in terms of broad uptake throughout the body, given current information.
The Japanese Pfizer pharmacokinetics report you helpfully provided tells us that most of the activity happens and is metabolised at the site, a small amount gets into the bloodstream and taken up into the liver where it's processed into bile/excreted and/or metabolised, then a tiny amount gets into other organs. That sounds like "reasonably local" and makes me less worried rather than more about any unintended uptake by distant cells and organs.
Some of the language around the fear of DNA integration is absolutely hysterical, as are some of the ideas. Shit like "pure humans"? A global conspiracy to gene edit the entire global population for some unknown end...via a mechanism that's very not built to do that? Experiments on the human population via a process that's...extremely expensive and not very useful experimentally? Some of these are only explainable if the world has been lied to so successfully that all public information on the vaccines and the virus would have to be fake, and every lab that could analyse the vaccine and its components are in on it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link