Previous attempts at mRNA vaccines had failed, due to the side effects being too serious. There was no reason to believe in May 2020 that a COVID mRNA vaccine would be any different than all the previous mRNA failures.
Maybe! The fact that everyone "knows" that doesn't is the 1st concern. Even scientists are not clear on efficacy or long term beneficial/averse effects. Nobody knows why all previous mRNA vaccines were ineffective, yet, the Covid jabs are. Lots of questions still remain.
Not mRNA vaccines, COVID vaccines (all of them, doesn't matter the type). To be specific Coronaviruses are known not to produce lasting immunity, COVID is no exception.
They failed in their primary goal: Creating lasting immunity to this disease. They succeeded in a secondary goal: Reducing severity of infection.
The trouble with failing in the primary goal is that COVID is here forever.
I personally find all this focus on mRNA to be disappointing. mRNA vaccines appear to be relatively easy to develop and produce, but I see no particular evidence that they’re good. With the efficacy numbers they seem to be currently showing against Covid, it’s not clear they would have made it through trials.
There was never a major mRNA vaccine roll out ever. mRNA possibly does not compare to traditional vaccines, there's evidence it is a different beast entirely.
Enough reason to be cautious, wait out the hidden/late-onset side effect, and not give it to those not too vulnerable to covid.
But authorities claim it's totally safe for all ages, while they have no data to back this up (that'd need a long trial, and those taking it ARE the long trial).
This analysis seems to downplay the fact that mRNA vaccines had not been found to be safe and effective in the past and that was a major reason it was not a mainline treatment.
The COVID situation tossed aside the very slow and meticulous approval process that vaccines must normally traverse due to the perceived urgency of the situation.
However, it remains to be seen if the raft of new mRNA treatments coming out will be found safe and effective when subjected to long slow approval process.
We will see in the years to come.
The mRNA vaccines were developed in February 2020. The virus has had ample opportunity to change since then so it's not surprising that you still got sick.
I don't think it makes sense to extrapolate this to a hypothetical new shot which is developed for the new virus.
Are you referring to the mRNA vaccine platform? Could you point me to the mRNA vaccine application that was approved before covid?
When I looked into it all, of them had been denied until covid and I did not hear of any breakthrough in mRNA technology that suddenly fixed the issues the previous ones (I found 8) had been denied for.
Past mRNA cancer vaccines haven't failed to get through trials because of ineffectiveness. They failed clinical trials in the 2000s and 2010s due to their side effects being too bad. The side effects of mRNA vaccines are getting less and less severe over the years, but the proof of the pudding will come in phase III for this vaccine, as with all the other ones.
mRNA isn't new (it was discovered in the 90s), and has been arguably studied far more than other types of vaccines. Also, there are non-mRNA COVID19 vaccines available as well, if that is your issue.
Accounting for both these facts, how is vaccine hesitancy justified ?
They were wildly effective for a few months after being given. We don’t know how well they would continue to work in the absence of mutation.
But it’s worse than that: the revised vaccines appear to be nowhere near as effective even against strains closely related to those which they target. As a somewhat plausible mechanism, repeated doses have been shown to induce IgG4 production, which non-mRNA vaccines don’t seem to do.
Measles and Chickenpox are both airborne, although they’re not respiratory the way Covid is. But their respective vaccines are vastly more effective.
I’m not saying that I know, or have strong evidence, that mRNA vaccines are weak. But I do think it’s fair to say that we have no evidence that they can be comparably effective to earlier vaccine technologies.
> Again, it was just an assumption that vaccines would be "safe enough", despite no mRNA vaccine having ever been rolled out at scale.
Why is this a criterium we should pay attention to? If you never roll anything out, you'll never have data about a roll out. So instead we do studies and statistical analyses. Are you aware of any studies that "normal"/previous vaccines had to go through, which mRNA COVID vaccines did not? If so, could you please share them?
I'm vaccinated but I think it's hindsight bias to say the mRNA vaccines are obviously safe. We had to wait for clinical trials to show that. There has been a great deal of research and development on the delivery of the mRNA, what kind of molecule to wrap it in, for example.
Additionally, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, but with e.g. the Spanish Flu, the morbidity was not from the flu, per se, but the immune response to it (cytokine storm, which I believe is implicated in Covid somewhat, too). If that's the case, could the proteins coded by the mRNA potentially have kicked off such a response? I know we see that it doesn't, but could it have?
As mentioned in the Nature article and in another poster's comment[1], MRNA vaccines have been known for a while now (decade+ ?), and studied on animals, with some limited phase I / phase II human studies. But nobody's gone through a full phase III before covid hit, so that kind of a wide fan-out is new and exceptional because of the emergency nature of the disease.
But I don't think they're unconcerned. I think it's a combination of lack of decades-long longitudinal studies, and also that previous phase I / II studies haven't throw up significant red flags.
What are you talking about? No one suggested that the vaccine would prevent infection 100% reliably, and I'm not sure why you think we have a better understanding of the long-term effects of covid than mRNA vaccines (which aren't the only type of vaccine available in the first place).
But we haven't seen long term effects of mRNA vaccines.
I am not expecting a "children of men" distopy, and I'd rather have an mRNA vaccine than any other, but it is possible there might be some unexpected issues in the long run.
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