How Safe is mRNA Vaccines?

 

How safe is mRNA vaccine?

 

lim ju boo

Post-doctoral CE Evolution (Cambridge)

·          

·         Viruses go through evolution by natural selection similar to all life forms. However viruses are able to mutate much faster and hence capable of evolving into much more strains and variants at unprecedented speeds compared to more complex organisms such as bacteria.  

·         There is likelihood that other viruses may also infect a cell simultaneously. When that happens they may switch genetic material to construct new type of viruses with distinctive behavior.

·         Mixed new strains and variants of SARS-CoV2 virus may arise through multiple mutations, and introduced into the body via compounded infections

·         In mixed infections they give  rise to different clinical presentations and complications

·         It is well-known that RNA viruses have very rapid mutation rates that allow it for fast evolution into numerous strains and variants. This may cause resistance to drug or vaccines due to changes in their genomic profiles and behavior.  

Through exchanges in their gene pool from mixed virus population it can rapidly evolve over time through natural selection into highly infectivity

One reason why virus such as SARS-CoV2 is able to mutate into various variants very rapidly is because of the simplicity and shorter RNA chains of about 30 kilobits.

By random mutations of changing their RNA sequence or codes new strains and new behavior of the subsequent variants arises

 

Origin of Viruses:

                        

There are many theories forwarded on the origin of viruses, probably including the corona group of viruses such as one given here;

https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-origins-of-viruses-14398218/#:~:text=Viruses%20may%20have%20arisen%20from,the%20evolution%20of%2C%20cellular%20life.

We shall look at this theory in another way later

However the origin of the corona virus that causes the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) are two highly transmissible and pathogenic viruses.

It is believed to have surfaced in humans at the beginning of the 21st century, and they are highly transmissible and pathogenic viruses

Many theories and conspiracies have emerged on the origin of the SARS-CoV2 group, among them  were thought to be from bats, pangolins, civet cats and even politically suspected to be artificially created by the Chinese in Wuhan, China

But then the genetically diversity or even similarity of the corona viruses related to SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV discovered in bats worldwide did not suggest this group of viruses were artificially created, or  have recently evolved.

Our current understanding on the origin and evolution of these two pathogenic corona viruses is that it may be a spillover from bat-borne coronaviruses, or from swine acute diarrhoea syndrome coronavirus (SADS-CoV) to pigs.

But going back to the theory on the origin of all viruses, it may have been the result of untold numbers of mutations from the first chemistry of RNA which may have taken place 3,800 million years ago by random combination of nitrogen compounds and nucleotide floating in the warm primordial oceans after Earth was created.

See list of Evolution of Life on Earth here:

https://scientificlogic.blogspot.com/             

Please also refer to Ir. Lau TO blog on the myriads of ways the Covid-19 virus could change their genetic combinations  here:

https://taionn.blogspot.com/ 

It is claimed that this novel vaccine is made from Messenger RNA (mRNA). What does that mean?

mRNA from  SARS-CoV2 is a molecular fragment of the virus  that carries the codes for  protein synthesis.  For instance, the message from mRNA is for the formation of their  spike proteins

mRNA was first described in 1956 by Elliot Volkin and Lazarus Astrachan. In addition to mRNA, there are two other major types of RNA: ribosomal RNA (rRNA) and transfer RNA (tRNA) that may be present in other cells, but we shall not go into them.  

According to Biontech this is how mRNA is made and how the vaccine works.

First, briefly explained, mRNA is synthesized by using the nucleotide sequence of DNA or RNA as a template. This procedure requires nucleotide triphosphates as substrates and is catalyzed by the enzyme RNA polymerase II. The process of making mRNA from DNA or RNA is called transcription,

Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccines are then made from this new process that is believed to be able to stimulate the body’s own immune response. These vaccines carry orders from the messenger RNA, including the genetic copies or code of a specific virus trait (virus antigen). The information allows the body to produce the antigen on its own.

The mRNA reassigns the information for the production of the antigen to the cell machinery that expresses the proteins. Cells in our body then present the antigen on their surface, and thus it activates the preferred specific immune response.

 

When the body comes in contact with the virus, the immune system recognizes the specific antigen. It then wrestles the virus in a targeted manner.

The entry of the COVID-19, into the host cell in humans involves the coronavirus spike protein that is located on the surface of the virus.

 

mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 are intended to provide our bodies with the code to produce the non-infectious virus according to the manufactures claim

 

The spike proteins instruct the cell’s machinery help stimulate a natural immune response. This response is also achieved principally through T-cells

 

Once a person is vaccinated and later comes into contact with SARS-CoV-2, the immune system will recognize the surface structure and will be able to combat the virus and destroy it.

 

Neutralizing antibodies targeted at SARS-CoV-2 circulating in the body will immediately bind to the virus by “neutralizing” it and inhibiting it from entering the cell

 

The T cells simultaneously also assist the immune system to fight intracellular infections and can also destroy the infected cells directly.
 
Thus, according to the manufacturer’s claim, unlike conventional vaccines, a mRNA vaccine does not contain any viral proteins itself, but only the information from the synthetic mRNA that our own cells need to produce a virus trait that triggers the desired immune response.

But the question we also need to ask is, if the vaccine merely mimics the surface structure that is synthetically-produced, and hence it is also bio-similar to the real virus

In such a scenario, wouldn’t this molecular fragment over time becomes biologically active into the real virus?

This would be very similar to how viruses first evolved other than the theories give above.

The supposedly nitrogen compounds or base plus sugars - pentose sugar (5-carbon sugar) and the phosphate group, that may have been floating in the warm primordial oceans between 3,800 to 4,000 million years ago may have formed the first nucleic acids, and subsequently integrated into nucleotides chains that then evolves into  real viruses. These compounds were pre-life as precursors to the real virus to be evolved later

It may seem to take a long, time under the natural environment where no other host were present 4 billion years ago.  But to my understanding, this may not be the case where a human host is already available right now for it to immediately hijack and evolve into a real virus exceedingly rapidly especially with a lot of human genomic materials to help it, exactly like bacteria being found to be very capable of incorporating stray DNA from the environment into their own for them to evolve into better and hardier strains. This is the real risk we need to consider.   

This is the same analogy with drugs that exerts the same pharmacological effect on the body, whether they were the original patented drugs or their generic bio-similars since their molecular structure, configuration and mass of both patented and generic are exactly the same. Both exert the same effect on the body.

In short, it to my mind, it makes no difference if the mRNA vaccine was synthetic or extracted from the real Covid-19 virus because their molecular similarity

I think this is the real risk no one so far is able to answer or for sure.

Logically, I have my personal reservations with this hardly-studied technology   

 

 

 

 

4 Billion Years of Life Creation

 

Evolution of the Universe and Life on Earth

 

 

Astronomical Big Bang 13.8 billion years

1.   4,500 – 4,400 million years ago (Mya). Accretion of Earth

2.   4,200 million years ago (Mya) Atmosphere and oceans form

3.   4,000 million years ago (Mya) Prebiotic chemistry became possible

4.   3,800 million years ago RNA world shown by the first chemical fossil available (viruses)

5.   3,600 million years ago the first DNA protein life came into existence

6.   3,500 million years ago LUCA: Archaea / Bacteria spilt and also photosynthesis (autotrophy) began

7.   2,700 – 1,900 million years ago the first eukaryotes / sexual reproduction became possible

8.   1,000 Mya ?

9.   650 Mya Metazoans

10.                575 Oldest large organisms

11.                555 Mya Oldest sponge fossils

12.                542 – 488 Mya Cambrian Radiation

13.                525 Mya Earliest vertebrates

14.                440 Mya First vascular land plants

15.                425 Mya First jawed vertebrates

16.                420 Mya Earliest terrestrial animals

17.                396 Mya First insects

18.                365 Mya Plants evolves seeds and first tetrapods

19.                354 Mya Insects flight

20.                350 Mya First land-swelling vertebrates

21.                240 Mya First dinosaurs

22.                210 Mya First mammals

23.                200 Mya Pangea breakup begins

24.                150 Mya Archaeopteryx / birds flight

25.                140 Mya Flowering plants

26.                128 – 124 Dinosaurs flight

27.                125 Mya Mammalian gliding flight

28.                105 – 95 Mya Gondwanaland breakup

29.                90- 80 Mya Formation of Galapagos geological hot spot

30.                57 – 53 Mya Whale ancestor

31.                55 Mya Australia breaks away from Antarctica

32.                51 Mya Mammalian powered flights (bats)

33.                50 Mya First fossil Equidae

34.                45.6 Whale ancestor

35.                40 Mya Primate order diverges

36.                35 Mya First grasses evolve

37.                30 Mya Old-world / new-world monkey spilt

38.                25 Mya Old-world monkey / apes split. Also Drosophila melanogaster / D. obscura split

39.                15 Mya Apes migrate to Asia

40.                6 -7 Mya Sahelanthropus

41.                5 - 4 Mya Common ancestors of chimps and humans. Formation of current Galapagos Islands

42.                3.6 Mya Panama Isthmus rise / Lucy fossil / Australopithecus afarensis footprints

43.                2.5 Tool use

44.                1.8 Mya Homo habilis out of Africa

45.                1.6 Mya Homo erectus in Asia

46.                600,000 years ago Human / Neanderthal spilt

47.                500,000 years ago Homo erectus use fire

48.                355,000 Homo heidelbergensis footprints

49.                200,000 years ago Anatomically modern human

50.                250,000 – 160,000 Homo sapiens

51.                120,000 Homo language possible

52.                100,000 years ago Wolf / dog split

53.                79,000 – 15,000 years ago Start of Wisconsin glaciations

54.                50,000 years ago. Humans migrate from Asia to Australia

55.                45,000 years ago. Megafauna extinction in Australia

56.                30,000 years ago. Human migration from Asia to North America

57.                14,000 – 10,000 years ago. Domestication of dog and Megafauna extinction in North America

58.                12,000 years ago. Early agriculture

59.                8,000 years ago Domestication of cattle

60.                6,000 years ago Domestication of horse

61.                3,000 years ago Iron tools

 

Major extinctions of life took place during:

62.                445 Mya in the Late Ordovician

63.                375 Mya Late Devonian

64.                251 Mya End Permian

65.                200 Mya Late Triassic

66.                65 Mya Cretaceous-Tertiary

Reference:

 

Evolution by:

 

Nicholas H. Barton

Derek E.G. Briggs

Jonathan A. Eisen

David B. Goldstein

Nipam H. Patel

The Possibility of 400 Quintillion Strains and Variants of Covid-19 Virus

                        Caution

The calculation given here is based purely on mathematical theoretical situation where order matter. But in real biological situation when a virus mutates, the mutation is randomized  

The formula for permutations (nPr) is used when the order matters. However, when considering potential mutations, order does not typically matter because mutations are random.  Hence, a different set of equations is used under a different article entitled: 

"Theoretical Mathematical Calculations vs. Randomized Biological Variations" which I shall write later separately 

Over this lazy afternoon today I was wondering if scientists have all along got their directions wrong by producing all sort of vaccines, without considering the various ways the sequence of the RNA of SARS-CoV-2 could arrange themselves to give rise to various mutagenic strains and variants which may render all existing vaccines to be useless.

               

For instance the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has now been found to offer limited protection against  the mutant South Africa variant of Covid-19 virus based on about 2,000 young people who had the vaccine,

 

I was looking at the various permutations and combinations their sequence could arrange themselves into various sub-sets of genomes and their capability of mutating in appalling ways and numbers we fail to even dream.  

 

I like to share my thoughts on this dilemma mathematically rather than biologically other scientists have been focusing on all this while.  

 

We know the nucleotides that comprise the RNA of the virus contain a nitrogenous base, a deoxyribose sugar, and a phosphate group which covalently link with other nucleotides to form phosphodiester bonds.

 

Nucleotides are the monomers that make up a nucleic acid, such as DNA or RNA. Nucleic acids are made of long strands of nucleotides 

 

A nucleic acid sequence is a succession of bases signified by a series of a set of five different letters that indicate the order of nucleotides forming alleles within a DNA

 

In short its nucleotides may have just three groups, but their individual group arrangements into nucleic acids through combination and permutation can run into millions of billions of codes.

  

The corona viruses of Covid-19 have single-stranded, positive-sense genomes that are the largest of all known RNA viruses. Its nucleotide chain is between 27 – 32 kilo base (Masters, 2006).

 

The genome of this Covid-19 is about is about 30,000 characters long. In short it has a 5 digit code, all are capable of rearranging the sequence to cause them to mutate into unthinkable numbers

 

Epidemiologists estimated the genomic mutation rate of SARS-CoV-2 viruses at 33 per year. Scientists use the presence of these mutations in SARS-CoV-2 genomes to assign a lineage or clade to each strain.

 

But I think initially its mutation rate can be extremely slow, but this may be a deadly misjudgment and a lethal mistake we are going to pay pricey if we intend to challenge this virus with a fight using all sorts of vaccines.

 

As far as I can foresee, we are not fighting with a virus, but we are raging a war against an Intelligent Designer who has put this virus here on this planet with an intended purpose.  

 

The Combination and Permutations of Mutations:

 

The number of permutations possible for the  SARS-CoV-2 to change the order of their sequence, assuming just a small fraction of 30 nucleotides were taken from its genetic code (the sequence of nucleotides in the ribonucleic acid (RNA) that determines the amino acid sequence of the spike proteins)  would be, assuming r = 10 of them were taken at a time

 

This would be:

 

ⁿ P _r = n! / (n – r)! = 30! / (30 – 10)! = 1 x 10¹⁴   = 100 trillion

 

However I do not think this would normally be the case, because as far as we know from our knowledge on genetics, cellular and molecular biology, mutation is normally randomly-assigned without considering the order of the arrangement of their sequence.

 

The sequence during mutation most likely is randomized rather than chosen in a specific order. In other words, mutation is normally a random change in its sequence

 

We would then have to look at this problem in another way if the sequence of their nucleotides is randomly arranged without any concern of order.

 

Put this in another way, we would have to look at how the sequence are combined which is more likely rather than permuted in a fixed arrangement.

 

Such randomly-assigned combinations would give rise to far more numbers of mutations, and subsequent strains and variants rather than through more through prescribed permutations

 

Mathematically we will then apply a different equation for this biological threat to mankind given as:

 

ⁿC_r  = n! / (n – r)! . r!

 

= 30! / 20! x 10! = 4 x 10 ²⁰ = 4 followed by 20 zeros or 400 quintillion

(1 quintillion = 1 followed by 18 zeros) 

(30!, 20! or 10! are all factorials. For instance 10! or 10 factorial is equal to 10x 9x 8x 7x 6x 5x 4x 3x 2x 1x = 3628800).

 

(We assume conservatively when we took only 30 nucleotides of this SARS-Covid 2 genome which may more likely to be the genetic code, or just 0.1 % of the genome, and were rearranged with 10 codes taken at a time) 

                   

If we assume this is more likely the  possibility, then there is no vaccine we need to look for any further  or any other preventive measure we need to enforce additionally against the capability of this virus to mutate randomly to a tune a 100 quintillion different variants

 

400 Quintillion Types of Vaccines vs. A 400 Quintillions

Mutagenic Variants?

 

If this virus uses just 0.1 % of sequence to rearrange themselves to a 400 quintillion different mutagenic combinations would scientists also wish to fight and match them with a 400 quintillion various types of vaccines?  

 Of course in practice it is not possible for this or any virus to mutate until such an astronomical number of times. If it could, it would probably have mutated into some thing else entirely different from being a virus, especially if it could capture RNA or even DNA from the host cells or from the environment

See how life is being evolved on Earth like various music being composed by the varying the arrangements of their musical notes. 

See under the paragraph "The Music of Life" in this link below: 

https://scientificlogic.blogspot.com/search?q=RNA+Explained

But let us assume it does not change into another form of life no matter how many quintillion times it mutated, although once again, it would not 

Assuming theoretically it does, and remains to be a virus.  Let's see how do we intend to challenge it with vaccines?

It is projected there will be 8.5 thousand million people on this planet by the year 2030 which is another 9 years time in the Year of the Dog (A dog’s life by then).

 

This means if this virus mutates to its theoretical limit, though it may not be likely through the Grace of God, then each individual on this planet in about 10 years time will need to receive at least 4.7 x 10¹⁰, that’s 47,000,000,000 different types of vaccines to cope with the flood of mutations this virus is capable of transforming itself by merely rearranging 0.1 % of its sequence

 

My personal feeling towards this predicament it is best we lay down all our biological arms – vaccines, drugs and anything other thing we can think of, and just ask for forgiveness from our Creator for trying to fight with Him as it is already clearly written that a third of the population of the earth would be killed by four angels and the army which they lead (Revelation 9:16-18).

 

This is an unyielding divine decree that must come to pass periodically to cut down overpopulation according to the prescribed laws of Natural Selection for the survival of the fittest and to get rid of the old and infirmed, those with comorbidities, those who are immunologically compromised or those genetically malformed as we can see from the nature of the mortality from this pandemic

 

If we look at this again, it is not just the horrendously huge numbers of mutant variants this virus is capable if we attempt to challenge them with various types of vaccines, but

 it is their sheers numbers too that can rain down on this Earth

This we may also need to consider here:

 

https://scientificlogic.blogspot.com/2021/02/our-vaccines-against-alien-invaders.html

 

Readers may also go into other general articles by Ir. Lau TO blog here:

https://taionn.blogspot.com/search?q=laU+TO

 

For other articles by this author (Lim Ju Boo) are found here:

https://taionn.blogspot.com/search?q=articles+by+Dr+Lim+