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Mark Bobrow's avatar

Superbly done!! I loved this statement, "Science isn’t nostalgic—it’s pragmatic. It’s about accruing knowledge, adjusting and correcting with new information, and relentlessly pursuing safer, smarter tools to improve health."

A thought about a previous post about sterilizing immunity. If those folks don't get the MMR vaccine, they could get "sterilizing nonimmunity".

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Brian Zimmer's avatar

The mRNA vaccines are absolutely necessary and saved millions of lives.

It is also true that vaccine-induced long covid is a real phenomenon, with a non-trivial rate of occurrence, even if it's also true that developing long covid is more likely to happen by catching the virus while unvaccinated.

I'm disappointed that this article suffers from the same issue that a lot of otherwise good science communication does - it fails to acknowledge this real phenomenon that is ruining people's lives, and in so doing, undermines trust and credibility in a message that needs to be heard and understood (with some modification).

I would love to hear you engage seriously with that topic. What are the rates of vaccine-induced long covid between Novavax and the mRNA vaccines? Can we quantify that mRNA vaccines do, in fact, cause this less than prior vaccine technology? What is our best understanding of why these vaccines are causing long covid? What research is being done to get to the bottom of this? What kind of tracking is being done to monitor how big of a problem this is? How can we do more monitoring, more research, and more funding to solve this problem? Why are science communicators (in general) so hesitant to talk about this?

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Dr. Andrea Love's avatar

What do you mean by “vaccine induced long COVID?” The vaccine does not have live virus, so no one is getting COVID from it.

Please feel free to clarify.

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Geoff Lye's avatar

I have seen posts on what you discuss here Brian.

Long covid comes about because the covid virus lodges itself at the top of the brain stem and therefore interferes with the brain's messaging to the rest of the body.

Hence the foggy brain lethargy etc.

This situation worsens the more times you get infected by the virus.

So the best way to not get long covid is to get vaccinated.

https://www.the-scientist.com/search?term=long+covid

Also this is a good explainer.

https://curiositystream.com/video/3818

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Geoff Lye's avatar

I have seen posts on what you discuss here Brian.

Long covid comes about because the covid virus lodges itself at the top of the brain stem and therefore interferes with the brain's messaging to the rest of the body.

Hence the foggy brain lethargy etc.

This situation worsens the more times you get infected by the virus.

So the best way to not get long covid is to get vaccinated.

https://www.the-scientist.com/search?term=long+covid

Also this is a good explainer.

https://curiositystream.com/video/3818

Expand full comment
Serafina Purcell's avatar

I recently got a booster of MMR as an adult because I’m that concerned how bad a measles outbreak across the US is going to be. The next decade or more is going to be really bad from a public health standpoint.

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