My brother's wife is helping me to understand this, but it's going over my head. She doesn't work in medicine, but she is a forensic anthropologist, and understand topics relating to DNA/RNA/mRNA, cell chemistry, and other things related.
I have no problem admitting that I simply don't understand this topic.
But I do understand that in general, we don't use 8-month-old medicines for once-in-a-century [wimpy] viruses. That's not how it works.
What's the standard time for a vaccine to go from the research phase, through the development phase and early testing, all the way to public implementation/use? 10 years? 15+ years?
Hey Matt,
It's not the easiest information to understand. Believe it or not, most doctors don't understand this too well unless they are actual virologists, immunologists or possibly oncologists. I am no doctor. I was pre-med a very long time ago before going into business school, so I did take every possible pre-med science and so I do appreciate medical literature and have a subscription to UpToDate (The go-to for pretty much all doctors in the USA when in clinical practice) + also read PubMed (NIH) studies all the time for fun. That said, I have been reading actual medical literature on the use of an mRNA vaccines (not many available to be frank) and pretty much ALL of the available studies say that while the preliminary data looks to be very promising, we have no actual long term data to support the idea that this method for vaccination is safe.
The most telling of the medical literature that I managed to find was this article (which is a medical literature found within the NIH, in other words legit medical literature):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7218962/The excerpt within that piece of literature that is leading me to further investigate the risks behind using an mRNA vaccine is as follows:
"Although these beneficial features of mRNA vaccines provide some hope for the development of the first clinically applicable SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine, recent reports regarding rare cases of moderate or severe reactions for different mRNA vaccines have raised concerns about safety and immunogenicity, including in the primary outcome findings of the phase I trial on mRNA-1273 [20,48].
Therefore, it is important to clearly understand the potential risks of this type of mRNA-based vaccine, which include local and systemic inflammatory responses, the biodistribution and persistence of the induced immunogen expression, possible development of autoreactive antibodies and toxic effects of any non-native nucleotides and delivery system components [48–50]."
Again, it is my sincere hope that this turns out to be a success. If it does, it could mean that we finally figure out cures for cancers, HIV, autoimmune disorders and many other medical diseases. The flip side is that if this novel science backfires, it could be disastrous.
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