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Sure, but AIUI it can only replicate in cells with ACE-2 receptors -- which is different from the mRNA vaccines, right?
ACE2 receptors are very widespread, though.
Are they as widespread as cells which can be hijacked by the mRNA vaccines, though? (Or infected by adenoviruses, for that matter)
I don't know, but I'm pretty sure they are different.
Which introduces unknowns.
Which is all that I'm saying.
At a glance I couldn't find anything in particular for the COVID vaccines, but the delivery system used for the mRNA vaccines are lipid nanoparticles, which have been in use for a short while, and can be targeted towards certain cells. (Some newfangled cancer vaccines, for example, use targeted lipid nanoparticles.)
So I'm not sure about whether they would be as widespread as COVID-susceptible cells, but based on the mechanism of uptake - which has nothing to do with the mRNA - it seems to be a technology that can be used for targeted cell uptake of drug/vaccine/etc.
They would probably be different cells, though, yes, though because the vaccines wouldn't replicate like viruses do, I would expect the distribution of uptake to be more local than with a COVID infection.
Not sure what you're getting at with adenoviruses, but it would probably depend on which? Most human adenoviruses would attach to CAR, which I'm pretty sure is widespread but not exactly everywhere, or CD46, which actually is everywhere.
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?
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