Hayadan > About the claims against the corona vaccine - and all the answers

About the claims against the corona vaccine - and all the answers

The mRNA vaccine has no effect on the genetic code, it does not contain biological substances, does not cause sterilization, every technology was once new, and the corners that were rounded for the acceleration of the vaccine were not in the medical field but in the bureaucracy * Dr.Roey Tsezana answers these and other concerns that arise Opponents of vaccines have gained traction with the public

Corona deniers. Illustration: depositphotos.com

It seems like every few months there is a new controversy regarding the virus. At first they claimed that it was no more serious than the flu (it turns out that it is), after that they said that there is no excess mortality (there is), and now that the vaccine is just a moment away, one can hear concerns that it is at all dangerous to health. Somehow, all these statements do not come from the experienced and responsible medical authorities, but mainly from tweets on Twitter and firm posts on her Facebook page. But let's go.

So what will we deal with in this record?

The record will include the list of claims against the vaccine - and the answers to each of them. My hope is that the record will provide an answer to every claim, and that you can always refer people with questions and concerns to it.

The vaccine will change my genetic code!
The technology is too new and has not been tried before!
I don't want embryos injected into my body!
I don't want the vaccine to sterilize me!
CEO of Pfizer sold shares!
The vaccine companies will not be to blame for the damage caused to the vaccine victims!
The vaccines were developed too quickly!
It is not known what the long-term consequences of the vaccine are!

But before we review all of these, I will explain a little about the biology behind the vaccine, because the explanation will help us understand why some of these claims are not true.

How to quickly vaccinate

The traditional vaccines until today were based on a simple idea: if the immune system knows the source of the particles attacking the body, then it can deal with them at lightning speed. For this reason, researchers would develop vaccines that contained weakened or dead bacteria and viruses, which could not really harm the body - but which the immune system would become familiar with and then develop resistance against.

The problem is that it takes a long time to find the ways to weaken bacteria and viruses to just the right degree, and it is not easy to grow them in the first place either. That is why the vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna with lightning speed are vaccines of a new and exciting type known as "mRNA vaccines".

What is mRNA, you ask?

Almost every cell in the body has DNA - these are the cell's operating instructions. Now, assume for a moment that you only have one copy of grandma's recipe book, and if it gets lost then you won't be able to cook your favorite dishes anymore. what will you do Will you put the book in the kitchen, where it might get dirty or catch fire on the stove? of course not. You will put it in the room carefully, and every time you want to prepare a new dish, you will go to the book and copy the appropriate recipe on a page - and take the page itself to the kitchen.

The same thing happens in cells. DNA is the most important substance in the cell, therefore it is well preserved and protected inside the cell nucleus. In order for the cell to be able to read the recipes in the DNA, there is a fascinating mechanism in which the relevant recipe is copied into a molecule called mRNA. why m Because it is short for messenger, or "messenger". This is what mRNA does. It leaves the cell nucleus with a copy of the recipe, and then all the tiny machines that sit outside the nucleus can read the same recipe and produce proteins that the cell needs. They can even secrete these proteins out of the cell, if given the right instructions.

And now for the genius part: Moderna and Pfizer realized that they did not have to work for years in the laboratory to produce proteins or parts of bacteria and viruses to be injected into the body. Instead, they can simply produce mRNA - the production cost of which in the laboratory tends to be zero - and inject it into the body. The same messenger molecule will enter the cells and give them instructions to produce parts of proteins that are similar to those that the virus carries on its body. The cells will produce the proteins, release them into the bloodstream, the immune system will learn to recognize them, and as soon as the real virus arrives in the body - it will recognize it once or twice, and cleanse it from the body even before the first patch.

This. That's the whole biology behind it.

And now - for concerns!

The vaccine will change my genetic code!

There is a rumor that the mRNA vaccines can change the genetic code of humans. Not far from it, and now that you understand the biology behind them, you can also understand why. The messenger molecule does not enter the nucleus, and cannot affect the genetic code at all. It remains intact in the cells for a day or two, then breaks down on its own, so the cells stop producing the protein, and the situation returns to normal.

So no - the mRNA vaccine has no effect on the genetic code.

The technology is too new!

Another claim is that the mRNA vaccine technique itself is too new, and has not yet been tried on a large scale. But experiments with mRNA vaccines have been conducted for over a decade. In recent years, researchers have managed to overcome many problems related to vaccines: they have found ways to make sure that the messenger molecule really enters the cells and that it is not destroyed by itself in the blood, for example. They adapted it so that it instructs the cells to secrete the virus-like proteins into the blood, instead of them remaining inside the cells. They surrounded the molecule with a thin coating to protect it, and found it harmless to the body.

We have evidence for the safety of the vaccines in animals, including mice[1], monkeys[2], and even in the most important animal: humans[3]. If there was any inherent problem with the mRNA vaccines, we would have seen it by now.

I don't want embryos injected into my body!

From time to time you can find claims on the net that the new vaccines contain tissues that came from aborted fetuses. But the whole point of the mRNA vaccines is that we don't need to grow viruses or bacteria in tissues of any kind at all. In fact, they are probably the most sterile vaccines we have ever come across. The mRNA is created synthetically in the laboratory, transferred to capsules that protect it in the bloodstream, and that's it.

I don't want the vaccine to sterilize me!

You can find claims online that the vaccine causes infertility in women. And not only that, but the "Chief Scientist of the Pfizer Development Team" said so. Crow flower. That "chief scientist" left Pfizer about nine years ago, and has nothing to do with the current vaccine. The claim he made is that the vaccine causes the cells to produce a protein that is similar to another protein on the placenta, so the body may produce an immune response against the placenta.

What else? There is no real resemblance between the protein involved in the vaccine, and the protein on the placenta. Any resemblance between them is… well, imaginary. And there is not even a shred of evidence that the vaccine sterilizes women or men.

By the way, if infertility scares you, you might want to know that there are opinions that it is the virus that can cause fertility problems because it is able to bind to the cells in the testicles[4]. The research on this topic is very preliminary, but there is reason to believe that in some infected people we may see impaired fertility[5]. So if this is what bothers you, go get vaccinated.

CEO of Pfizer sold shares!

One of the news that jumped people in November is that the CEO of Pfizer sold approximately sixty percent of his shares in the company, immediately after the announcement of the development of the vaccine[6]. The reason this is so troubling is that the value of the shares increases as the company becomes more successful. When shareholders in a company sell a large part of them at once, the automatic assumption is that they know something we don't, and like rats escaping from a sinking ship - they are the first to get out with minimal damage.

What else? It turns out that the sale of the shares was already approved in August, with a security period of several months before the CEO was allowed to sell his shares, and even then only when their value reached above a certain amount. On the day the vaccine was announced, the value of Pfizer's shares rose by approximately 15% - a huge jump in stock market terms - and the same CEO who had hoarded the shares for 25 long years, decided to redeem them for a profit of approximately 15 million dollars[7]. Why not?

If the CEO was really selling the shares at a low value, we should all be worried. But if he sold them at a good profit - well, that's exactly what we would expect him to do. No need to worry, friends.

The vaccine companies will not be to blame for the damage caused to the vaccine victims!

There is a rumor that the vaccine companies will not be charged in the event of damage caused to the vaccinated, and that a court is even set up just for the victims of the corona vaccines[8]. In fact, such a court has existed in the United States since 1986, for a historical reason: the pharmaceutical companies produced vaccines that were given to tens of millions of people a year. If even one person in a million developed severe side effects, then the companies would be punished with dozens of lawsuits filed against them each year, each of which would require them to hire lawyers and suffer bad public relations. They would lose tens of millions of dollars a year as a result, and made it clear to the government that they could not bear this burden.

Because the government wanted the public to continue to be vaccinated and protected from communicable diseases, it agreed to assume the one in a million risk, and compensate people who claim to have been harmed by the vaccine. She even funds an expert lawyer for those people! [9]

The exact same thing is going to happen with the corona virus vaccine. It is almost impossible not to have side effects in a tiny fraction of the recipients - even if only in one in a million. Because of this, the government removes the responsibility from the vaccine companies (provided that the vaccines have been thoroughly tested in advance), and takes the responsibility upon itself.

As a side note: I wasn't just female in the one in a million statistic. Between 2006 and 2017, approximately 3.5 billion vaccine doses were given in the United States, and 4,153 people received compensation from the court for side effects. That is, the court determined that only one out of every 831,000 vaccinated suffered serious side effects[10].

Vaccines were developed too quickly

The vaccines were certainly developed quickly, and the FDA did round corners to approve them as soon as possible... but the corners that were rounded were not on the scientific side, but on the FDA's willingness to jump ahead with the vaccines bureaucratically. Instead of the results of the clinical trials waiting for the opinion of experts for many months, the FDA acted quickly to go over the results of the trials and make the decision about the safety of their use.

At this point it is worth noting that the clinical trials of Moderna and Pfizer included approximately 70,000 subjects, who were subject to medical monitoring for at least two months. Why two months? Because most of the side effects of vaccines appear up to the sixth week from the moment the vaccine is administered. During these two months, no serious side effects of the vaccine were discovered. At most, an allergic reaction appeared in 0.63 percent of the vaccine recipients... and in 0.51% of the placebo recipients (that is, an injection without a vaccine). So it is no wonder that doctors in the UK have been instructed not to provide the vaccine to people suffering from severe allergies.

But what about the long-term consequences?

Here the truth needs to be told: we don't know for sure that vaccines won't have long-term consequences. But the same can be said for every medicine ever given to humans and every food item. The reason we're still willing to eat tomatoes, for example, is that while we can't know for sure that they won't poison us, we have solid years of experience showing that so far they haven't really harmed the vast majority of diners.

As for the mRNA vaccines, there is plenty of previous research and clinical trials demonstrating that the vaccines are harmless, including four-year clinical trials[11] [12]. In fact, if anything, the mRNA vaccines demonstrated so far have not been very effective, which is the main reason why clinical trials have so far failed. However, in the clinical trials conducted for the two current vaccines, they succeeded above and beyond expectations - and were therefore approved.

Every vaccine has side effects

And now that we've said it: yes, there can always be side effects to a vaccine. Every vaccine can have side effects, with minimal frequency but present. But we did not see serious side effects in 70,000 people over two months, so if they really exist - they affect a very small part of the population. Maybe in 100,000 in XNUMX people. Compared to these statistics, the virus should scare us all much more, because the death rate from it is about XNUMX percent, and we are beginning to understand that its health consequences can be far-reaching even in young patients. The estimates at the moment are that ten percent of those infected (diagnosed positive for carrying the virus)[13] and 88 percent of those released from the hospitals[14] Continue to suffer from symptoms of the disease for weeks or months after recovery. And these are not trivial symptoms: a study in France showed that people who were discharged from hospital tended to suffer from memory loss (34 percent) and difficulty concentrating and sleeping (28% and 31%) for at least 110 days after discharge[15]. And if all this is not enough, it seems that the virus can damage the heart's activity even in patients without symptoms[16].

All this evidence, by the way, adds up to one simple point: we don't know this virus in depth yet. We have no idea if it does not continue to hide in the cells of our body and will break out at a later stage in a more severe way, as certain viruses do.

So what do we have here? A comparison of two possible evils. One is the virus, which we know for sure has severe and long-term effects on health with high frequency. And in contrast, the vaccine - which we know does not cause serious side effects for two months from the moment of administration, and that there is no reason for it to cause such side effects based on studies from the last ten years.

When this is the choice before us - it seems quite clear to me that it is better to get vaccinated as soon as possible.

More of the topic in Hayadan:

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/109/36/14604

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21428

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28457665/

[4] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(20)30348-5/fulltext

[5] https://www.urotoday.com/recent-abstracts/men-s-health/male-infertility/124144-male-fertility-and-the-covid-19-pandemic-systematic-review-of-the-literature-beyond-the-abstract.html

[6] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/pfizer-ceo-sold-stock-6-million-30-percent-compensation-vaccine-2020-11-1029798146

[7] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/11/coronavirus-vaccine-pfizer-ceo-sold-5point6-million-of-stock-as-company-announced-positive-data.html

[8] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-compensation-lawsuit.html

[9] https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/how-to-file/index.html

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Vaccine_Injury_Compensation_Program