Posted on 09/13/2023 8:51:42 AM PDT by ChicagoConservative27
Okay, ready for a long and detailed explanation of immune system function?
We are born without adequate immune systems. Our immune systems develop throughout childhood and, according to a veterinarian friend of mine, reach maximal development around age 18. The immune systems of young adults have peak function, although in some cases, this leads to potentially deadly cytokine storm. As we age, our immune systems stop working so well. Around age 65, immune system function begins to decline significantly, so that you are less able to fight off infectious disease.
In addition to age-related changes in immune function, some people are born with a genetic variant of the immune system that prevents them from adequately forming an immune response. Others get a disease like cancer that impairs immune function. Or they get an organ transplant and receive immune-suppressing drugs.
So, no, our immune systems are not perfect and some don't even work well or at all.
"Natural" immunity, by which I presume you mean "disease-induced immunity" is not as good as vaccine immunity. This is because the virus contains 29 different proteins as well as the mRNAs and RNA genome to code for those proteins. Your immune system can easily choose the wrong proteins to make antibodies against. Antibodies against a protein that is located on the inside of the virus where it is protected from antibodies do nothing to block the virus. Only antibodies that attack the spike protein on the surface of the virus are capable of physically blocking the virus from attaching to the ACE2 receptor. Their attachment to the outside of the virus also signals the immune system that there is an invader that needs to be destroyed.
The mRNA vaccine technology has been in development since the early 1990s. How is a technology that has thirty years of development behind it "rushed"? And how do you scientifically characterize a vaccine that specifically targets the protein that the virus needs to initiate an infection as "useless"?
Why do you say that? Can YOU explain the logic of believing that the best way to get immunity against a dangerous disease is to catch it and therefore purposely expose yourself to the dangers you want to avoid?
I am exquisitely aware of the last few years. I have seen Covid misinformation deliberately spread among conservative news outlets, forums, and talk shows. I have fought against it because this misinformation is not only life-threatening, it damages the conservative movement by giving the left fuel to characterize conservatives as ignorant, superstitious, and uneducated.
Among people with "mild" Covid who are not hospitalized for it, there is about a 0.1% chance of developing blood clots. The risk of developing blood clots remains elevated for months or even a year after catching Covid. The risk of blood clots among hospitalized Covid patients is 3.1%, or 31 times higher than for non-hospitalized patients.
The chance of you knowing three people who had mild Covid and developed blood clots is one in a trillion.
The chance of knowing three people who were hospitalized with Covid and got blood clots is still low, at one per 33,567, but it is high enough to be believable.
mRNA vaccine manufacturing does not involve using aborted babies or even cells from babies that were aborted several decades ago. The spike protein is coded in a piece of DNA called a plasmid. Bacteria are used to grow plasmids. The plasmids are cleaned and linearized (normally they are circular) and then added to a cell-free mixture containing enzymes and nucleotides in order to make the mRNA. Selected Adverse Events Reported after COVID-19 Vaccination.
Venous blood clots rare among COVID-19 outpatients, study finds
Incidence of thrombotic complications in COVID-19.
Study finds risk of serious blood clots up to six months after covid-19.
Blood clot risk remains elevated nearly a year after COVID-19.
It could save your life—if you give it a chance.
My natural immunity which I got through training my immune system with vaccines has protected me from a lot of diseases. I have never had polio, measles, rubella, smallpox, influenza, Japanese encephalitis, or Covid because I got vaccinated. I was unfortunate enough to catch mumps and chickenpox before vaccines for them were invented, it would have been nice to have antibody-mediated immunity in place then, too, so I wouldn't have had to suffer through those illnesses.
The fact that immunity to coronaviruses wanes rather rapidly is no reason to avoid vaccination. Professional antivaxxers use this characteristic of the immune system to convince people that vaccines are worthless. Catching Covid is still more risky than vaccines, by orders of magnitude.
I do not know how the vaccines can be formulated to overcome the immune system’s inability to mount a long-term response to coronaviruses. That may end up being a holy grail like the search for a universal influenza vaccine.
One reason so many people fall for antivax rhetoric is that they don’t know how to look up the data. Another reason is that they are bad at math. So when I post rebuttals of antivax propaganda, I try to link to the appropriate sources.
The "government's view" is the result of information being provided from tens of thousands of scientists not just in the US but all over the world. This is not a matter of clueless politicians saying whatever they feel like. Scientists such as myself (who read the study data) prepare briefs for the politicians. It's a challenge because the politicians don't understand technical jargon, yet we still manage to get the pertinent points across. Most of the politicians do listen to the scientific opinions.
Only some Republican politicians reject the scientific opinion, and this seems to have started happening because of Covid. I think this is because the charlatans embedded conservative ideals into their antiscience propaganda so effectively that they convinced many conservatives that protecting their health is the equivalent of losing their bill of rights freedom. So, instead of politicians being leaders who denounce antiscience propaganda, they help to propagate it because that's what their constituents want.
I have followed your posts here on FR regarding Covid. I very much respect your opinion.
I will add that there are many frauds on the anti-vax side. When I see them quoted, I will not hesitate to call them out.
But here’s the thing. When Covid first reared its ugly head, I was all for the vax. Trump’s statements did much to influence me there. So I got the J&J shot. Then I noticed something. The legitimate anti-vax folks were being silenced. Public debate on the issue was forbidden. Shut up, and take the vaccination.
That’s not the way science is supposed to be conducted! It’s just like with the Climate Change issue. No debate is allowed. Silence anyone who disagrees with the official viewpoint.
I’m not some romantic poet. I’m a trained chemist. It was drummed into my head that inquiry must be respected, and continuous. That’s not happening with Climate Change. And it’s not happening with the Covid vax.
Regards to you,
LR
Within the scientific community, there can be and is much debate on various vaccine formulations. Some early vaccine candidates (in general, I am not referring to Covid) are, in fact, quite problematic. Scientists get together at meetings and discuss these issues.
I don’t talk about early vaccine development failures for a reason. That is because the vast majority of drug candidates (including vaccines) fail. In fact, we want them to fail and try to cause them to fail as early in the process as possible. Therefore, it is pointless to talk about the failures, since they make up most drug development efforts.
Once the vaccine has been tested enough for the manufacturer to submit the paperwork for approval to the FDA, there is a large volume of supporting data. Even then, there is no guarantee the FDA will accept the data.
What this means is not that there are valid antivax concerns about vaccines. Those antivaxxers who make it their livelihood to disseminate doubt and distrust of vaccines aren’t concerned about patient health or drug safety. They have completely different motives.
Climate change (since you mentioned it) is another example of a science that became politicized and is no longer based on the data. I get seriously annoyed every time I see that a disease outbreak, weather event, toxic algae bloom, frog die-offs, etc., happened because of “climate change.” In my opinion, blaming everything on “climate change” is just lazy. As long as the “cause” can be attributed to “climate change,” there is no reason to dig any further to find out what is going on.
But disease fighting and developing countermeasures is unrelated to the political forces driving the “climate change” agenda and the persons involved are not the same. In the life sciences, nothing happens without a lot of debate and discussion. And in the end, we stick to the scientific evidence.
You do not understand these “vaccines” which are not. And the specious notion of the generation of T and B Cells to provide antibodies against antigenic viruses. Please, talk to the inventor of mRNA Dr. Robert Malone. I understand immunity far better than you ever will. Can assure you of that. Utter bilge, and one might add provenanced opinion of a “grant” researcher. We’re done here. Dr. Malone can explain it to you.
I've done more than "talk to" Robert Malone. I've worked in his lab doing a research project that he oversaw. Of course, this was in the days before he decided to start spreading misinformation to conservatives. Back then, he was not what I call a "kook", although he and his wife were fairly liberal.
Here is the introduction to the chapter on adaptive immunity published in the textbook "Molecular Biology of the Cell. 4th edition." It explains adaptive immunity, i.e. the immune system function of producing pathogen-specific T- and B- cells along with antibodies in much more depth than I posted here:
Chapter 24: The Adaptive Immune System
You can buy the entire book and read the whole chapter on adaptive immunity if you want even more detail on the immune response. I paid around $150 for the book when I attended university. It is probably more expensive now.
Robert Malone probably read this textbook, too. It is standard reading for all students of cell biology and related disciplines of molecular biology, biochemistry, etc. People keep it in their personal libraries long after they graduate university. (Yes, I still have it.)
John S Mosby:
“Please, talk to the inventor of mRNA Dr. Robert Malone. I understand immunity far better than you ever will.”
exDemMom:
“I’ve done more than “talk to” Robert Malone. I’ve worked in his lab”
Damn, that’s gonna leave a mark.
Hubris + sheer ignorance makes kook posters the best entertainment on FR.
Here we go— ‘misinformation’. So no govt. researchers or CDC are “kooks”. Sorry, this does not wash, but understand the need to keep getting paid by paymasters. It’s a living.
Dead right! And.. over the target, thus getting flak. Well spoken.
You have your answer as I have yours.
Mandy Cohen, with a voice like nails on a chalkboard, got her job at the instantly retired director’s obvious self awareness of incompetence— got this job through machinations of NC Gov. Roy Cooper (yes, another jackass dem). The height of mis-direction and mis-information- kind of like little miss supercalifragilisticexpialadocious chickie no longer at DHS but.. “abroad” as they say.
Lord spare us these government weenies.
The CDC has no say over what China or Russia or anyone else chooses to do. The conspiracy theory view requires every other country to be playing along with American misinformation instead of calling the bluff of the CDC, FDA, Big Pharma and everyone else they accuse of being part of the big Covid plot.
That might make a good movie script because people suspend their disbelief while watching. Rival and/or hostile governments like Beijing and Moscow don’t suspend their disbelief nor spend their money unnecessarily on vaccines they don’t need or which harm their people.
Somehow I don’t recall them laughing at the American effort to create and deliver a vaccine against Covid. In fact what they did do is create their own vaccines and had them finished in December 2020 just like we did.
How long was the current formulation tested on humans? On how many people? And how long were they observed for side effects? --
Before rushing out to inject EVERYONE because "SCIENCE™!" ?
And how do you scientifically characterize a vaccine that specifically targets the protein that the virus needs to initiate an infection as "useless"?
Huh, how many successful vaccines for coronavirus have ever been created?
Trick question, I saw your posting on this earlier. I can dig it up if you really want it shoved up your Donkey sideways.
And if the protein produced by the jab (not a vaccine) actively attaches to the same binding sites as the real virus, then just maybe injecting it directly into the bloodstream straight off kind of cheats the nose hairs, mucuous membranes, and the rest of the body, out the their chance to keep the pathogen out of the bloodstream, before it can do anything nasty like the spike protein on real virus does.
Dingbat.
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