Coronavirus spreads. But don't panic! (topical thread)

[Dancefortwo]

Serves me right, for reading trashy Brazilian (but in English, so not even a real paper written by real journalists) newspapers.

Here's the jerk because of whom a whole horde of the unwashed who hadn't even heard of prions before yesterday are now worried their two brain cells will stop functioning: J. Bart Classen.

"A widely-reposted 2021 Facebook post claiming that the mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 could cause prion diseases was based on a paper by Classen. The paper "COVID-19 RNA based vaccines and the risk of prion disease" was published in Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, whose publisher, Scivision Publishers, is included in Beall's list of publishers of predatory journals. Vincent Racaniello, professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, described the claim as "completely wrong".Tulane University virologist Robert Garry stated that Classen has offered no evidence for the three pillars of his argument: that the sequence overlaps between the Pfizer vaccine are greater than occur with any randomly-selected stretch of RNA, or that the vaccine could cause zinc to be released and that doing so would affect its purported targets as he proposes."

Scum. Utter human scum.

And speaking of scum, look who's also spouting this CRIMINAL lie. A Kennedy. Quelle surprise. Who would've expected it from such a thoroughly nice and decent, even heroic family

SCUM.

ETA: "The claim that mRNA vaccines cause neurodegenerative diseases is based on a single flawed study that doesn’t provide any data supporting its claim and misrepresents results from other studies.

Inaccurate: mRNA from vaccines can’t modify human DNA because it doesn’t enter the cell nucleus, where DNA is stored. Furthermore, mRNA vaccines cannot cause long-term effects in humans because RNA is quickly broken down by the cell after it provides the cell with instructions to make the protein.

Show ContentSpoiler:

Jesus R. Requena, Associate Professor, University of Santiago de Compostela:
The report on which this piece of news is based[1] is a completely baseless and misleading speculation which doesn’t contain any experimental evidence to support the notion that COVID-19 RNA-based vaccines can cause neurodegenerative diseases associated with protein misfolding, let alone prion disease.
The author confuses cause and effect. TDP-43, a protein whose function involves binding to RNA, can form aggregates [protein clumps] under certain circumstances, particularly as a consequence of a mutation, which can result in a neurodegenerative disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Classen misquoted a study by Tollervey et al., who found that once TDP-43 aggregates (cause), its ability to bind to certain RNA sequences and thus modulate them may change (effect 1)[2]. This in turn might cause failures in the normal function of the cell that could play a role in this neurodegenerative disease (effect 2).

But Classen misinterprets this to mean that normal, correctly folded TDP-43 binds certain RNA sequences, one of which “might be” the one in the COVID-19 vaccine, and this causes its misfolding and aggregation (wrong!!!!).

With respect to other neurodegenerative diseases mentioned by Classen, such as Alzheimer’s, there isn’t even this totally wrong thread of a hypothesis. Furthermore, Classen plays with the term “prion disease”, which he uses ambiguously.

Finally, the paper contains a number of ideological statements such as “the vaccine could be a bioweapon and even more dangerous than the original infection”, which are not scientific (no evidence is provided, not even a citation; clearly the author couldn’t find any) and should never be included in a scientific work.

Funny because there are clinical trials that are testing mRNA as a treatment for cancer.  Some interesting stuff has been going on with mRNA for 20 years. 

 long before anyone had heard of COVID-19, researchers had been developing mRNA vaccines to fight cancer, autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, and to protect against other infectious diseases, such as the respiratory syncytial virus. “It’s not a new idea: What COVID has shown us is that mRNA vaccines can be an efficacious and safe technology for millions of people,” 

It goes on to say.......

 One of the beauties of this technology is it can be used in people agnostic to their cancer type—it doesn’t matter if it’s a breast cancer or lung cancer as long as you can identify its mutations,”   says Van Morris, a physician and an assistant professor of gastrointestinal medical oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston who is leading a phase two clinical trial exploring the use of personalized mRNA vaccines for patients who have stage II or stage III colorectal cancer. “One of the exciting things is the adaptability of the technology based on a given cancer and the underlying biology of that cancer.”

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scien...a-vaccines

Wouldn't it be ironic if the mRNA research and a vaccine really put cancer in it's place, meanwhile all these wacky anti-vaccers are running around like a chicken with their heads cut off.    Bahahahahaha!