Still not safe, still not effective.

[SpeedRacerXXX]

Originally Posted by texassapper

Pfizer disagrees with you.
From their own Terms for sales....

That is a standard warning that comes with every vaccine, not just the Covid vaccine. Nothing Pfizer says about their Covid shot indicates it is unsafe, it is just a CYA statement. All negative reactions to vaccines in the past occured very soon after the shot is given.

New COVID-19 Vaccine Warnings Don’t Mean It’s Unsafe – They Mean the System to Report Side Effects Is Working

https://www.govexec.com/oversight/20...orking/183858/

[SpeedRacerXXX]

Originally Posted by Tiny

Thanks for posting on this Dilbert.

I'm not getting much from the Dutch paper about IgG4 antibodies, because I don't have the background to understand it.

This one however, including its long list of references relative to auto-immune diseases and the COVID vaccines, is easier to understand does give some cause for concern:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10222767/

If they're right, negative outcomes from vaccination would mostly affect people who are genetically susceptible, have immune deficiencies, or comorbidities. But that's also the group that's supposed to receive the most benefit from the vaccines. Apparently not only the vaccines but also infection with COVID-19, the disease, may lead to higher IgG4 production. You're damned if you do get the vaccine and you're damned if you don't.

It will be interesting to see how this develops. Back a couple of years ago, vaccination might reduce your chances of severe disease from COVID by 80% or more. Now that's lower. I thought the big reason was because everyone's now had the disease and/or the vaccines, so we all have at least some immunity. But maybe this has something to do with it too.

I'm probably going to continue to do whatever the CDC and mainstream science and medicine recommend. If indeed the risks of the vaccines appear to outweigh the benefits, they'll let us know, although admittedly not as fast as we'd like.

I'm calling bull shit on the Bertha Madras tweet about Paxlovid. I've had too many friends swear by it. One has had COVID three times, the first back in October, 2020, when he actually thought he might die. Both times he got COVID since then, he took Paxlovid. And both times he got a lot better overnight. From what I understand the only downside is it tastes like shit.

Articles like that are always interesting to read. Might be some truth to it but I'll wait and see. I agree with you on being aware of advice from the CDC and following it, but anti-vaxxers will disregard information from such sources, not trusting any government related organization.

[offshoredrilling]

is it still EUA ????

[Tiny]

Originally Posted by SpeedRacerXXX

Articles like that are always interesting to read. Might be some truth to it but I'll wait and see. I agree with you on being aware of advice from the CDC and following it, but anti-vaxxers will disregard information from such sources, not trusting any government related organization.

I've done some more reading. Autoimmune disease is in rare instances associated with COVID, both the disease and the vaccine. A woman I went to high school actually was one of the few who probably died of an autoimmune disease caused by the vaccine, or that's what her doctors thought anyway.

Anyway, I think the risk described in Dilbert's article by Berenson, and more so in Uversky et al's paper (my link), is overstated. Uversky says that countries where a higher % of the population is vaccinated have seen a bigger increase in autoimmune disease. That sounds kind of anecdotal to me. Probably the best study looking at this issue, involving millions of people in Hong Kong, was done by Peng et al.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37637754/

Peng concluded that COVID vaccination probably protects from autoimmune disease. The reason most likely is that getting a bad COVID infection is less likely if you've been vaccinated. And severe COVID disease is more likely to lead to an autoimmune disease than the vaccine.

I'm not sure how significant increased production of the IgG4 antibody is either. IgG4 may even be protective against autoimmune disease in some instances. But admittedly it can also be associated with increased probability of disease, notably a condition called "IgG4-Related Disease." And it's hard to know whether the IgG4 is actually playing a causative role, or if it's just a side effect.

These autoimmune diseases are rare anyway, regardless of a person's vaccine status.

There's a series of IgG antibodies, called IgG1, IgG2, IgG3, and IgG4. IgG1, IgG2, and IgG3 are much more effective at fighting disease than IgG4. The human body initially generates more IgG1 through IgG3 in response to a disease. Then later on IgG4 kicks in, and has the result of muting immune response. Beekeepers typically have high levels of IgG4 compared to IgG1 through IgG3, probably as a protective measure against developing a severe immune reaction to stings.

Normally IgG4 antibodies would comprise less than 5% of the total IgG series in the body. However, after the 3rd COVID shot, on average that number is 20%, and it's over 50% in about a quarter of the population. I'd think if IgG1, IgG2 and IgG3 comprised 80%, you'd still be getting decent additional protection from the COVID vaccine against severe disease from antibodies, not to mention additional protection from T cell response.

Increased levels of IgG4 antibodies do appear to be associated with reduced effectiveness of pertussis, HIV and malaria vaccines, although, again, is the antibody the cause or an effect of something else?

So anyway, like you say the jury's out. I just got my 6th shot, so have plenty of time to wait and follow developments before the next one.

[texassapper]

Originally Posted by SpeedRacerXXX

New COVID-19 Vaccine Warnings Don’t Mean It’s Unsafe – They Mean the System to Report Side Effects Is Working

So your saying that VAERS is an accurate reporting tool for the clot shot side effects... because if so, you might want to take a seat.... lol

[SpeedRacerXXX]

Originally Posted by texassapper

So your saying that VAERS is an accurate reporting tool for the clot shot side effects... because if so, you might want to take a seat.... lol

VAERS, when used correctly, can be a useful tool in pointing out potential problems with the Covid vaccine. But VAERS is too often used incorrectly, as it has been on this forum in the past.

"Recent adverse events associated with the COVID-19 vaccine, including Guillain-Barré and thrombosis for Johnson & Johnson and myocarditis for Pfizer, were identified through VAERS.

Serious adverse event risk from vaccines is small

A rare adverse event may take months or years to identify for a simple reason: It’s rare. For some drugs that are less commonly used, new safety data takes longer to discover because a relatively small number of patients use the drug. For example, though the shingles vaccine Shingrix was approved 2017, it wasn’t until March 2021 after over 3.7 million patients had gotten the shot that the FDA announced a potential increased risk of Guillain-Barré. And it still hasn’t been confirmed that the Shringrix vaccine causes the nerve condition.

For cases like the COVID-19 vaccine, however, millions of people will receive the drug shortly after it’s released to the public, and new issues or patterns often emerge more quickly.

This can lead to two problems.

First, not every reported adverse event is directly related to the vaccine. For example, many of the tens of millions of people who have received the Pfizer vaccine have likely experienced a sunburn. People might report that they experienced a sunburn to VAERS, but the vaccine has no effect on your skin’s ability to protect against the sun. VAERS is very clear that it “is not designed to determine if a vaccine caused a health problem, but is especially useful for detecting unusual or unexpected patterns of adverse event reporting.” Correlation does not imply causation.

Second, a plausibly identified adverse event does not necessarily make the vaccine unsafe. According to CDC, there have been 100 preliminary reports of Guillain–Barré out of 12.5 million J&J doses, or 0.008% of people who received the vaccine. Administering one vaccine to a huge sample of people can make it easier to identify a possible connection between the shot and a side effect. But that doesn’t mean the risk of getting that side effect is very likely, or that it outweighs the benefit of getting vaccinated.

These risks, while real and potentially life-threatening, must be viewed in context with the much larger risk of negative outcomes from the diseases vaccines protect people from. For example, 1%-7% of patients who take cholesterol drugs called statins are likely to experience potentially harmful muscle injury. However, these drugs are still taken by millions of people because they are highly effective at preventing heart disease and stroke. And in the case of Guillain–Barré, about one in 100,000 people, or 0.001%, develop this condition yearly in the U.S. from any cause. By comparison, the U.S. has had more than 33 million cases of COVID-19, and over 600,000 deaths caused by this disease."

It remains up to each person as to whether or not to get the Covid vaccine. I am a person who looks at the upside and downside of decisions like this and my opinion is the upside far outweighs the downside.

[adav8s28]

Originally Posted by texassapper

Post-vaccine vaginal bleeding rates associated with all COVID-19 vaccine types across reproductive ages

Are/were there some side effects with the M-RNA vaccines? Yes. However, the M-RNA vaccines were effective. Of the 1 million people who died from CoVid infection (Approx 450,000 under Trump, 550,000 under Biden) most of these people were UNVACCINATED. There have been very few BREAK Through deaths ( A person who got fully vaccinated Two shot Moderna or Pfizer, one shot J&J got infected with CoVid and still died). Moderna and Pfizer had the best clinical trial results. About 260 million people in the USA got fully vaccinated. The M-RNA vaccines were effective in preventing death after infection.

Thanks Moderna.
Thanks Pfizer.

[adav8s28]

Originally Posted by Tiny

I've done some more reading. Autoimmune disease is in rare instances associated with COVID, both the disease and the vaccine. A woman I went to high school actually was one of the few who probably died of an autoimmune disease caused by the vaccine, or that's what her doctors thought anyway.

Anyway, I think the risk described in Dilbert's article by Berenson, and more so in Uversky et al's paper (my link), is overstated. Uversky says that countries where a higher % of the population is vaccinated have seen a bigger increase in autoimmune disease. That sounds kind of anecdotal to me. Probably the best study looking at this issue, involving millions of people in Hong Kong, was done by Peng et al.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37637754/

Peng concluded that COVID vaccination probably protects from autoimmune disease. The reason most likely is that getting a bad COVID infection is less likely if you've been vaccinated. And severe COVID disease is more likely to lead to an autoimmune disease than the vaccine.

I'm not sure how significant increased production of the IgG4 antibody is either. IgG4 may even be protective against autoimmune disease in some instances. But admittedly it can also be associated with increased probability of disease, notably a condition called "IgG4-Related Disease." And it's hard to know whether the IgG4 is actually playing a causative role, or if it's just a side effect.

These autoimmune diseases are rare anyway, regardless of a person's vaccine status.

There's a series of IgG antibodies, called IgG1, IgG2, IgG3, and IgG4. IgG1, IgG2, and IgG3 are much more effective at fighting disease than IgG4. The human body initially generates more IgG1 through IgG3 in response to a disease. Then later on IgG4 kicks in, and has the result of muting immune response. Beekeepers typically have high levels of IgG4 compared to IgG1 through IgG3, probably as a protective measure against developing a severe immune reaction to stings.

Normally IgG4 antibodies would comprise less than 5% of the total IgG series in the body. However, after the 3rd COVID shot, on average that number is 20%, and it's over 50% in about a quarter of the population. I'd think if IgG1, IgG2 and IgG3 comprised 80%, you'd still be getting decent additional protection from the COVID vaccine against severe disease from antibodies, not to mention additional protection from T cell response.

Increased levels of IgG4 antibodies do appear to be associated with reduced effectiveness of pertussis, HIV and malaria vaccines, although, again, is the antibody the cause or an effect of something else?

So anyway, like you say the jury's out. I just got my 6th shot, so have plenty of time to wait and follow developments before the next one.

+1


Good post Tiny on the IgG antibodies. I think there should be a threeway tie for first place as the best Amateur Virologist on ECCIE.NET. (Reddog1951, you and me). Speedracer gets honorable mention for participating in the clinical trials for Moderna.