Inside Medicine. What Are You Seeing? [COVID-19 medical news]

What state?

I’m in a low mask area of our state, but medical offices still require them and wear them properly - at least - those I go to. H and I went for routine blood draws to keep tabs on basic numbers today.

Same here re: the liver panel. Still, the article would seem to counter the CDC’s messaging on this subject, for instance here:
Myths and Facts about COVID-19 Vaccines | CDC.

MYTH: COVID-19 vaccines can alter my DNA.

FACT: COVID-19 vaccines do not change or interact with your DNA in any way.

Both messenger RNA (mRNA) and viral vector COVID-19 vaccines work by delivering instructions (genetic material) to our cells to start building protection against the virus that causes COVID-19.

After the body produces an immune response, it discards all the vaccine ingredients just as it would discard any information that cells no longer need. This process is a part of normal body functioning.

The genetic material delivered by mRNA vaccines never enters the nucleus of your cells, which is where your DNA is kept. Viral vector COVID-19 vaccines deliver genetic material to the cell nucleus to allow our cells to build protection against COVID-19. However, the vector virus does not have the machinery needed to integrate its genetic material into our DNA, so it cannot alter our DNA.

The article confirms only one thing: there is a some evidence that a piece of nucleic acid could be incorporated into some DNA of a single immortalized carcinoma cell line in some artificial system under the specific conditions used by the researchers. Why did the authors went on this adventure? Because there has been a previous paper demonstrating that the coronavirus itself can do this in a similar artificial system.

No, this is not a proof that modification of genetic material is what is happening in a complex living organism.

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Good, because no such proof was inferred. The CDC, on the other hand, has made some rather confident assertions and now I’m wondering about their proof, especially given this new re-search.

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Hmmm… your link is leading to some unrelated site.

The assertions are based on solid science. The vaccines were not developed overnight.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w

Huh - not sure why it’s linking to anything. I was referring to the re-search posted above by dietz. I’ll modify to avoid confusion.

Bizarre. :slight_smile:

If you take a hammer and hit a square peg very, very hard, it will fit throughout a round hole. This is what that paper referenced by dietz is all about. :slight_smile:

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Yes - I’m aware that the vaccines were based on existing “messenger technology” (if that’s the correct expression - no scientist, moi). Interesting article about the history of mRNA development. The question would be whether the current findings (again, the paper linked by dietz) contradicts the work on which the CDC is basing their statements. Or are they distinct issues? Further complicating the matter (IMO) is this finding regarding the virus itself:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2109066118

Excerpt:

No evidence of SARS-CoV-2 reverse transcription and integration as the origin of chimeric transcripts in patient tissues

There is interest in understanding the mechanisms that underlie reports that patients infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) remain PCR positive many weeks after initial infection. The recent paper by Zhang et al. (1) suggests a potential explanation of this phenomenon by claiming that SARS-CoV-2 RNA can integrate into the genome of infected human cells. The authors also reanalyze RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data and report that SARS-CoV-2−host chimeric reads are present in cells and patient tissues. Given the potential implications of this research on the long-term impacts of COVID-19, we feel that it’s necessary to scrutinize the evidence presented.

To determine whether SARS-CoV-2 RNA might be retrotranscribed and integrated into the genome, the authors conducted a proof-of-principle experiment where human lung cells (Calu3) and kidney cells overexpressing class I transposable elements and wild type (HEK293T-L1/HEK293T) were infected with SARS-CoV-2 and subjected to high-throughput DNA sequencing (1).

The very low frequency of identified chimeric events (Table 1) suggests that SARS-CoV-2 integration into the host genome is unlikely.

So, in effect, “it’s there because we forced it in there?” Sorry for the unscientific language. Would that be a publishable conclusion?

I have a background in cellular biology, but now as a clinician it’s been so long since I did anything germane to DNA/RNA that most of this stuff is WAY over my head.

You’re cherry picking a VERY narrow piece of information out of a VERY large body of Covid evidence. Why, admittedly not a scientist, do you feel qualified to not only assess this, but to be critical? It comes across as though you want the data to say something, and now you’re digging for affirmative evidence.

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A basic correlation that I’m seeing is that Covid, itself, does pretty much every side effect the vaccines do (except the sore arm?), but much worse. Choose your odds.

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We’re in the deep south. A group of parents recently tried to sue our city schools over enforcing a mask mandate, even though we remain in the high risk category. The suit was kicked out only because the mandate was dropped by the time the judge reviewed it.

That has to be really frustrating. Hopefully Covid will truly move on this time and the polarization from it can fade away too.

In the meantime, I’m still seeing/hearing sad stories (bad hospitalization with recovery or death) almost totally from the unvaccinated, esp if they’re younger (<75). Why they choose lower odds mystifies me. It makes no logical sense.

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You are jumping to conclusions, as I have made no such qualification. It did strike me as an odd contrast - it must have struck others that way as well. That can be clarified or corrected, assuming you or another poster has the ability to do so.

My apologies. I thought you posted the original too, when it was @dietz199.

Here’s my view of the scientific method…it’s like the reverse of Jenga. You try to build a tower, starting with one block. Sometimes you get a pile of rubble, sometimes you get a tower. It the latter case though, you always have random rubble pieces laying about, even in the sturdiest tower.

So it goes with scientific consensus. Even the most robust data set, climate change or the general safety of vaccines as an examples, there are always outlier studies. You can have a near perfect tower, but there’s always a little rubble.

Debating a single block, outside of the context of the whole, regardless of whether it was in the tower or on the ground, is really meaningless. It has zero relevance to the question is there a tower or not, regardless of what it says.

When the original question was posited, does this single Jenga block mean the whole tower the CDC is relying on is bad, it struck a nerve. I vented at the wrong person. Again, sorry.

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No harm no foul. However, at least according to Dr. Syed (Dr. Been), this is one intriguing piece of work. (NB: have no opinion on the credentials or motivations of Dr. Been; I enjoyed his youtube summary of the paper linked above and it’s given me a deeper understanding of the experiment’s conclusions).

BTW you shouldn’t vent at Dietz either for posting a peer-reviewed published work. :slightly_smiling_face:

Whether it will remain an outlier is a TBD. No doubt it’s created some definite questions and will be grounds for lots of additional re-search. For instance, someone either needs to connect the dots, or establish that there is no such connection, between in-vitro and in-vivo. And not just for the liver.

I understand the analogy you provide but you would probably agree that consensus sometimes does yield to breakthrough. One of the main benefits of scientific inquiry is that it continually tests the strength and integrity of that tower.

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I agree wholeheartedly.

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Maybe it’s time to stop and take a breath…California is entertaining the idea of requiring vaccination for anyone 0 age and older as a pre-requisite for attending daycare and school.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13759

’ Among boys with a history of prior infection and no comorbidities, the risks of myo/pericarditis after even dose one appear to outweigh the benefits in both delta and omicron. the RR of the first dose may be more than 6 times the risk of COVID-19 hospitalization.

‘Our first risk-benefit analysis considered the sex of the child as well as multiple scenarios including the setting of previous infection, with and without medical comorbidities, delta and omicron variants, and just one instead of two doses of vaccination. For adolescent boys without medical comorbidities, their risk of post-vaccination dose two myo/pericarditis exceeded their risk of COVID-19 hospitalization during delta after one dose of vaccination. During omicron, the additional benefit of the second dose cannot be estimated due to the reduced VEH with dose two compared to dose one. Our risk-benefit analysis also does not favour the second dose, or even one dose, in all boys 12–17 with a history of infection. However, clinicians are cautioned to consider the specific risks associated with the child’s health circumstances in their guidance. In girls with or without medical comorbidities, our risk-benefit analysis does not favour two doses if they have a history of SARS-CoV-2 infection. By some estimates, even a first dose after previous infection is not favourable for girls 12–17 without comorbidities.’

and…

When looking specifically at COVID-19 in children without medical comorbidities, Germany has reported an infection-fatality rate of 0/3.2 million,[20] which should also be used to help inform vaccination policy when considering the myo/pericarditis described in this article. Furthermore, the vaccination’s benefits in transmission prevention may be quite limited as no difference in household transmission from vaccinated vs. unvaccinated was detected for the delta variant.[58]

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Opinion piece in CNN:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/04/opinions/covid-19-cardiovascular-symptoms-sepkowitz/index.html?fbclid=IwAR1H8WxJxKpGHSNPNwTBnP4etwIRoSwSEa65f2FDAyjSCI1xDechSIYfDn4

Two eye-opening points:
Because so many deaths were due to respiratory failure, many colleagues I talked with expected to find progressive pneumonia with lung destruction as the cause. However, researchers discovered something entirely different: blood clots in the lungs (also referred to as pulmonary emboli). Furthermore, they found countless additional smaller clots in many other organs as well.

The results are clear and very significant: Compared with similar people who had not been infected with SARS-CoV-2, those who recovered from infection had many more blood clots, heart problems and strokes.

Any thoughts?

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