Executive Summary
- Why rushing a vaccine trial injects all sorts of risks into the equation
- Weighing these risks vs the risks of not getting the vaccine
- Others cautions to be aware of
- My personal plans for the vaccine
If you have not yet read Part 1: Prive Profits Vs Public Health, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
You’ve all heard the news; the new vaccines were produced in a miraculously short time and are miraculously effective (90%+).
I remain both slightly skeptical and cautiously optimistic.
I am not anti-vaccine by any stretch. I have been well vaccinated in my life, and I continue to get tetanus boosters. But I am becoming increasingly ‘vaccine cautious’ as I learn more and more, especially from ER doc user ‘SandPuppy’ here at the site.
Covid has taught me a lot about viruses and our immune systems. Both are ridiculously complex and locked into a battle that is as gripping as it is subtle. Viruses may well be math geniuses. They play the law of large numbers and by trying new things, iterating, and refining, they evade and commandeer the very systems designed to detect and destroy them.
Consider that Sars-CoV-2 not only manages to invade a cell and replicate, but turns on and off a huge array of genes located in the cell nucleus and thereby commandeering the larger set of regulatory systems at the whole body level.
This is the “Bradykinin Hypothesis.” Everything in red (below, screenshot from Sept 3rd YouTube video) is a gene system that is turned off or ‘downregulated’ and everything in blue is turned on or upregulated.
In other words, everything the virus needs to spread and replicate more widely is amplified and things that might interfere with those plans are dialed down or turned right off.
It’s mad genius I tell you!
It also makes a big mess in our bodies.
The point here is that our immune systems are ridiculously complex. When we introduce vaccines what we’re doing is consciously interacting with something that we really just don’t understand all that well and certainly cannot predict.