It's hard to define when I'll get inspired to write a rant. Sometimes it's clueless tweets, an obnoxious meme, podcasts, something I hear in person or on TV--and sometimes it's an email. In this case, it's an investment-related email on the topic of vaccines. I'm not going to identify the writer (let's call him "JR" like the infamous villain JR Ewing of Dallas) or the vendor publishing him. That's not the point; it's not personal. He's not really saying anything new here; lots of other conservatives or libertarians have written or said similar things. So this, particularly the last paragraph, is the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.
Joe Biden has called for vaccine mandates for federal workers, even though the White House had repeatedly said there would be no federal vaccine mandates. Biden’s federal worker mandate covers 4 million federal employees and as many as 4 million federal contractors.
Universities, large companies like Facebook and Google are also imposing vaccine mandates. In addition, sports and entertainment venues are barring anyone who cannot prove they have been vaccinated. When you add it all up, we’re turning into a society of vaxxed and unvaxxed where the latter are denied the opportunity to live normal lives.
This is all over so-called vaccines that are really experimental gene modification treatments with dangerous side effects and limited efficacy since many that are vaccinated are now being infected again. It’s a Brave New World and it’s not going away soon.
Well, let's start with the fact it's not the kind of mandate JR would have you think. You can opt out of vaccination but you have to submit to testing. The fact of vaccine breakthroughs in a pandemic, particularly with the highly contagious Delta variant, and an employer's vested interest in a safe workplace easily justify such a policy. I myself am a contractor and have no issue with providing proof of vaccination.
In one manner of speaking, JR has a point: just over 10% of the American people have been diagnosed with an infection: is it fair for the 30% of unvaccinated adults to be treated as infected? Furthermore, given the vaccines aren't 100% effective and the fact of vaccine breakthroughs, how is exempting the vaccinated from testing fair? Well, consider the fact that vaccine breakthroughs amount to basically 0.3% of cases and near-zero hospitalizations and deaths across states.
JR really doesn't identify his sources. Reuters has identified a viral Facebook meme that it largely debunks here. One needs to recognize some of the elements of fear mongering here.
First, note that there are 3 different vaccines which are in use in the US: two of them mRNA-based (Pfizer and Moderna) and other (Johnson & Johnson) is a more traditional virus-based). (My RN little sister took the J&J "one-and-done" vaccine.) Now JR is mostly focused on fearmongering the relatively new mRNA technology, but note that the purported side effects can differ (recall the FDA's infamous pause on the alleged J&J vaccine blood clot side effect).
"Dangerous side effects": first, there are some routine side effects like pain/redness/swelling at the injection site, headaches, chills, tiredness, etc. I myself felt lethargic the day after my second Pfizer vaccine shot. But these are typically very short-lived. JR is probably referencing things like anaphylaxis, thrombosis, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, and (probably most specifically) myocarditis or pericarditis (principally associated with young men). The key thing to realize is these are extremely rare (like up to dozens or hundreds out of millions of vaccine patients), some may be related to vaccine shots in general, and others may be coincidental with but not caused by vaccine administration. One thing one must be aware of is physical symptoms may reflect multiple conditions, only one of which may be a vaccine event. For example, some elderly people might die of natural causes with or without COVID-19 or a relevant vaccine. These data may well be gathered or recorded for completeness purposes, but other evidence may be required to determine the real cause of death.
"Limited efficacy since many that are vaccinated are now being infected again". First of all, efficacy differs. For J&J, it's about 66% globally and the mRNA vaccines about 95%. Note no vaccine promises 100% efficacy or effectiveness. And effectiveness is primarily based on reducing the need for medical intervention or morality. And if you look at the statistics for the 70% of American adults partially or fully vaccinated, you'll see they account for low single digits of hospitalized COVID patients and nearly no fatalities. By any objective standard, the vaccines are a game changer, accounting for much of the rapid drop of pandemic casualties. JR seems to be making reference to a mass breakout on Provincetown, MA over the July 4 weekend, where up to 75% of infected cases were fully vaccinated, i.e., vaccine breakthroughs. This has a lot to do with the highly contagious Delta variant. (Note this is comparable to the percentage of vaccinated people in MA.) JR is implying that the vaccines are not effective against the Delta variant:
A recent study from the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences has also found that “viral loads in Delta infections are [approximately] 1,000 times higher” than those caused by previous SARS-CoV-2 variants.
According to an analysis carried out by Public Health England, two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine appeared to be about 88 percent effective against symptomatic disease and 96 percent effective against hospitalization with the Delta variant. The same study suggested that the vaccine was approximately 80 percent effective against preventing infection from the Delta variant.
As for the claim that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are "experimental gene modification treatments":
Gene therapy implies the use of DNA which stays in the body and can incorporate into chromosomes. RNA doesn’t do that. The RNA in the vaccines wouldn’t be converted into DNA because the enzymes capable of doing that aren’t present. Moreover, the RNA is not stable enough to hang around and is rapidly degraded.
This is not a science blog, but the basic concept of a cell includes the nucleus, which contains our DNA, and the liquid-based cytoplasm. mRNA are like scripts the cell uses to produce proteins in the cytoplasm, most of which are natural in origin and are short-lived (3 days or so). Basically the vaccines work by injecting temporary scripts to generate the COVID-19-like surface spike proteins which are used to train our immune system to fight against the COVID-19 virus, which basically tries to multiply in a human host using a similar mechanism. The idea a vaccine mRNA script can go rogue and invade the nucleus of a cell without the chemical support of enzymes is untenable. For the interested reader, there are a number of good posts on the web which probably do a better job of explaining specifics, e.g., here and here.
