I don’t have the expertise or training to evaluate detailed medical claims myself. I wasn’t even able to find sources for the blood-brain-barrier thing (neither claims nor rebuttals), except for this thread on askreddit which I was too exhausted to peruse. In any case, at this point the discussion is not about medicine but about epistemology.
I have not yet been convinced that the vaccine causes brain damage. I think that at the very least, that argument requires sources for both a link between mRNA vaccines and an inflamed brain, and for the claim that this is an exceptional occurence / that this is something worse than what happens in e.g. an average fever.
I guess my prior is that bodies are pretty robust, and that most contrarian claims are wrong. Identifying correct contrarians is hard.
My god-of-the-gaps comment was directed at what I perceived as a complex hypothesis which looked like it was (over?)fitted to the available evidence. In such a situation, one can’t falsify the hypothesis without new evidence, even though one figures there should be plenty evidence regarding most conceivable side effects by now.
I do agree about the issues with doctors, though. I have had several suboptimal encounters with the medical system, which have left me rather unimpressed with medical care (diagnosis in particular). I have an essay draft on this topic, but it’s going to be a long while until I get to it.
The EMA is the EU equivalent of the FDA. When they approved the drug the wrote a report indicating all the risk related information about the COVID-19 Vaccine from Moderna.
In it they say:
Low levels of mRNA could be detected in all examined tissues except the kidney. This included heart, lung, testis and also brain tissues, indicating that the mRNA/LNP platform crossed the blood/brain barrier
The fact that your sources don’t tell you about this tells you how much they are interested in having a serious discussion about side-effects.
Generally, there are a lot of possible side-effects a drug could potentially have.
There are many situations where people claim to know more then they actually know for political reasons. A claim like “I know that the mRNA that’s found in the brain produces significant problems” is one that needs a lot more evidence then one that says “It possible that this happens but we don’t know”.
You have presented evidence that the mRNA vaccines “cause brain damage” to, let’s say, the same extent as drinking a glass of wine “causes brain damage”. That is, you can trace a sequence of events likely to kill at least one brain cell.
You haven’t shown any evidence that mRNA vaccines do anywhere near enough damage with anywhere near enough probability to be cause for concern.
The fact that the EMA report says what it does but doesn’t say anything at all like “the risk of brain damage is a downside to using these vaccines” seems to me to indicate that the people who wrote that report don’t think that what they found about small numbers of lipid nanoparticles crossing the blood/brain barrier is cause for concern. This means that either they don’t think brain damage would be a problem (which seems … unlikely), or else they don’t think the danger is substantial enough to be worth worrying about.
The comments from user yesitsnicholas in the Reddit thread linked above by MondSemmel seem to be (1) written by someone who actually knows something about this stuff, and (2) very confident that there’s no danger to speak of.
Now, whether or not yesitsnicholas is an expert, I am not, and maybe I’m failing to recognize the dangers here. I’m willing to be persuaded. Do you have any evidence that goes beyond “look, at least one lipid nanoparticle will get into the brain and that may lead to the death of at least one brain cell”?
I am not disagreeing with the narrower point that what we know at present about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines—or, in fact, pretty much any drugs—or in fact, pretty much anything at all—is not enough to be very confident that there aren’t very small adverse effects. Or indeed very small beneficial effects; we wouldn’t have noticed if getting the Pfizer vaccine raises your IQ by one point, either. Identifying very small effects is difficult.
But you go further and say e.g. that there was no point in trying novel approaches (with, therefore, more scope for wholly unsuspected adverse consequences) like mRNA vaccines. But available evidence suggests that the mRNA vaccines happen to be the most effective against COVID-19. A policy for which we can see with hindsight that it would have stopped us finding the most effective vaccines is, it seems to me, not obviously correct. “But for all we know Novavax’s vaccine is just as good as the mRNA ones”, I hear you say. Maybe it is. But it’s still in trials and the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been widely available and widely used for months.
We can calculate the upper bound of risk from the document you provided. Moderna says 2% of plasma level of LNP ends up in the brain. There are 10 billion LNP in each shot of Moderna vaccine and at most 10% goes into general circulation unless nurse made a mistake and put it in your vein. So, 2% of one billion is 20 million LNP, that is the maximum that will end up in a person’s brain following a vaccine shot. So, maximum 20 million brain cells are at stake after each shot. Not all of them will be neurons.
I don’t have the expertise or training to evaluate detailed medical claims myself. I wasn’t even able to find sources for the blood-brain-barrier thing (neither claims nor rebuttals), except for this thread on askreddit which I was too exhausted to peruse. In any case, at this point the discussion is not about medicine but about epistemology.
I have not yet been convinced that the vaccine causes brain damage. I think that at the very least, that argument requires sources for both a link between mRNA vaccines and an inflamed brain, and for the claim that this is an exceptional occurence / that this is something worse than what happens in e.g. an average fever.
I guess my prior is that bodies are pretty robust, and that most contrarian claims are wrong. Identifying correct contrarians is hard.
My god-of-the-gaps comment was directed at what I perceived as a complex hypothesis which looked like it was (over?)fitted to the available evidence. In such a situation, one can’t falsify the hypothesis without new evidence, even though one figures there should be plenty evidence regarding most conceivable side effects by now.
I do agree about the issues with doctors, though. I have had several suboptimal encounters with the medical system, which have left me rather unimpressed with medical care (diagnosis in particular). I have an essay draft on this topic, but it’s going to be a long while until I get to it.
The EMA is the EU equivalent of the FDA. When they approved the drug the wrote a report indicating all the risk related information about the COVID-19 Vaccine from Moderna.
In it they say:
The fact that your sources don’t tell you about this tells you how much they are interested in having a serious discussion about side-effects.
Generally, there are a lot of possible side-effects a drug could potentially have.
There are many situations where people claim to know more then they actually know for political reasons. A claim like “I know that the mRNA that’s found in the brain produces significant problems” is one that needs a lot more evidence then one that says “It possible that this happens but we don’t know”.
You have presented evidence that the mRNA vaccines “cause brain damage” to, let’s say, the same extent as drinking a glass of wine “causes brain damage”. That is, you can trace a sequence of events likely to kill at least one brain cell.
You haven’t shown any evidence that mRNA vaccines do anywhere near enough damage with anywhere near enough probability to be cause for concern.
The fact that the EMA report says what it does but doesn’t say anything at all like “the risk of brain damage is a downside to using these vaccines” seems to me to indicate that the people who wrote that report don’t think that what they found about small numbers of lipid nanoparticles crossing the blood/brain barrier is cause for concern. This means that either they don’t think brain damage would be a problem (which seems … unlikely), or else they don’t think the danger is substantial enough to be worth worrying about.
The comments from user yesitsnicholas in the Reddit thread linked above by MondSemmel seem to be (1) written by someone who actually knows something about this stuff, and (2) very confident that there’s no danger to speak of.
Now, whether or not yesitsnicholas is an expert, I am not, and maybe I’m failing to recognize the dangers here. I’m willing to be persuaded. Do you have any evidence that goes beyond “look, at least one lipid nanoparticle will get into the brain and that may lead to the death of at least one brain cell”?
I am not disagreeing with the narrower point that what we know at present about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines—or, in fact, pretty much any drugs—or in fact, pretty much anything at all—is not enough to be very confident that there aren’t very small adverse effects. Or indeed very small beneficial effects; we wouldn’t have noticed if getting the Pfizer vaccine raises your IQ by one point, either. Identifying very small effects is difficult.
But you go further and say e.g. that there was no point in trying novel approaches (with, therefore, more scope for wholly unsuspected adverse consequences) like mRNA vaccines. But available evidence suggests that the mRNA vaccines happen to be the most effective against COVID-19. A policy for which we can see with hindsight that it would have stopped us finding the most effective vaccines is, it seems to me, not obviously correct. “But for all we know Novavax’s vaccine is just as good as the mRNA ones”, I hear you say. Maybe it is. But it’s still in trials and the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been widely available and widely used for months.
We can calculate the upper bound of risk from the document you provided. Moderna says 2% of plasma level of LNP ends up in the brain. There are 10 billion LNP in each shot of Moderna vaccine and at most 10% goes into general circulation unless nurse made a mistake and put it in your vein. So, 2% of one billion is 20 million LNP, that is the maximum that will end up in a person’s brain following a vaccine shot. So, maximum 20 million brain cells are at stake after each shot. Not all of them will be neurons.