• cynar@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    I’ve had COVID and the vaccine. While the vaccine was less than pleasant, COVID left me coughing blood. I was alarmingly close to the 2 week collapse before I got ahead of it.

    The kick would be down to the adjuncts in the vaccine. There are 2 parts to a vaccine. The target, and the immune activators.

    The mRNA produces a critical protein in COVID’s outer shell. It is then expelled from the cells. This protein is inert and useless on its own. The normal reaction to this would be quite mild, and produce next to no protection.

    The adjuncts are used to convince the immune system there is a major attack ongoing. The small debris created by the mRNA now causes a huge reaction and strong immunity. Unfortunately this is also what makes us feel unwell. It’s not the flu virus that makes us feel shit, it’s our immune reaction to it.

    The adjuncts are one of the areas where the COVID vaccine did cut corners. While the dose of adjuncts is still completely safe (they are used in most vaccines, some in higher doses) they aren’t optimised. The larger the dose, the more ill you feel from the vaccine. In a perfect world, they would have used multiple trials to find the perfect dose, just enough to trigger the response, but no more. Unfortunately, this would have taken additional months or potentially a year to do. Instead they found a safe dose that worked, and went with it. This leaves the vaccine more aggressive in its activation. This is still perfectly safe, but less pleasant for the patient.

    In short, they didn’t bother with the fine tuning of comfort Vs effectiveness of the vaccine, they just went for optimal effectiveness.

    • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      The vaccines also don’t leave a solid 5-10% of people with permanent cognitive impairment or heart problems.

      I’m pissed because we largely shut down society to protect people over 50 from death at first, and now it turns out that young healthy people are the ones getting fucked by endemic long COVID forcing them to go on long term disability, and the boomers are all “cognitive impairment? Lol What’s that?”

      • cynar@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Fully agreed. They made the right call getting it out fast. It also means that vaccines against future variants shouldn’t be so harsh. A combined flu and COVID yearly vaccine should be perfectly doable, and would help protect all.

        The vaccines don’t block infections totally, but they do give the immune system enough of a head start to stop it progressing to dangerous or damaging levels.