Just so that we’re clear — I am not saying we should dismiss any COVID vaccine concerns. Absolutely not! We should debate any potential issues and closely monitor any actual ones. So far there do seem some rare minor issues and ultra-rare major ones (deaths, clots).
1/5
Not all vaccines are equal. Some are better than others. I am a huge fan of mRNA ones, I fully admit. I’ve been a fan of mRNA technology for many years (back when it was just invented/considered for use in Yamanaka factors delivery which are my main passion).
2/5
Vaccines seem like a perfect fit for the mRNA technology, especially in a pandemic where you need very quickly adapt to novel strains. I actually hope we can squeak by without new boosters, but for that we need a coordinated world-wide effort to eradicate SARS2 ASAP.
3/5
So some COVID vaccine alarmist have been quoting the study by @manorlaboratory out of Salk that SARS2 spike alone can cause cell damage. But that’s not what the study has shown!
1/4
Those were not lone spike proteins, those were HIV-like virions encoding SARS2 spike. I.e. entered the cells expressing ACE2 and once inside expressed their proteins and maybe even integrated into cell genome (not sure if they used integrase-deficient retroviruses or not).
2/4
Maybe the confusion is due to the lax wording by the popular science article describing the study:
AAA SNAKES ON A PLANE, I mean
SPIKES IN MY BRAIN AAA!!!
The latest Covid vaccine fear is that spike proteins produced by the vaccine will get out of the cells, get into the bloodstream, and travel to the brain causing prion-like pathology.
1/4
While there are some data that free-floating spike proteins (or just their fragments) seem to be detected in the blood the first couple of days after vaccination, the amounts detected are minuscule, around 70 pg/mL. A picogram is 1e-12 gram.
2/4
Moreover, free-floating spikes cannot get inside cells on their own, and even if they could, any potential prion-like effects of spikes are pure conjecture at this point: nothing of sort has yet been observed — neither in vitro or in vivo.
3/4
Ok let’s try to estimate our annual risk of contracting COVID. We have these nice CDC data from when there were just 15M cases in the US (after about 6 months of the pandemic). Now it’s 33M, icymi.
2/7
Let’s look at the 40-64 age group. We have 5M cases out of ~100M ppl, i.e. a 5% incidence in 6 mo/15M cases, which I think we can extrapolate to 10M cases out of 30M/12mo. => annual risk of 10% for people aged 40-64.
Quick sanity check: 33M cases out of 330M is also 10%.
3/7
Now, what is the risk of death for people aged 40-64 who got COVID? Well, we got about 0.1M dead out of about 10M infected, which means a nice round CFR of 1%.
Ok, let me try and harp on my evolutionary, well, harp 😂 And maybe my favorite EvoBio couple, @HeatherEHeying and @BretWeinstein can smack me on the head if say something dumb.
So basically infectivity and virulence/pathogenicity are two different properties of a virus,
which *might* be correlated but do not have to be. First of all, we must understand: these little viruses are not out to kill us. All they “want” is to replicate. And want is in quotes because of course they don’t have any agency:
3/n
they are just a self-replicating collection of molecules, set in motion by some random LUCA prime mover billions of years ago. So the pathogenicity/virulence of a virus is really an unwanted side-effect for both parties: