Scientist Behind COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Says Her Team's Next Target Is Cancer (www.cbc.ca) 109
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: The scientist who won the race to deliver the first widely used coronavirus vaccine says people can rest assured the shots are safe, and that the technology behind it will soon be used to fight another global scourge -- cancer. Ozlem Tureci, who founded the German company BioNTech with her husband, Ugur Sahin, was working on a way to harness the body's immune system to tackle tumors when they learned last year of an unknown virus infecting people in China. Over breakfast, the couple decided to apply the technology they'd been researching for two decades to the new threat.
Britain authorized BioNTech's mRNA vaccine for use in December, followed a week later by Canada. Dozens of other countries, including the U.S., have followed suit and tens of millions of people worldwide have since received the shot developed together with U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. [...] As BioNTech's profile has grown during the pandemic, so has its value, adding much-needed funds the company will be able to use to pursue its original goal of developing a new tool against cancer. The vaccine made by BioNTech-Pfizer and U.S. rival Moderna uses messenger RNA, or mRNA, to carry instructions into the human body for making proteins that prime it to attack a specific virus. The same principle can be applied to get the immune system to take on tumors.
"We have several different cancer vaccines based on mRNA," said Tureci. Asked when such a therapy might be available, Tureci said "that's very difficult to predict in innovative development. But we expect that within only a couple of years, we will also have our vaccines [against] cancer at a place where we can offer them to people." For now, Tureci and Sahin are trying to ensure the vaccines governments have ordered are delivered and that the shots respond effectively to any new mutation in the virus.
Britain authorized BioNTech's mRNA vaccine for use in December, followed a week later by Canada. Dozens of other countries, including the U.S., have followed suit and tens of millions of people worldwide have since received the shot developed together with U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. [...] As BioNTech's profile has grown during the pandemic, so has its value, adding much-needed funds the company will be able to use to pursue its original goal of developing a new tool against cancer. The vaccine made by BioNTech-Pfizer and U.S. rival Moderna uses messenger RNA, or mRNA, to carry instructions into the human body for making proteins that prime it to attack a specific virus. The same principle can be applied to get the immune system to take on tumors.
"We have several different cancer vaccines based on mRNA," said Tureci. Asked when such a therapy might be available, Tureci said "that's very difficult to predict in innovative development. But we expect that within only a couple of years, we will also have our vaccines [against] cancer at a place where we can offer them to people." For now, Tureci and Sahin are trying to ensure the vaccines governments have ordered are delivered and that the shots respond effectively to any new mutation in the virus.
Good luck with that (Score:1)
Re: Good luck with that (Score:4, Funny)
I'm sure they know this.
Re: Good luck with that (Score:5, Funny)
Now they do... because they read slashdot comments.
mRNA was always about Cancer (Score:2)
That was the target of all the research. The amazing techniques that allow them to get a bit of modified RNA into a cell and have it produce a protein of choice.
Then, when Covid-19 unexpectedly came along, they just applied that to the production of the spike protein.
The vaccine is the icing on the cake. The cake was baked for the much more difficult problem of cancer.
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Congratulations on summarizing the summary (apparently without reading it).
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Last time I checked covid is still one of the main problem of the world and cancer too. I'm not sure anything is baked yet.
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Thats kind of the whole point of these things.
If there was only one sort of cancer thats behind all the death and misery of that wretched disease, we probably would have solved it in the 1960s, 1980s at the latest.
The problem of course is that cancer is made out of people. its our own cells going haywire , and usually through fairly unique mutations.
And so thats where the new wave of therapies focuses, attenuating cancers based on individualized therapies. Looking at the specific genetic changes, building c
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Exactly. They can produce, in theory, a vaccine that is tailored to YOUR specific cancer if they can find a unique signature to target.
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No, like COVID, it's a $$kerchingggg$$ thing, researcher is grabbing for the big grants, why this is news I don't know.
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BioNTech does not realy get "grands".
Why that is news to you, I don't know.
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So does the FDA think this mRNA tech is dangerous or what's the deal?
No, it means that the FDA had better speed up its approval cycle to match the faster pace of today's testing protocols. This will be of immediate importance if we have to get booster shots out quickly to heal with Covid variants.
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The FDA moves very slowly, it's one of the reasons new medications are so expensive to develop for the US market.
Maybe. (Score:2)
It occurs to be that it may be a better idea to go after an array of highly prevalent viruses like Human papillomavirus (HPV) and other soft targets before taking on something as diverse as cancer. However, it may merely be a selfish decision in that if she lives long enough then she is certain to develop cancer. In all cases, I hope she succeeds and I'm glad she isn't a super-villain.
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It occurs to be that it may be a better idea to go after an array of highly prevalent viruses like Human papillomavirus (HPV) and other soft targets before taking on something as diverse as cancer. However, it may merely be a selfish decision in that if she lives long enough then she is certain to develop cancer. In all cases, I hope she succeeds and I'm glad she isn't a super-villain.
There is already a vaccine for HPV, which frequently leads to various cancers. It is best given in the early teens, so it is up to parents to decide if their kids get it or not.
It is as close to the perfect example of Darwinism as we have in the vaccine world.
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There is already a vaccine for HPV
There are more than 150 types/strains of HPV while the current vaccine protects only against nine types (HPV types 6, 11, 16, 18, 31, 33, 45, 52, and 58). There is still much work to be done to eliminate HPV.
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Yes, there are many others, but diminishing returns make it unlikely there will be a drive to target those.
Unless there's some targetable conserved region on some HPV antigen that is common to the family.
Virus surface proteins generally have some section that doesn't change much because it's the part that does the work and has to be approximately the way it is to do its job, while the structural bulk of it gets to change a lot to provide a moving target to the immune system, letting variants infect hosts wh
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The Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) has strong causative and correlation associations with a variety of cancers. Disregarding the lunatic fringe of anti-vaxxers and "my teenage daughter will never have sex except with her one and only husband" god-squaddies, I've heard of no claims that the HPV vaccine has a significant causative association with any cancer.
I know what you mean, but it could have been read in the wrong
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Re: Maybe. (Score:2)
You obviously know nothing about mRNA vaccines. Cancer is the original target, and in fact it is highly suitable for cancer. The mRNA vaccine is made specific to an individuals cancer. A persons cancer genome is decoded (sequenced), and the vaccine is generated based on that.
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You obviously know nothing about mRNA vaccines.
Well, you're not wrong.
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Re: Maybe. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a scientist, I'm going to try to answer this in the spirit that you're actually interested and not just another person who cares about the action of asking the questions more than learning the answers. Your questions are all reasonable!
How does the mRNA get into the cellular enzymes where it can actually do something?
It gets into the cell by being packaged in a special liposome shell. In scientific literature, we typically call the naturally occurring versions of these shells vesicles. What we've done with mRNA vaccines is we have borrowed the system by which our cells communicate mRNA with each other and we're sending our own manufactured mRNA messages. mRNA, by the way, stands for messenger RNA. It's a message. Although most mRNA stays in the cell that originated it, a lot of mRNA is moving from cell to cell in your body right now. You may be reading about links to mRNA and cancer. We learned about using vesicles to transfer external mRNA into cells in large part by studying cancer, but the messaging system is there and working fine in normal healthy cells as well. A lot of mRNA vaccine technology was developed as a prototype cancer therapy, and quickly repurposed for covid before any cancer therapy was finished.
This is like putting DVDs on top of your laptop and expecting them to be installed somehow.
Rather, this is like discovering that the DVD player manufacturers built a robot to test their hardware by inserting DVDs and using that robot to insert DVDs for us so that we don't have to do it by hand.
Plus, what is the eventual disposition of the mRNA?
You are right now producing a lot of mRNA. Just like your naturally produced mRNA, injected mRNA will be degraded over time by the cells that use it (or may be destroyed by your immune system while the vaccine trains your immune system to attack viral proteins). The liposome that carries the mRNA falls apart quickly - a few hours. It is that liposome shell that necessitates the extreme storage conditions for the vaccine. The mRNA itself has a lifetime of a few days.
Is it going to be floating around in your system for decades like the cancer-causing Simian virus No.40 that was spread to millions thanks to US polio vaccines?
An interesting question. This is a real thing that happened: a virus infected the polio vaccine developed by Salk and that virus led to a significant global increase in cancer rates. In that case, the vaccine contained an active virus as a contaminant that replicated inside people, it wasn't intended to be there. It would be dishonest to suggest that such a mistake could never happen again, it could. In this case, the mRNA vaccines are synthetic. That means that they're not the result of growing anything (like almost all past vaccines), they are manufactured via a chemical process. This should drastically reduce the opportunity for any biological organism or virus to infect and contaminate the vaccine. In addition, our ability to test for infecting viruses is MUCH better today than it was 70 years ago.
Re: Maybe. (Score:1)
Browsing Slashdot today was worth it for this comment alone.
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No, mRNA is messenger RNA. There's nothing spooky here, just decades of quiet research culminating in an effective treatment.
Methylation is something that happens to DNA or RNA naturally to help regulate expression (use by the cell) of the DNA or RNA. It's a natural process.
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Noting that technically they are not using RNA of any description because the Uracil has been replaced by 1 methyl-3'-pseudouridylyl which does not occur in nature. Note there is a missing hyphen after the 1 due to the lameness filter thinking I am posting ASCII art, for a "news for nerds" website that is particularly crap.
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An interesting question. This is a real thing that happened: a virus infected the polio vaccine developed by Salk and that virus led to a significant global increase in cancer rates.
This review https://onlinelibrary.wiley.co... [wiley.com] from 2006 concludes "In summary, the most recent evidence does not support the notion that SV40 contributed to the development of human cancers." Or is there newer evidence?
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I think the factcheck.org link you posted is quite good. I'm a scientist, but I'm not an epidemiologist. That said, I would communicate very differently than the way the National Academy did, when presented with the same data.
In a case like this, making a definitive statement that could reasonably interpreted by a non-scientist as "there's no link at all" or "it didn't happen" is ethically wrong. At a scientific conference, in front of an expert group of people, I would absolutely use your language, beca
Re: Maybe. (Score:4, Informative)
Haha if you can get RNA to survive 2 days, let alone a decade, just floating around in the blood that's Nobel prize. RNA is either cut up by enzymes or falls apart very easily. That's why they had to invent ways to make it stick around in a cell long enough to be useful as a vaccine. That's why your cells use DNA, not RNA to store the genome. Also the mRNA vaccine doesn't need to "get into the cellular enzymes" .. it needs to get into the cell. It is carried there in a lipid particle (think of it like a cage) that helps it get inside the cell where it can do its thing.
The SV40 contamination incident of polio vaccines happened literally 60 years ago.
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mRNA vaccines are new only because the technology to make them came together only around 5 years ago. mRNA itself was resear
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mRNA vaccines are new only because the technology to make them came together only around 5 years ago.
Not really.
The German "inventors" got a Nobel Prize for it around 1975.
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Well, m stands for messenger.
A huge deal of ordinary body functions is based on mRNA.
The fragments are so small that they can enter a body cell. There they trigger production of antigens (the things that the immune system is looking for and makes fitting anti bodies against).
After a few days that mRNA is gone, probably after a few hours.
Normally: you learn that in biology, if you do not have a biology class that is 30 years outdated.
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The articel or summary is very badly written.
The original goal of BioNTech was: an anti corona vaccine. That is why the company got founded and why they were prepared to develop a vaccine against this particular variant so quickly: they already had 15 years research behind their back. Of course the idea to use mRNA to fight "cancer" was already prevalent 20 years ago.
However they will tackle "some cancer" and not all kinds of cancer.
Bottom line they aim to get approval for new approaches in therapy, not rea
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The articel or summary is very badly written.
The original goal of BioNTech was: an anti corona vaccine. That is why the company got founded and why they were prepared to develop a vaccine against this particular variant so quickly: they already had 15 years research behind their back.
According to BioNTech's SEC filing: [sec.report]
On BioNTech's "Our Vision" [biontech.de] website page, the first text you come across is:
On BioNTech's "Science" [biontech.de] website page, the first text you come across is:
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Sorry, borked the link for "On BioNTech's "Science" [biontech.de] website page". Should be
https://biontech.de/science/individualized-cancer-medicine
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My evidence is their "story in Germany" :D
But I was wondering already if they try to change it depending on who is asking.
Not super important, point is they are one of the first in Europe who work on mRNA based medical procedures to boost the immune system.
I can't find anything that says BioNTech was even looking at coronaviruses when it was founded. What is your evidence that "The original goal of BioNTech was: an anti corona vaccine"?
That is what was in the news about a year ago.
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But I was wondering already if they try to change it depending on who is asking.
Here [biontech.de] is the BioNTech website section on COVID-19. Funny, I was wondering why a company whose original goal was "anti corona vaccines" makes absolutely no mention of it anywhere in their COVID section. Or anywhere else on their site that I can find.
I would expect a company that was founded expressly for producing corona vaccines, who now has such a vaccine on the market, would be shouting to the rooftops about their long experience in that specific area. But they aren't. Are you really asking people t
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would be shouting to the rooftops about their long experience in that specific area.
As I said: that is what they did last year.
The founders told that in an interview.
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As I said: that is what they did last year.
The founders told that in an interview.
LOL!
As I said: I'm looking for something besides "take my word for it".
Your claim is "The original goal of BioNTech was: an anti corona vaccine." Apparently, you expect people to believe that a company founded by pure cancer researchers was created to focus on coronaviruses instead of cancer. I find that claim rather extraordinary. Do you know what extraordinary claims require? [wikipedia.org] (hint: they require something you haven't provided)
Given the multiple published statements from BioNTech itself that directl
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Sorry, no idea about what you want to argue.
When the two founders got interviewed when a Covd-19 vaccine was on the horizon, they told the reporter "beacause of SARS and MERS we wanted to make a company focusing on Corona vaccines" Based on mRNA and in the end tackle cancer.
What you want to argue is beyond me.
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WTF?
You've got to be kidding me. Is this some kind of joke? Or a pathetic troll?
You've made over a dozen comments in other discussions since my reply over a fucking day ago, and now you come back here with more of the same idiotic bullshit? Do you understand what it means to be "a day late and a dollar short"? Are you trying to get your fucking picture published next to the definition of that idiom?
My friend, I don't want to argue ANYTHING with you. I've made my points crystal clear. If you're unab
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Lol, why so angry? Why so ranting?
As I'm male, I hardly can be cunt.
And the one who lost something is you, as the discussion/story is obviously not close.
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Lol, why so angry? Why so ranting?
I don't suffer fools gladly. On this site, I generally allow idiots like you 2-3 stupid replies before becoming annoyed. You surpassed my limit for "comments that repeat the same ludicrous shit over and over and over" some time ago.
Looking at your posting history, my limit looks quite a bit more generous than yours. Here's you calling someone stupid, a moron, and an [slashdot.org]
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You seem blissfully unaware (i hope) of the pain cancer causes and the fact that it affects many younger people too. We aren't going to run out of ways to die. Also, "population overgrowth" is a situation we as a species are nowhere near threatened by. And in places where it's a problem it is purely an economic problem that is solvable by resource management, better family planning, improved energy production (fusion energy for example), and space travel.
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Solved by... space travel? How, by smacking orbital masses into populated centers?
If you think we're ever going to ship enough people off the planet to 'somewhere else' to halt population growth, you have a stunning lack of understanding of the kind of numbers we're talking about and how expensive it is to ship mass off-planet.
And that's assuming we managed to learn how to survive long term in space tomorrow, which we're most certainly not going to do.
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The cost of launching a person into space with re-usable rockets 10 years from now would be about $20,000 (Elon Musk's Starship -- 100 passengers for $2 million --- $1 million for fuel, $1 million for non-fuel operating costs). Reference: https://www.space.com/spacex-s... [space.com] So long term, living in space is a viable possibility .. 75 to 200 years from now there will 100s of SpaceX style re-usable rockets. And colonies in space.
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Currently Earth produces a net growth of 81 million people per year.
Good luck.
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Your Aspergers is showing
I hope... (Score:2)
I sure hope she didn't make any "racist" tweets when she was 17.
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I sure hope she didn't make any "racist" tweets when she was 17.
Does it matter? The whacko left will find something to complain about. If all else fails, make stuff up. Doesn't seem to matter if it's true or not. Just repeat the lie enough time and sheep will believe it.
Cancer (Score:1)
What a lot of people don't realize is Cancer is a catch all. There are different types of breast cancer for example. They are different than lung cancer. I happen to have experience in this area. What they can do today is a lot more than just 5 years ago. My wife had a cancer that if she came down with it in the 1980s she wouldn't be here. So far over 6 years. I have a sister that was in an old folks retirement condo. She said there are a lot of people living there with stage 4 cancer. They live for years l
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Yeah, I'm hoping that - whenever I'm eligible - I get to have one of the mRNA vaccines.
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Is there someone we should be contacting to have your medications adjusted? You seem to be having a word salad stroke.
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It's said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing-- there re so many inaccuracies and incoherencies in your post, it should be classified as a weapon of mass disinformation.
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I love people that come on here and spout nonsense that is directly contradicted by actual research and real life study.
You don't have any god damn clue what the "effective rate" for these vaccines even means, nor do you have any idea historically what the effective rate for vaccines has been for diseases all but eradicated.
Would you bitch about the polio vaccine because it was only 90% effective after two shots? Oh wait, polio basically doesn't exist any more. Or how about the measles vaccine that is onl
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Here in the US (red state) there are lots of people refusing any of the COVID vaccines, including the mRNA ones. Last week, I had an otherwise bright member of this community tell me he wasn't getting any vaccine that "Bill Gates or George Soros" had anything to do with. I knew he was a Republican, but until then I did not know that he was deluded.
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Sadly, the people I've heard express this view are mostly basing it on brand loyalty...
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Loyalty to the brand that gave us carcinogenic talcum powder. Interesting.
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Re:OK, new rule (Score:5, Interesting)
> I have heard of people refusing Astrazenica, however.
I too have heard of people who are bad at assessing risk. 37 reactions in 20 million vaccinations? Yet those same deniers will hop into a car for a pleasant drive no problem, despite the averages saying they have a 5x better chance at getting into an injury causing accident than having that adverse reaction.
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Re:OK, new rule (Score:5, Informative)
It is and isn't related. The FDA never got around to actually approving the AZ vaccine, but Health Canada and the corresponding agency in Mexico have, so the US is going to "lend" us their stockpile of AZ that they legally cannot yet use, with the provisio that we replace it from additional shipments/purchases when we get them later. Canada is lagging but then again that's what happens when you don't have any domestic vaccine production capacity because the Harper Government years ago cut all the funding that would have kept those facilities operational and removed incentives that kept other drugmakers from retaining their capacity in Canada. Boy those Conservatives sure are S-M-R-T smart...
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Seems like a good use of a stockpiled drug that hasn't been approved for use in the US yet. Helps neighbors, and helps the US by making sure there is less transmission of disease in countries with long borders shared by the US. And before anyone cries about "we should be vaccinating our own citizens first!" - it's a loan. If the AZ vaccine is approved by the FDA, these countries owe us the doses they receive at some later point out of the shipments they get in the future.
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despite the averages saying they have a 5x better chance at getting into an injury causing accident than having that adverse reaction.
And both things have nothing to do with each other.
So what is your point?
You get the vaccine tomorrow, you drive there with your car, and you drive home with your car. ...
You are the same idiot like the idiots you complain about
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Are you serious? A recent Associated Press poll reports that 1 out of 3 Americans say they either probably or definitely won't get vaccinated. Some people believe it's a campaign to get everyone microchipped as part of an evil government mind-control plan. Others claim "It hasn't been tested!!" despite all the evidence to the contrary. I personally know several people I used to consider quite smart and thoughtful who refuse to be vaccinated for reasons they can't clearly enumerate.
I suspect that some - hope
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There has been no long-term safety testing.
No proof that people won't do just fine for the next 5-10 years and then suddenly come down with autoimmune disorders or worse.
If others want to take the chance, fine, but I won't. What I will do instead is to keep my immune system as strong and healthy as possible.
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Fully vaxed with Moderna here, and so is everyone else I know (OK, other old people) in this very red state. I for one am proud to be be part of the messenger RNA experiment. No side effects whatever.
Re: OK, new rule (Score:1)
You people are so stupid it hurts my head.
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Oh, so we should just ban certain classes of technology because Hollywood made a movie about how it went badly? Do you also think we should stop all progress on computing power and AI? Have non of yah'all seen "Terminator" or "Wargames" ?
As it turns out, we do clinical testing for a reason, and it has nothing to do with bad movies.
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Re: I will gladly get the vaccine (Score:2)
Every medical intervention carries a risk. Itâ(TM)s balancing the overall benefit with the risk. It would become impossible to treat any medical condition if the bar was that no person can have side effects. People are allergic to peanuts, should allergic people get to sue peanut sellers when they get sick from eating peanuts. A few people might suffer reactions to the vaccine, but more lives will be saved overall.
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