I know this rumour is pretty widespread, but it is scientifically impossible for any of the COVID vaccines to alter your DNA, and there is no evidence of it happening either.
With the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) they literally cannot even physically get into the nucleus of your cells where your DNA is, and even if they could, they don’t have the fancy enzymes required to turn the mRNA into DNA then actually modify the DNA. Though the ADV-based ones (Oxford/AZ and J&J) can get into the nucleus, they again lack the enzymes that would be needed to actually modify DNA:
COVID-19 is a new type of coronavirus that causes mild to severe cases. Here’s a quick guide on how to spot symptoms, risk factors, prevent spread of the disease, and find out what to do if you think you have it.
www.webmd.com
As I said before vaccine side effects are caused by your innate immune system responding to what it thinks it a threat. A lot of people don't get any, or simply get a sore arm for a couple of days, but even people who have their immune system respond more strongly, still generally quite quite mild symptoms that are common with many other vaccines, which can be easily treated with some paracetamol/ibuprofen and a bit of rest, and which go away within a few days once the adaptive immune system takes over from the innate part. The data on this is clear, though I also know multiple people who had AZ, and they had no issues beyond a sore arm and feeling a bit tired for a day or so.
One of the key things to remember when it comes to more serious apparent side effects is that coincidences absolutely do happen when you're vaccinating people at this scale, and one of the things human beings are great at is seeing patterns in things that are unrelated. Scientists figure out if it's just a coincidence by seeing if the number of people reporting something is higher than we’d expect by chance. That's how we found out there's a tiny chance of a certain kind of blood clot with the AZ vaccine, but all the reports people have made of farting post vaccination (139 in the UK for Pfizer, 393 for AZ, remember we've used AZ more than Pfizer) haven't led to it becoming a listed side effect.
I don't know which country you're in, but the AZ vaccine is safe and effective. I'm in my 30s so because of the tiny blood clot risk I wouldn't normally be offered it here, but there's a 1/3 chance it's the vaccine I got in the clinical trial I'm in, and I was fine with that because the risk is tiny (it's a 1 in 50,000 chance, I'm 208x more likely to die in a car accident), it's only for a few weeks after vaccination that it can occur, they can be treated, and as before, COVID itself causes far more blood clots.
Scientists absolutely have figured out how safe the vaccines are. Hundreds of thousands of people joined trials to test the vaccines for you, and since then billions of doses of the authorised vaccines have been given around the world. All the data we've had since then hasn't changed what we know about their safety and effectiveness.
Can you tell me exactly are you waiting for confirmation of?
Yes, because the evidence we have (
for example) indicates that prior infection is not as good as protection from the vaccines, and there's no downside to getting vaccinated if you've previously survived COVID.
The evidence we have shows that they do significantly reduce transmission of the virus, and significantly reduce your odds of being infected, even before we talk about how effective they are at preventing symptoms and how incredibly effective they are at preventing serious cases and deaths. Delta being
much more infectious is more of a challenge when it comes to the transmission side of things, but as you're still far less likely to get infected to begin with if you're vaccinated, you're therefore inherently less likely to infect others as a result.
There's many reasons that a lot of vaccinated folks are still wearing masks, and while part of it is that no vaccine is perfect, so while they help, they can't magically make someone who is immunosuppressed from chemo, have the same immune system as a healthy 20 year old, and that there are some people, particularly kids, who still can't get vaccinated, it's mostly it's that it's sensible to have a multi-layered strategy against something like this, and masks are a very easy component of that.
This is because the flu strains that circulate each year vary, which means scientists have to try to predict which strains will be prevalent, and unfortunately sometimes their predictions aren't correct. The same doesn't apply with COVID so far as we know that the authorised vaccines are still working well even with Delta.
It's true that scientists and public health officials aren't able to perfectly predict the future, but that doesn't mean that just because sometimes their predictions have been wrong, it's better to ignore what the overwhelming majority of doctors, scientists, and researchers, are telling you. After all, you went to the hospital recently, which means you trusted doctors enough to get treatment from them for whatever that was, why does that trust apparently disappear when it comes to this?
I'm sorry that (likely exhausted) nurses and doctors didn't spend a load of time trying to convince you to get vaccinated, but that literally isn't their job, and as someone who has spent a load of time talking to vaccine hesitant people, holy moly it can be utterly exhausting and difficult, and I don't have to try to do it in the middle of a hospital shift, but hey, let's see how you respond to someone actually trying to do that for you here:
I'm pleased to hear you generally don't get that sick, but there's a lot of other people who said the exact same thing, who were really healthy, who still either got really sick and died, had to spend a lot of time in hospital to survive it, and/or were left with
long term damage from it. I've got multiple friends with long COVID and it's utterly terrible, especially because it isn't clear that they're ever actually going to recover.
The problem with not getting vaccinated because you don't think it'll be much of an issue if you're infected, even aside from impacts on anyone else or making it easier for the virus to come up with new mutation inside you, is that by the time you're infected and very sick, it's too late to get vaccinated, and considering how super infectious Delta is, it's more a case of when, rather than if, you'll get infected by it.
As I've now said something like 3 times in this thread, the authorised vaccines are not "experiments" anymore because hundreds of thousands of people joined clinical trials to test them, the first ones starting roughly 16 months ago, and the phase 3 results being peer-reviewed and published last year (
Pfizer,
Moderna) and early this year (
J&J). All they're still checking with those trial participants now is how long the protection lasts, as there really isn't any kind of biological mechanism that could cause a side effect to occur after a few months.
Here's a thread from an immunologist on this, and an article from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia that goes over how
it’s never taken more than about 2 months for a side effect to occur after vaccination.
While I get that people can be unsure about new technology, the fears around the mRNA vaccines aren't well founded, partly because of the sheer amount of data we have on how safe and effective they are, but also because the way they, and mRNA itself, works, the mRNA itself is only in your system for a few days. It's literally destroyed by the enzymes in your cells once the ribosomes have read it, and even if it wasn't, mRNA is a super fragile thing that quickly breaks down naturally in your body anyway. I mean Pfizer has to be stored frozen at -70C (-94F), and once a dose has been mixed up for use, it has to be used within 6 hours or thrown away because it'll have degraded too much to be effective. Now remember your body is normally around 37C (98F). As such, one of the key challenges with these vaccines was just getting the mRNA to last long enough to get into some cells and get to the ribosomes without being destroyed first.
They have been incredibly thoroughly tested, all of them are definitely vaccines, and all of them actually use quite a similar technique to help train your immune system, J&J and AZ just go in at a slightly higher level (conceptually) than the mRNA ones do.
If you've got any particular concerns left, go ahead and ask and I'll see if I can clarify things. I'm in a trial for a
new vaccine being tested so made sure to do my research first, plus I find this stuff pretty interesting anyway.
