There is no strong proof for such effect. Such proof would greatly increase acceptance of governments’ policies, so there is a strong incentive to publish any such proof.
Trump spent months speaking about vaccines being soon available. Now we have the evidence that a vaccine works and the FDA will wait three weeks before to think about whether or not to approve the vaccine.
There would be strong incenties to start vaccinating now and vaccinating as soon as possible is a prime goal of the US president but still not done because the system is dysfunctional to an extend that even after spending years deregulating the FDA and having months to prepare for the moment of the vaccine.
While we do have slighlty more functioning governments in Europe, our governments are also not spending as much more on science to deal with COVID-19 as would desireable.
There’s a study that German researchers did do that says:
Findings In this cohort study including 100 patients recently recovered from COVID-19 identified from a COVID-19 test center, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging revealed cardiac involvement in 78 patients (78%) and ongoing myocardial inflammation in 60 patients (60%), which was independent of preexisting conditions, severity and overall course of the acute illness, and the time from the original diagnosis.
There’s a recent study that suggest 20% of COVID-19 patients develop diagnoseable mental health issues. Here it’s worth noting that 20% is not the upper bound as mental illness that gets developed through physical trauma often takes longer to show up (see the literature on depression due to head trauma).
Neither of those are surprising because our priors for this Coronavirus should come from the last problematic Coronavirus which was SARS with produced long-term mental health issues in a even larger number of patients and chronic fatigue syndrome (which might be a result of myocardial inflammation).
Even if the Vitamin D treatment they did in the study would have such an effect, you don’t get that by stockpiling vitamin D and taking it when you get symptoms.
Orally taken Vitamin D takes a while to be converted into it’s active form and in the study they gave that active form intravenously.
Pfizer’s vaccine requires extremely low temperatures, so there is a danger that in some locations it will be transported or stored incorrectly, causing greater risk than that suggested by the trials so far
Damaged mRNA doesn’t cause additional risks. It just won’t produce the desired proteins.
Given the studies that we have that do suggest long-term problems from COVID-19 and no evidence for long-term problems due to the vaccine, you need pretty high double standards to consider the vaccine more risky then getting infected with COVID-19.
Your 20% link is the cardiology link repeated. I think I know the link you meant: this Lancet study?
(I’d caution that a number of journalists mis-read the abstract and reported that nearly 20% of people had a first-time mental health diagnosis after COVID—that isn’t so! Only 5.8% had a first time diagnosis. The near-20% (18.1%) includes people already diagnosed with a mental health condition. You might have known this already but I wasn’t sure from your phrasing, and this specific error on this study is common so I thought I’d mention it.)
Findings In this cohort study including 100 patients recently recovered from COVID-19 identified from a COVID-19 test center, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging revealed cardiac involvement in 78 patients (78%) and ongoing myocardial inflammation in 60 patients (60%), which was independent of preexisting conditions, severity and overall course of the acute illness, and the time from the original diagnosis.
What does that mean? I don’t understand the meaning, severity or prognoses related to “cardiac involvement” and “ongoing myocardial inflammation”.
Given the studies that we have that do suggest long-term problems from COVID-19 and no evidence for long-term problems due to the vaccine,
Oh come on, I expect better from people on LW. There was no opportunity yet to produce evidence for long-term problems due to the vaccine.
What does that mean? I don’t understand the meaning, severity or prognoses related to “cardiac involvement” and “ongoing myocardial inflammation”.
This means you have a medical test that shows the heart was damaged. We don’t have the full knowledge of how that heart damage plays out years down the road.
Oh come on, I expect better from people on LW. There was no opportunity yet to produce evidence for long-term problems due to the vaccine.
This sounds to me like you don’t understand what the word evidence means when it’s used on LessWrong. On LessWrong the word evidence is generally meant in the Bayesian sense.
There are long-term effects that only appear after a while. Neither for COVID-19 nor for the vaccine we can measure those effects currently.
On the other hand there are adverse effects that happen when a person gets vaccinated or a person gets ill. We can measure whether those effects disapper after 2-3 months or are still there.
For clarity’s sake, is “Damaged mRNA doesn’t cause additional risks. It just won’t produce the desired proteins.” the claim that:
A) the vaccine mRNA can only become inert when stored improperly, or that
B) the probability of changes to the mRNA due to the incorrect handling producing a dangerous, unintended protein is vanishingly small?
I would assume B is correct but perhaps there is something about the chemical reactions that take place at higher temps that do result in what is better views as a non-mRNA compound that is incapable of producing any protein.
Epistemic status: I did study bioinformatics but it’s been more then a decade, so I have basic familarity but no strong expertise.
I meant B. Most mRNA errors will result in no protein being produced.
One scenario is that you have the mRNA cut somewhere in the middle. The front of the mRNA is marked with a 5′ cap addition. The tail of the cut mRNA doesn’t have that, so it won’t be processed into a protein.
The front with does have the 5′ cap addition however doesn’t have the polyadenylation at the end of the mRNA that normally marks the end of it. Lacking that exonucleases will degrade it. This is a process that the body has to get rid of damaged mRNA.
Given these processes I would expect that no clinical significant amount of proteins that only has the front X amino acids gets build.
Even with proper handling many mRNA molecules will be damaged by the time they reach the ribosomes inside cells. If damaged mRNA molecules would cause problems you would likely see those problems also in patients in the clinical trials.
Trump spent months speaking about vaccines being soon available. Now we have the evidence that a vaccine works and the FDA will wait three weeks before to think about whether or not to approve the vaccine.
There would be strong incenties to start vaccinating now and vaccinating as soon as possible is a prime goal of the US president but still not done because the system is dysfunctional to an extend that even after spending years deregulating the FDA and having months to prepare for the moment of the vaccine.
While we do have slighlty more functioning governments in Europe, our governments are also not spending as much more on science to deal with COVID-19 as would desireable.
There’s a study that German researchers did do that says:
There’s a recent study that suggest 20% of COVID-19 patients develop diagnoseable mental health issues. Here it’s worth noting that 20% is not the upper bound as mental illness that gets developed through physical trauma often takes longer to show up (see the literature on depression due to head trauma).
Neither of those are surprising because our priors for this Coronavirus should come from the last problematic Coronavirus which was SARS with produced long-term mental health issues in a even larger number of patients and chronic fatigue syndrome (which might be a result of myocardial inflammation).
Even if the Vitamin D treatment they did in the study would have such an effect, you don’t get that by stockpiling vitamin D and taking it when you get symptoms.
Orally taken Vitamin D takes a while to be converted into it’s active form and in the study they gave that active form intravenously.
Damaged mRNA doesn’t cause additional risks. It just won’t produce the desired proteins.
Given the studies that we have that do suggest long-term problems from COVID-19 and no evidence for long-term problems due to the vaccine, you need pretty high double standards to consider the vaccine more risky then getting infected with COVID-19.
Your 20% link is the cardiology link repeated. I think I know the link you meant: this Lancet study?
(I’d caution that a number of journalists mis-read the abstract and reported that nearly 20% of people had a first-time mental health diagnosis after COVID—that isn’t so! Only 5.8% had a first time diagnosis. The near-20% (18.1%) includes people already diagnosed with a mental health condition. You might have known this already but I wasn’t sure from your phrasing, and this specific error on this study is common so I thought I’d mention it.)
What does that mean? I don’t understand the meaning, severity or prognoses related to “cardiac involvement” and “ongoing myocardial inflammation”.
Oh come on, I expect better from people on LW. There was no opportunity yet to produce evidence for long-term problems due to the vaccine.
This means you have a medical test that shows the heart was damaged. We don’t have the full knowledge of how that heart damage plays out years down the road.
This sounds to me like you don’t understand what the word evidence means when it’s used on LessWrong. On LessWrong the word evidence is generally meant in the Bayesian sense.
There are long-term effects that only appear after a while. Neither for COVID-19 nor for the vaccine we can measure those effects currently.
On the other hand there are adverse effects that happen when a person gets vaccinated or a person gets ill. We can measure whether those effects disapper after 2-3 months or are still there.
If a vaccine was causing long-term problems, how would you expect the world to be different from what we have now?
I would expect that there are reported vaccine side effects that don’t go away after a few days.
For clarity’s sake, is “Damaged mRNA doesn’t cause additional risks. It just won’t produce the desired proteins.” the claim that:
A) the vaccine mRNA can only become inert when stored improperly, or that
B) the probability of changes to the mRNA due to the incorrect handling producing a dangerous, unintended protein is vanishingly small?
I would assume B is correct but perhaps there is something about the chemical reactions that take place at higher temps that do result in what is better views as a non-mRNA compound that is incapable of producing any protein.
Epistemic status: I did study bioinformatics but it’s been more then a decade, so I have basic familarity but no strong expertise.
I meant B. Most mRNA errors will result in no protein being produced.
One scenario is that you have the mRNA cut somewhere in the middle. The front of the mRNA is marked with a 5′ cap addition. The tail of the cut mRNA doesn’t have that, so it won’t be processed into a protein.
The front with does have the 5′ cap addition however doesn’t have the polyadenylation at the end of the mRNA that normally marks the end of it. Lacking that exonucleases will degrade it. This is a process that the body has to get rid of damaged mRNA.
Given these processes I would expect that no clinical significant amount of proteins that only has the front X amino acids gets build.
Even with proper handling many mRNA molecules will be damaged by the time they reach the ribosomes inside cells. If damaged mRNA molecules would cause problems you would likely see those problems also in patients in the clinical trials.