Here’s everything you need to know about the COVID vaccine. I decided to do a post because there are so many theories and interviews floating out there. Many of the people giving these interviews have failed to disclose their conflict of interests. That is, having shares in said pharma companies creating these vaccines or working on them prior which makes their endorsement questionable.
So my own involvement. I don’t have a dog or cat in this fight. I’m not involved with any company or have investments with pharma. I do not work with any company mentioned here. I’m just providing an unbiased view of the vaccines and their mechanism of action (MOA).
COVID Vaccine: Everything You Need To Know: Terms
Immunity: This is the the ability to resist a particular infection or toxin by the action of specific antibodies or sensitized white blood cells.
Herd Immunity: ‘Herd immunity’ is also known as ‘population immunity.’ Here a population is immune indirectly through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection. Polio and several other vaccines work based on herd immunity.
HIT =Ro -1/ Ro
Case: The WHO has changed its definition several times over the last year. As far as the thinking, intelligent scientific community is concerned, a case is defined as a person with symptoms plus a confirmatory diagnostic test. This includes an assay. Different countries have bungled this up and so have a high number of cases. A positive Antigen test is not a case especially if only tested via PCR. I’ve personally had friends who tested positive on the PCR only to have tested negative the following day. The CDC guidelines also confirm this as they’re definition is based on the presence or absence of symptoms.
R rate/Basic reproduction number = Rox
Where Ro is infections producing contacts per unit time and X is the mean infectious period.
The effective reproduction number (R) is an indicator of how fast an infection spreads in a population. The R number must be sustained under 1 for an epidemic to come to an end.
Vaccine: A preparation that triggers your immune response and prepares it for future infections.
Types of Vaccines
Unfortunately, the media hasn’t been reporting on the sheer variety of vaccines that are available today.
Here’s a table from the CDC with a list of approved vaccines.
| Vaccine Name | Type | Developer | Origin | Approval |
| 1. Comirnaty (BNT162b2) | mRNA-based vaccine | Pfizer, BioNTech; Fosun Pharma | Multinational | United Kingdom, Bahrain, Canada, Mexico, US, Singapore, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Jordan, Panama, Chile, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Switzerland, Kuwait, EU, Philippines, Pakistan, Colombia, Iraq, Israel, Qatar, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Faroe Islands, Greenland, Iceland, Malaysia, Norway, Serbia, Hong Kong, Albania, Australia |
| 2. Moderna COVID‑19 Vaccine (mRNA-1273) | mRNA-based vaccine | Moderna, BARDA, NIAID | US | Canada, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, EU, Faroe Islands, Greenland, Iceland, Norway |
| 3. CoronaVac | Inactivated vaccine (formalin with alum adjuvant) | Sinovac | China | China, Bolivia, Turkey, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile |
| 4. COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca (AZD1222) | Adenovirus vaccine | BARDA, OWS | UK | UK, Argentina, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, India, Bangladesh, Mexico, Nepal, Pakistan, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Hungary, Thailand |
| 5. No name announced | Inactivated vaccine | Wuhan Institute of Biological Products; China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm) | China | China |
| 6. Sputnik V | Non-replicating viral vector | Gamaleya Research Institute, Acellena Contract Drug Research and Development | Russia | Russia, Belarus, Argentina, Guinea (experimental use), Bolivia, Algeria, Palestine, Venezuela, Paraguay, Turkmenistan, Hungary, UAE, Serbia, Iran |
| 7. BBIBP-CorV | Inactivated vaccine | Beijing Institute of Biological Products; China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm) | China | China, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Pakistan, Serbia, Peru |
| 8. EpiVacCorona | Peptide vaccine | Federal Budgetary Research Institution State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology | Russia | Russia |
| 9. Covaxin | Inactivated vaccine | Bharat Biotech, ICMR | India | India |
Now, I didn’t add in the efficacy for each vaccine. I think the Indian vaccine is at 65% while the Moderna had an effectiveness of 94%.
Just to put things in perspective, a normal seasonal flu vaccine has about 75% effectiveness.
Now many of these vaccines are still in trials also phase 3 etc. While others have never been successfully tested in humans. They also have not published data yet. Some have had press releases but no actual published data. The usual regulatory process of studying the cycle, and side effects has been cut out altogether to fast track these vaccines.
What are mRNA vaccines?
So, mRNA vaccines contain material from the virus that causes COVID-19. This material instructs our cells how to make a protein that is unique to the virus. After copies of the protein are made, they destroy the genetic material from the vaccine. Our bodies recognize the foreign protein and build T-lymphocytes and B-lymphocytes that will recall how to fight the virus if we are infected in the future.
Alternatively, Protein subunit vaccines contain harmless protein pieces of the virus that cause COVID-19. After vaccination, our immune system recognizes the foreign proteins and begins making T-lymphocytes and antibodies. In the future, memory cells will recognize the virus and fight it.
Vector vaccines contain a weakened version of a live virus—a different one that causes COVID-19. It has genetic material from the virus that causes COVID-19 inserted called a viral vector. Inside our cells, the genetic material instructs cells to make a protein unique to the COVID-19 virus. Our cells make copies of the protein. It prompts our bodies to build T-lymphocytes and B-lymphocytes to fight that virus in the future.
DEVELOPMENTAL VACCINE
There are currently 58 vaccines being studied. The sheer variety of all of them will leave your head spinning. They include the following:
Do They Contain Fetal Cells?
The COVID-19 vaccines do not contain aborted fetal cells per se. However, Pfizer and Moderna performed confirmation tests with fetal cell lines.
What are fetal cell lines? Fetal cell lines grow in a laboratory. They come from cells taken from elective abortions back in the 1970s and 1980s. Those individual cells have since multiplied creating fetal cell lines. Current fetal cell lines are thousands of generations removed from the original fetal tissue.
Vaccine makers use fetal cell lines during three stages of vaccine development:
Development: To see what works
Confirmation: Ensuring if it works
Production: Manufacturing the formula
In the COVID-19 vaccines currently approved, neither the Pfizer nor Moderna vaccines used fetal cell lines in the confirmation phase. In particular, the fetal cell line HEK 293. All HEK 293 cells are descended from tissue taken from a 1973 elective abortion that took place in the Netherlands.
So, this is a personal choice for Catholics and other prolifers as you choose a vaccine.
Risks and Side effects
The one issue with all of these vaccines is that their long term side effects are not known. Even back in 2018, mRNA studies proved to have some immunogenicity and toxicity that was not trivial.
Long term side effects are completely unknown. Temporarily, most people have reported feeling well with mild flu like symptoms. There have been deaths but there’s no clarity yet. Norway changed its guidance following the deaths. The death rate in the UK has escalated despite the vaccine program. Its not clear if these are hidden clusters or its just post vaccination side effects.
COVID Vaccine: Everything You Need To Know
My brother whose a surgeon shared this video about autopsy findings in COVID patients. It’s interesting information.
Personally, the people at most risk like the elderly and those with preexisting conditions should consider getting vaccinated now. The data shows that most healthy individuals will get better without intervention.
Here’s a figure showing the case fatality rate of CVOID versus SARS and Influenza. Surprisingly, its less than SARS. No surprise that SARS countries have done well during this pandemic.
At this point, if you’re part of the healthy population you can wait until there are more choices available in the free market. Then you can choose a vaccine. Many countries are purchasing vaccines from various countries/companies to plug any gaps. By then you can choose a single dose or double dose vaccine, the vector, the type and mechanism.
There’s also lots of controversy over the fact that pharma is exempt from any legal responsibilities should you suffer any long term side effects. Several countries are working on alternative agreements, so you will have to see what your country’s agreement is. It may not seem important now but ten years down the line, it might be a different story. You may think what difference does one case of paralysis/whatever major side effect make? But if you’re that one person who does suffer it, it makes all the difference, doesn’t it?
There’s a ton of information that I can’t write about but research is ongoing. There will be more data but it is slowly being published. However, this is all I could read into for now. If there’s something you want me to look into let me know.
What is your opinion of the COVID 19 vaccine? How has your experience been with it so far?