There are some known rare complications associated with HQL use (e.g. this 2013 literature review: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3760572/). We don’t have good studies on its efficacy with COVID-19 to date because every study done so far has either been entirely too small or was just very poorly constructed. Thus, without solid evidence of efficacy in one hand and with solid evidence of potential harm in the other, it makes sense for medical professionals speaking broadly to express reservations about broad application of an unproven treatment with known risks. As I said, I think it’s really sad we haven’t gotten any well constructed major studies on this as we should be aggressively investigating ALL potentially life saving treatments for this disease. My personal thought is that if you have the major risk factors for COVID-19, you’re looking at such a high risk of severe illness or death that the risk of HQL complications are completely overshadowed and thus worth trying it early in the disease progression. It may just save your life. But I also couldn’t tell someone there’s hard scientific evidence supporting such a course of action at this time because nobody’s done that work yet.
When we’re talking about mRNA vaccines, it’s a new approach, but one with a lot of promise to save lives with much more rapid development and deployment if it works as expected. It’s been tested in various animals for a decade and found to be successful. This would be the first approved use in humans, but there’s nothing sinister about it. Using mRNA to get the body’s own ribosomes to print the antigens we want to introduce the immune system to is brilliant. And since we don’t need to “grow” a virus anymore, these generation 3 vaccines should eliminate problems like vaccine allergies (which usually happens due to culturing taking place in chicken eggs) and delays in manufacturing making the vaccine less effective (like with the seasonal Influenza vaccine).
There’s an enormous amount of promise for life-saving therapies and no ethical issues with the approach. The way you go from an unproven technology to a proven one is by proving it, and that’s why a decade of work has gone into this new type of vaccine.
The generation 1 vaccines (using a weakened version of the virus grown in chicken eggs) were once unproven, but have since become the cornerstone of our vaccine toolkit, including the vaccines for things like polio, measles, mumps, and the seasonal flu. It takes months. We later took a new approach where we took just the antigen from the target pathogen and attached it to another harmless virus. Vaccines like Hepatitis B take that approach. It’s safer since there’s no risk of the original virus still managing to infect the individual, but it still takes months to grow these. At one time, this approach was also unproven. But now it’s in common use.
The third generation vaccines using mRNA don’t use any part of the virus, have no risk of infection, and don’t need to grow anything. They’re faster and potentially much cheaper to make. If this approach works with SARS-CoV-2, they could potentially replace the seasonal Influenza virus with this and we could see a vaccine that’s close to 100% effective instead of the current one that’s usually only about 30-40% effective. With an average of 37,000 flu deaths per year in the US even with the current vaccine, that’s a lot of lives that could be saved each and every year just against one type of common virus.
Listen, I have no doubt there are plenty of self-serving individuals around promoting various things for their own reasons. However, I’m also a believer in capitalism. If you make a better product than the last guy, you get more business and you make more money. If Moderna or somebody like them comes up with a better, cheaper, quicker process for creating vaccines that’s as or more effective, as or more safe, and doesn’t have ethical issues attached to it as compared to older methods, they’re going to get rich. We have a lot of requirements around safety testing in the US. They’ve shown that they work.
I know you don’t trust them and I understand that, but from my perspective, the products that make it onto our market are generally well tested and safe. Not without exception (we’re only human), but generally speaking, many lives are being saved with well made products.
We shall see. The coercive posture adopted for this unproven vaccine, coupled with questionable methods and injury immunity do not augment the argument for adoption.