Coronavirus news & views

Take Your Vaccine Skepticism To A Cemetery

“Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”

            --Paul Simon, in The Boxer

They say you won’t find an atheist in a foxhole. Well, perhaps you shouldn’t find a vaccine skeptic in a cemetery, either. Bear with me and I will explain.

I have been reading about how vaccine skepticism is growing beyond the COVID vaccine to include other common vaccines against flu, measles, chicken pox, polio, etc. Perhaps this all began with parental resistance to Gardasil, a vaccine against human papillomavirus, or HPV, introduced in 2006. HPV is a sexually transmitted virus that causes genital, anal, and oral cancers. It is the most common cause of cervical cancer. In order to confer maximal and lasting protection, it is recommended that children around 11 and 12 years old be vaccinated. Some parents have railed that this promotes promiscuity. They fret that the vax licenses licentiousness in children, akin to giving them condoms with illustrated instructions in their use. Balderdash!  

While that medical insurrection continues to smolder, along came COVID and the anti-COVID mRNA vaccines accompanied by the surprising resistance of many people against the shots. It is a resistance that seems to be growing and spreading to vaccines in general including those listed above that have long been commonly accepted.

This is concerning because it portends that in the near future, kids will begin coming down with diseases that we have pretty well controlled. In fact, in the last year or so, de novo cases of polio have appeared in the US in unvaccinated people. Before this incipient vaccine resistance, polio had been eradicated in North America, thanks to the vaccine.

It is safe to expect that vaccine resistance will persist, and probably increase as new vaccines are developed to treat cancer and better protect against flu. The mRNA vaccine technology is being used to develop new vaccines against the deadly skin cancer melanoma, and research is underway to also develop vaccines to prevent breast, liver, prostate, and other cancers. This use of modern vaccine technology to prevent cancer is a very novel and promising approach to dealing with malignancy. Anti-cancer vaccines are a potentially exciting new weapon in the armamentarium for the war on cancer. Too bad for those who would reject an effective cancer-preventing vaccine. At least they can fall back on the standard harsh radiation and chemo therapies.

mRNA vaccine technology also is being used to try to develop a universal vaccine against the flu. Flu is a highly malleable virus because there are many strains out that that can mix and shuffle their genetic material. This means that every year, it is a guessing game as to which combination of flu we will contend with—hence the changing flu numbers each year-- H1N3, H2N4, H3N1, etc. Since the Southern Hemisphere’s flu season precedes ours in the North, flu sleuths follow what goes on down there and track which strains make their way Northward, often via migrating birds, and try to predict what flu strains will be prevalent here each year. Then flu vaccines are made based on the best predictions. Usually, the annual flu vaccine is a mix of 2-3 of the flu strains that we are most likely thought to encounter. Some years we better predict which flu strains to vaccinate against than in other years, hence the efficacy of the vaccine can vary from year to year. Therefore, the advantage of a universal vaccine effective against all strains would be to remove this uncertainty and variability. That is the goal of using mRNA technology to take genetic material that is common to all flu strains and package it into lipid particles as pseudo-viral particles to trick the immune system to make an immune response to these parts of the viruses. If successful, this would protect against all flu strains and eliminate the need to guess which strains to vaccinate against. Theoretically.

The point is, vaccine science is moving forward and continues to offer great promise to prevent diseases that have proven very difficult to treat. The vaccine naysayers will miss the boat if they continue their misguided dissent. I suggest that they test their skepticism in a cemetery.

Go to an old cemetery and find the graves of people who died in the 1950s and earlier. See how many headstones belong to children.

Then go to the part of the cemetery where the grave stones are for people who died in the 60s and later and see how many graves are occupied by children.

The sharp drop in the number of childhood deaths after the 60s can largely be attributed to vaccines. Vaccines prevent serious disease and death in children who used to die from meningitis, pneumonia, dysentery, small pox, flu, and other diseases, but now do not. And to those who think that the vaccines are killing people, where are their headstones?

It is always better to prevent disease than to treat it. Vaccines prevent disease. Avoid vaccines if you wish. Darwin might approve.

Unvaccinated People Are 11 Times More Likely To Die Of COVID-19

People who were not fully vaccinated this spring and summer were ~10 times more likely to be hospitalized, and 11 times more likely to die of COVID-19, than those who were fully vaccinated, according to one of three major studies published mid-September by the CDC.

That study did not distinguish between which vaccine the vaccinated cohort received. But, a second study compared the different vaccines and found that the Moderna vax was somewhat more effective in preventing hospitalizations than the Pfizer and J&J vaccines. This assessment was based on the largest US study to date of the real-world effectiveness of all three vaccines, involving about 32,000 patients seen in hospitals, emergency departments and urgent-care clinics across nine states from June through early August. While the three vaccines were collectively 86 percent effective in preventing hospitalization, protection was higher among Moderna vaccine recipients (95 percent) than among those who got the Pfizer (80 percent) or J&J vaccines (60 percent). That finding echoes a smaller study by the Mayo Clinic Health System in August, which showed the Moderna vaccine to be more effective than the Pfizer vax at preventing infections from the Delta variant.

Vaccine effectiveness against infection dropped from 90 percent last Spring, when Delta had not yet gained significant traction, to less than 80 percent from mid-June to mid-July, when Delta began out-competing other viral variants. Importantly, effectiveness against hospitalization and death showed barely any decline during the entire period. Thus, all vaccines remain quite effective and useful in protecting against illness.

Get one!

Why there is a difference in preventing infection between the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines was discussed earlier in these pages.

The Differences Between The Moderna And Pfizer mRNA Vaccines

Since the vaccines rolled out, people, including me, have talked about the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines as simply being interchangeable versions of mRNA vaccine technology platforms. They both use part of the CoV-2 viral mRNA sequence to temporarily express parts of the viral spike protein on muscle cells in order to stimulate a protective immune response against the live virus. Since mRNA is very unstable and would quickly degrade if it were injected by itself, both vaccines encapsulate it in lipid nanoparticles, or liposomes, which both protects the mRNA and helps it fuse to cell membranes and insert the genetic material into the cells where it is translated into the protein. So, the Pfizer and Moderna technologies are very similar.  But they are not identical. At first blush, the differences appear subtle, but we are learning that they seem to manifest themselves in different, not-so-subtle biological ways. Let’s take a look at the how the vaccines differ.

The formulation: The lipid nanoparticles that carry the mRNA are a bit different between the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine platforms. While the exact formulations are proprietary intellectual property owned by each company, we do have a little bit of information about how they are similar and how they differ. Both platforms are concoctions of several different lipids designed to spontaneously assemble in aqueous solutions into small, “artificial cells” that encapsulate the mRNA payload. The lipids in both vaccines include polyethylene glycol (PEG), which can have multiple effects on the properties of lipid nanoparticles; they can affect particle size and particle stability. Certain PEG modifications can also prolong the blood circulation time of nanoparticles by reducing clearance of the liposomes by the kidneys and by scavenger immune cells called phagocytes.

The Pfizer vaccine also contains two proprietary lipids known as ALC-0315, and ALC-0159 as well as cholesterol, all in a very precise ratio. The Moderna vaccine platform consists of lipids that are not as well-known publically because the company is in litigation over the intellectual property with Arbutus, which developed the lipids that were licensed by Moderna.

Basically, viruses are naturally occurring liposomes encapsulating genetic material. The nanotechnology community has long been trying to create “artificial” virus-like nanoparticles that do not replicate or spread like a live virus in order to deliver fragile molecules, like mRNA, to cells for therapeutic reasons. Therefore, the goal of therapeutic liposomes is to create a virus-like lipid bilayer membrane (see figure) in order to deliver a drug or vaccine payload to cells. Mixing amphiphilic fatty acids, which are lipids where one end is water soluble (hydrophilic), while the other end is not (hydrophobic), in an aqueous solution allows them to spontaneously assemble into virus-like nanoparticles, or mini-cells. A water soluble payload (mRNA in this case) is captured in the central blue area and is protected by the outer lipid membrane. When these artificial cells bump into a live cell, the lipids on the two membranes fuse dumping the therapeutic payload into the cell’s cytoplasm.

There are endless combinations of amphiphilic lipids which can form such pseudo-cells, the properties of which can be modified depending on which lipids are used. For example, the selection of lipids used in both vaccines give the surface of the liposomes a mild positive charge, which facilitates their ability to stick to the negatively charged membranes of live cells.

What all this means is that the specific lipid formulation used in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines affects the delivery of mRNA to cells, but we do not have enough detail to be able to suss the effects of the different liposome compositions on the efficacy of the vaccine. Those details mostly remain trade secrets.

lipid nanoparticle mimics a cell bilayer membrane

mRNA sequence. Both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use mRNA that encodes part of the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, which sits on the surface of the virus and binds with the ACE2 receptor on the cell surfaces of many tissues. mRNA molecules are chains of four nucleosides arranged in a gene-specific sequence code that cells then translate into a specific protein. However, when a foreign mRNA is injected into a body, the mRNA itself can be recognized by the immune system and neutralized before it can enter a cell and express its cognate protein. For this reason, both the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines have been modified to incorporate a synthetic non-natural nucleoside, 1-methylpseudouridine, which reduces the ability of the immune system to recognize the foreign mRNA and improves its stability and expression of its protein.

The spike molecule consists of two protein subunits, the first of which is responsible for the initial binding with ACE2, while the second promotes the fusion between the virus and the cell membranes. The mRNA sequence incorporated into the Moderna vaccine, mRNA-1273, specifically encodes the pre-fusion form of the second spike protein subunit that is found on the surface of the virus before it binds to the ACE2 cell receptor. The mRNA sequence is modified to produce a spike protein with two amino-acid substitutions at positions 986 and 987 on the protein that help to keep it in the pre-fusion state. In contrast, the mRNA utilized by the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine (BNT162) only encodes part of the spike protein on the first subunit that specifically binds to the ACE2 receptor. Thus, the two vaccines drive immunity to different parts of the spike protein molecule.

Perhaps more importantly, the dose of mRNA in the two vaccines differs. The Moderna vax delivers a 3-fold higher dose (100 mcg) of mRNA compared to the Pfizer vaccine (30 mcg). This  means that more spike protein antigen to stimulate an immune response is expressed from the Moderna shot.

What does it all mean? Initially, these differences in lipid composition, mRNA sequence, and mRNA dose do not seem to affect vaccine effectiveness. Both are extremely effective at protecting against COVID-19 within a few months after the second shot. But, over time, differences in the effectiveness of the vaccines are showing up.

Last month, the Mayo Clinic released a preprint of a large study of 645,109 patients after vaccination. This assessed the level of protection from infection in people vaccinated with the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, or who were unvaccinated between January–July, 2021. Both vaccines continued to be very effective at preventing hospitalization, ICU admission, and death relative to unvaccinated people over the period of the study. However, prevention against mild to moderate COVID-19 was somewhat lower for both vaccines in July compared to January. Vaccine immunity faded a bit over that time. Importantly, the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine faded faster over this time compared to the Moderna vaccine. A more recent CDC analysis of COVID-19 emergency room or urgent care visits for ~33,000 people between June-August 2021, when the Delta variant was predominant in the US, showed that overall the vaccines were 86% effective at protecting against serious COVID-19. But, vaccine efficacy for those who received the Moderna vaccine was 92%, while those receiving the Pfizer vax showed 77% protection.

Similar results were found in another study of 196 vaccinated elder nursing home residents in Canada. Compared to those who received the Moderna vaccine, residents who received the Pfizer shot mounted a 3.89-fold lower antibody response. A Belgium study published August 30, also found that the Moderna vaccine stimulated ~3 times the antibody response as the Pfizer vax. This study looked at 1,647 vaccinated workers at a Belgium hospital. Finally, a Qatar study largely found the same thing; that the Moderna vaccine stimulated a more robust antibody response.

What accounts for the different responses to the different vaccines over time? That is impossible to pinpoint at this time. It could be due to the higher dose of mRNA in the Moderna vaccine. The difference in response over time could also be due to the different mRNA sequences the vaccines contain, or due to the slight differences in the chemical composition of the lipid nanoparticles. Or, any combination of the above could drive quantitatively different immune responses.

Most importantly, though, both vaccines continue to work amazingly well against serious COVID disease, hospitalizations and death. Even while the more infectious Delta variant rages around the world in the face of slowly fading vaccine efficacy, about 95% of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths today are in unvaccinated people.

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Long Term Side Effects Of COVID Vaccines

In his nearly 30 years studying vaccines, Paul Goepfert, M.D., director of the Alabama Vaccine Research Clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has never seen any vaccine as effective as the three COVID vaccines — the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, and the adenovirus-based vaccine from Johnson & Johnson that are currently available in the US. He refers to the 90 percent reduction in infections, and 94 percent protection against hospitalization the vaccines confer. 

Despite this undeniable success, most Americans who have not been vaccinated report long-term safety as a major concern. Nearly a quarter of respondents in Gallup surveys in March and April 2021 said they wanted to confirm the vaccine was safe before getting the shot. And 26 percent of respondents in a survey of parents with children ages 12-15 by the Kaiser Family Foundation in April 2021 said they wanted to “wait a while to see how the vaccine is working” before deciding to get their child vaccinated. 

There are several reasons to not worry about such long term consequences of the vaccines. Vaccines are very temporary medicines, making them different from medicines that people take every day, potentially for years, that can have long term safety issues. Further, decades of vaccine history, plus months of data from more than a billion people around the world who have received the current COVID vaccines starting last December, provide powerful real-life proof that there is little chance that any new dangers will arise more than a couple of weeks following the COVID shot. 

Consider the following:

1. Vaccines are eliminated within hours to a couple of days. Unlike many drugs, which are taken daily and chronically, vaccines are generally one (maybe two)-and-done. Medicines you take every day for months or years can cause side effects that only reveal themselves over time. 

Vaccines are designed to deliver a payload that is quickly eliminated by the body. This is particularly true of the mRNA vaccines as I wrote earlier. mRNA is a very unstable molecule that degrades rapidly (within hours) due to ubiquitous enzymes generally known as RNases. So, after a shot, the vaccine lingers just long enough to stimulate an immune reaction, and then the body’s normal mechanisms eliminate it within hours. The only long term effect after the vaccine is eliminated is the immunological memory it leaves behind.

2. Vaccine side effects, if any, show up within hours to a couple of weeks, never longer: No vaccine has ever shown a side effect that appeared more than two months after injection. This is why the FDA requires only two-months of of followup data after injection for Emergency Use Authorization (or six months as an extra precaution for Full Approval).

That is not to say that there have never been safety issues with vaccines. But in each instance, these issues appeared very soon after vaccination. When the oral polio vaccine was first introduced in the US in 1955, it used a crippled form of the polio virus that in very rare cases, about one in 2.4 million recipients, became activated and caused polio. Cases of vaccine-induced polio occurred between one and four weeks after vaccination, none after one month.

In 1976, it was found that in approximately one in 100,000 patients, a vaccine against swine flu was associated with Guillain-Barré Syndrome, in which the immune system attacks the nerves causing temporary paralysis. These cases occurred in the eight weeks after being vaccinated (in contrast the flu itself causes Guillain-Barré Syndrome 17 times more frequently than the vaccine). Eight-weeks is the longest post-vaccine delay for the appearance of a side effect for any vaccine.

3. Real life experience with COVID vaccines: By the time the COVID vaccines were approved for emergency use in the US in December 2020, we already knew what the short-term side effects were from the clinical trials on tens-of-thousands of people. The side effects seen in these studies, and later confirmed in the real-world experience of vaccinating hundreds of millions of people, were mostly simple tolerability issues, like arm pain, temporary fatigue and headache. These side effects occur a day or two after the vaccine and last 24-36 hrs.

As of June 12, 2021, more than 2.33 billion COVID vaccine doses have been administered worldwide, according to the New York Times vaccinations tracker. And as hundreds of millions of people are vaccinated, we can begin to detect the extremely rare side-effects that would not be seen when only tens of thousands of patients had been vaxed. This has not revealed any side effect occurring after two-four weeks following the shot. Thus, the close scrutiny of these hundreds of millions of vaccine recipients make the COVID vaccines perhaps the most studied vaccine in the history of medicine.

We also now know that a few people receiving the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine experienced a clotting disorder known as thrombotic thrombocytopenia. This occurred in just 79 people among more than 20 million people receiving this vaccine in the UK. A smaller number of cases have occurred with Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine as well. These side effects only happened 1-2 weeks following the shot (and clotting problems occur much more frequently following infection). An even rarer side effect, myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, has been reported in people receiving Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. This effect was found in about one in a million vaccinated people. None of these cases appeared more than a month after the vaccination.

Finally, on July 12, 2021, the FDA announced that in rare cases (100 reports out of 12.8 million shots given in the US), the J&J vaccine might be associated with Guillan-Barré Syndrome. All of these cases appeared about two weeks after injection.

Bottom line: All of this can be boiled down to this: There are no “long term safety issues” with these or any other vaccine. If you don’t have a side effect 2-8 weeks after the injection, you will not have any further vaccine-related problem down the road.

I challenge anyone to name any vaccine that has had side effects more than a few weeks following the shot.

Therefore, it is mind-boggling that people are avoiding COVID vaccines based on an unwarranted hypothetical concern over long term safety, but they are not at all worried about the reality of COVID mortality and the devastation of “long COVID” symptoms seen in 10% of infected people. That is irrational.

Stay tuned:  A multi-post blog series on the “long COVID” or “long haulers” will soon begin in these pages.

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Vaccines And Myocarditis In Young People

Rare cases of inflammation of the heart muscle, or myocarditis, have been found in 1,200 younger people (16-24) after receiving an mRNA vaccine, and this has been used by anti-vaxers to further the hysteria around the vaccine. But, if you talk to a pediatric cardiologist you will learn that we should be much more worried about the disease than the vaccine. There simply is no comparison.

The post-vaccine myocarditis is very mild, has caused no deaths, is easily treated with anti-inflammatory drugs, and quickly goes away without lasting problems. On the other hand, COVID-19 can linger for months, and, as of June 9, has caused ~3000 deaths in young people. Because of this, the American Heart Association and American Academy of Pediatrics continue to strongly recommend vaccination for young people.

Myocarditis in young people is not a new thing, and is usually associated with a viral or bacterial infection. One vaccine against small pox has also been weakly linked to myocarditis. People from puberty through their early 30s are at higher risk for myocarditis, according to the Myocarditis Foundation. Males are affected twice as often as females. Most of these cases are very mild and many times people with myocarditis do not even know they have the problem. The incidence of myocarditis in young people peaks this time of year when the coxsackie virus, which can infect the heart, is more common. This means that an undetermined fraction of post-vaccine myocarditis is likely due to concomitant infection with coxsakie virus and not due to the vaccine.

Bottom line: Post-vaccine myocarditis is much ado about next to nothing. This should not cause one to hesitate getting the vaccine, unless the person has another underlying cardiac problem. The mildness of this rare side effect contrasts with the thousands of young people who have contracted serious COVID-19 and have even succumbed to the infection. While severe morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 is rarer in children and adolescents than in older adults, the number of cases in young people has been steadily rising on a weekly basis according to the CDC. This trend will likely accelerate as the more infectious, and possibly more lethal Delta variant becomes dominant in the US. Since most older adults have been vaccinated, that leaves younger people as available targets for the new virus surge. There is no rational reason for 99.9% of people to not be vaccinated.

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COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines Safe For Pregnant Women

I have received a few questions about the safety of the coronavirus vaccines for pregnant and lactating women. I discussed toward the end of one blog post about how maternal immunity can benefit the baby by passing the mother’s antibodies across the placenta and given in mother’s milk, thereby protecting neonates whose immune systems are still developing.

Now, an analysis of the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, and the “v-safe after vaccination health checker," and its associated v-safe pregnancy registry, shows that the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines appear to be safe for mothers and babies. The analysis examined almost 36,000 pregnant women who received one of the mRNA vaccines, and was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Compared to non-pregnant women, pregnant women who were vaccinated reported more injection-site pain, but fewer incidents of headaches, myalgia (muscle pain), chills, and fever. About 14% of vaccinated pregnant women suffered pregnancy loss while about 9% of neonates born to vaccinated women suffered adverse events, and 3% of them were undersized. No neonatal deaths were reported. The important thing is that the incidence of these outcomes was similar to the incidence observed in pregnant women before the pandemic arose. Most of the pregnant women who were evaluated were vaccinated in the third trimester.

The study concluded that the data revealed no obvious warning signals for pregnant women who receive the mRNA vaccines. But, it also advised that followup with women vaccinated earlier in pregnancy is warranted.

Stay tuned.