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.
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.