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mRNA vaccines do not modify your genome. They trick your body into turning genes they carry into spike proteins, just like the virus does, but they don't replace your genes, and they don't make more of their own genes to repeat the process at exponentially-increasing scales like the virus does.
This stuff isn't as clearly against the rules as the "anyone with a certain brain processing power" above, but it is a good time for "proactively provide evidence" to come to mind.
They had better than 90% protection from disease in the first RCT. That dropped with time and with new variants, but even if it had had zero lasting protection, the temporary protection still would have been worth taking a chance for by vulnerable populations in the first megadeath-scale waves.
This is trivially true because "ow my arm" is a negative side effect, but for any serious claim you'll need specific side effects and numeric percentages. It didn't have as many negative side effects as getting Covid-19 one extra time. The trouble with trying to avoid risk here is that Covid's spread was so extensive that there was no way to avoid risk. There was just "risk exposing your body to a carefully metered dose of Covid spikes" versus "risk exposing your body, with your immune system unprepared, to an exponentially reproducing dose of Covid viruses".
And this is at least true because zero is a percent?
This is an especially weird one for me, because actual testosterone decline has been going on for 50 years, sperm quality included, with no complete explanations, and even the incomplete explanations don't seem to be engendering much concern from anyone. If one side of the Culture War wants to go all Buck Turgidson, couldn't we at least get some good out of it, and focus on an actual measurable corruption of our precious bodily fluids?
This is true or false depending on your definition of "basically" and "a certain age"; risks did rise pretty much exponentially with age, but there were still a few hundred pediatric deaths and tens of thousands of hospitalizations in the US. If you look at excess death counts Covid starts clearly showing up in the 25-44 age group; not kids, but not exactly great-grandma either.
This is all true (and more: some companies were forced to prevent holding a job, to remain federal contractors), and in hindsight (or maybe with foresight, from anyone who didn't see any a priori reason to expect long-lived sterilizing immunity against a disease not obviously more static than influenza) it was questionable to bar people even temporarily from half of society under the desperate belief that this was going to be the final step to push R below 1 for good.
The Reuters 'fact-checker' quotes Mark Lynas who is merely speculating:
"It does not enter the (cell) nucleus and cannot interact with your DNA or cause any changes to the genome (here)”.
Then this other source:
'In an explainer about COVID-19 vaccines, Oxford University’s Vaccine Knowledge Project rebukes misinformation about mRNA with equal force: “there is no way for human DNA to be altered by an mRNA vaccine.” (here).'
They are asserting this claim without evidence.
Until this is actually tested, it is possible.
Here's a few contradicting evidences :
Basically it is established that RNA can be turned into DNA and integrated into the genome.
This is a well-known phenomenon.
The point of contention is whether or not what is in the injection can do the same thing.
Until there is a study coming out to prove in a large sample that this does not happen, it remains a possibility, no matter what fact-checkers say, as this is something that happens in nature.
Here's one in-vitro study that found DNA integration of the injection product
Here is the commentary on that study that says 'vaccines are safe but actually that study makes a good point'
The mechanism exists in nature but we need to know whether or not it happens in injected humans.
Issues have to do with whether or not the injection reaches the cell nucleus, and whether or not the RNA gets reverse-transcribed, and what dose is needed, etc.
The FDA itself did not have even specify an actual dose on its emergency authorization if I recall correctly.
They are not controlling how much of the RNA mixture each injection delivers, as far as I know.
Here's one of your previous Fact-chunkers describing some of the side effects.
Regarding fertility, I'm basing it on the widely reported complaints about menstruation issues from women who were injected and some other anecdotes.
Even if it did not make one sterile, it still would not make sense for young people to take it.
A lot of unhealthy people in that age range that could use some more obvious remedies before dipping into transhumanism; for example watching their diet or avoiding paraphilia associated with sexually-transmitted diseases.
From wikipedia- "SARS‑CoV‑2 is a positive-sense single-stranded RNA virus[14] that is contagious in humans.[15]". Specifically, it enters your cell, expresses a RNA dependent RNA polymerase to copy its RNA, and then the RNA is translated into proteins that, with the genome, form new RNA viruses that go on to infect more cells. This means that, like the vaccines, covid itself puts RNA into your cells to replicate itself. So that doesn't make the vaccine any worse than covid. Or any one of the hundreds of respiratory viruses that float around, hundreds of which you've been infected with. And the RNA itself from the vaccine is just a (slightly modified) spike protein RNA from the original coronavirus.
By this standard, plenty of previous vaccines are gene therapy - weakened live virus, adenovirus vector, etc.
Yeah, lots of viruses do this. Covid is much less likely to, because it doesn't have DNA as part of its lifecycle, and doesn't encode a reverse transcriptase to make more viral DNA.
this is just a case of 'not understanding what you are talking about'.
Not that I claim to fully understand what I'm talking about (IANAB), but IIRC the difference is that a COVID infection specifically targets a subset of cell-types in your respiratory system -- the vaccine is in your blood and spreads all over the place, entering many types of cells and causing them to produce spike protein.
This seems like quite a different mechanism -- doesn't mean it's not safe, but it introduces a number of unknowns.
The vaccine, afaik, doesn't 'go into your blood', but mostly stays in the muscle or the lymphatic system. And anyway, that concern also applies to most other vaccines.
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.
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)
Other vaccines don't cause your cells to produce viral subunits; this is the new part, which carries unknowns.
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.
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:
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.)
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