I appreciate your comment regarding how the immune system works and why we take vaccines in general.
What has been frustrating for me, and I am sure others, is the lack of good explanation as well as certainly some bad information, about how the COVID vax works compared to other vaccinations.
I am not a doctor or expert in medicines, so my non-medical expert history understands that traditional vaccinations use a form dead virus to expose the immune system to something it can generate antibodies for. Those can later help fight the live virus if infected. (I know I am simplifying and technically could be completely wrong - again, not a doctor here).
If I am close to right in the above, my confusion comes from not understanding what is new about the COVID vax, the use of mRNA (Pzizer/Moderna) or DNA (J&J). After many questions I still dont get what is different in either or both of these from the dead virus approach. Oh, and then there is spike proteins. Were spike proteins and DNA not part of traditional dead virus vaccines?
I wish someone could do a good tutorial on the differences, at the non-medical expert level. Then when people get all spun up about how ‘our DNA is being changed’ and ‘we are all going die in 6 months’, we could sort out truth from hysteria.
The problem with dead/weakened pathogen vaccines is one of production time. The live pathogens have to be cultured in sufficient amounts to make the large amounts of vaccine needed for a worldwide vaccine push. Needless to say, that takes too much time to be able to get ahead of a novel pathogen in a pandemic situation.
The main advantage of the mRNA vaccines is speed. The target protein is identified and the mRNA to express it can be designed on a computer and synthesized in large amounts far more rapidly than live pathogens can be cultured. A highly useful technology, especially for potential bio-weapons or Fauci induced lab experiments gone wrong.
So the main difference between the two types of vaccines is cultured vs synthetic production of the antigens needed to induce an immune reaction in order to train it to respond to any live pathogen encountered in daily life.
The spike protein is unique to the corona virus (as far as we know) and what it uses to bind and break into our cells, so it was chosen as the target antigen for the new vaccines. Time will tell if that was a good choice, but I suspect that it is responsible for the higher level of adverse events and they should have perhaps chosen a different protein to serve as the antigen. But I could be completely wrong on that as well.
Choosing the antigen has to be very carefully done because choosing a protein too similar to a human one could provoke the immune system to attack our own similar protein thus causing an auto-immune disorder. That would be a catastrophic error. So I can understand the choice of the spike protein because of it’s uniqueness to the covid virus while remaining wary of it’s potential for adverse events. Everyone has to pick their own poison.
The problem with the mRNA vaccines is that it’s fairly new technology that is chockfull of unknown unknowns like every other new technology that comes along. We won’t know if there are any or what they are until they manifest and that takes time and widespread use to discover them.
Risk adverse types do not like that. I am firmly in the camp of individual freedom of choice. People should always make their own risk/benefit calculations.
The media has sunk so far below the level of used car salesmen that they have hopelessly muddied public discourse to the point that nobody trusts anything anyone says about anything, ever. Part partisanship and part stupidity, Jschools don’t attract the brightest minds, just the most fervent ones.
The FDA/NIH/CDC are full of incompetent bureaucrats who are good at bootlicking and butt-covering and not really good at math and science. Their messaging has been insulting, stupid and based on the personal calculations of the agency heads rather than fact-based science. They seem to be stuck on stupid and I don’t expect them to improve under the current power structure that is using the crisis and chaos to consolidate their hold on power.