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It's a shame it became such a weird political football, because the story of the mRNA COVID vaccine is absolutely in the "we are as gods" pantheon - the virus was sequenced, and 3 days later two separate labs had sequences for the vaccine. Phase 1 trials began within 3 months. To go from "weird novel pathogen" to "enough engineered vaccine candidate to start Phase 1 trials" is some legitimate sci-fi shit.

by onraglanroad3 hours ago|

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What felt Sci-Fi to me was when I saw this Stack Exchange question about what the A's at the end of the COVID virus sequence meant: https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/90607/does-the-g...

Edit: I found the wrong one; I think the one I remember was https://bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/questions/11227/why...

by Schiendelman4 hours ago|

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Thankfully the political football is simmering down - I think we have mRNA flu vaccines in progress now, and attempts to stop that failed.

by neonstatic4 hours ago|

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I was a conscious adult when all that was going down, so I can remind you, that on top of standard lunacy, there were legitimate concerns about safety of injecting something novel and untested to large parts of the population, genuine collusion to get as many people as possible injected, harassment that went both ways, and last but not least, there were many people who took one of the many vaccines and had life crushing, incurable side effects, not even mentioning the ones who died.

So the "political football" characterization is itself very political.

by Schiendelman3 hours ago|

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I've heard a lot of arguments that sounded, at first glance, like legitimate concerns. But I haven't seen any that weren't rooted in "People are telling me to be scared so my concern must be legitimate," or "I don't know how this works and it sounds new so I'm worried."

I think people with followings online got a ton of economic benefit from scaring people, the same as the rest of the news industry. Remember Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

The ONE thing I know of that survived study was the higher incidence of myocarditis in young men with Moderna, and provider guidance lists it as a potential side effect. However, the Novavax vaccine had the same myocarditis outcome without being mRNA, and the Pfizer mRNA didn't have that outcome.

It's very unlikely clinical trials would have exposed that issue, so even in hindsight, none of the concerns seem to have been legitimate.

by neonstatic2 hours ago|

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> I think people with followings online got a ton of economic benefit from scaring people

Yes, it was very upsetting at the time and unfortunately remains a constant. I guess one has to go through that at least once to recognize a grifter.

> so even in hindsight, none of the concerns seem to have been legitimate.

The point was not only that the vaccines were rushed, it was also that there was a tremendous amount of coercion to force people into taking them. There are a few countries that didn't do that (Sweden comes to mind) and they ended up not having a much worse outcome than anyone else. I think it was a very telling moment in modern history, because it exposed a lot of myths, e.g. the American myth of gun ownership to stand up to a tyrannical government was totally shredded. The government turned tyrannical re: vaccines and mandates, did the guns help?

by lesuorac1 hours ago|

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> There are a few countries that didn't do that (Sweden comes to mind) and they ended up not having a much worse outcome than anyone else.

I have no doubt Sweden did better than say sub-saharan africa. But it seems to me that only their neighbors are good comparison and they did worse than all of them.

Norway 1,050 deaths / million

Denmark 1,696 deaths / million

Finland 2,058 deaths / million

Sweden 2,812 deaths / million

> The government turned tyrannical re: vaccines and mandates, did the guns help?

I mean, the federal government had no mandate. So like were Floridians going to shoot up DeSantis because he didn't make a mandate? Or shoot up the other guy they elected, Trump (Biden not president until Jan 2021).

And then you don't really expect New Yorkers who elected Coumo to then shoot him up either?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

by Eisenstein3 hours ago|

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> So the "political football" characterization is itself very political.

According to your description it sounds completely accurate.

by creaktive10 hours ago|

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What’s even more shocking to me: one can “3D-print” downloaded genome, too! What a time to be alive.

by Terr_3 hours ago|

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You might enjoy: "Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine" (2020)

Being much smaller than a whole organism genome, the base-pairs are literally published in a WHO Word-document. :p

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...

by 9 hours ago|

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