> From participants’ blood samples, the researchers looked for immune features that were different between the two groups. They found several differences in immune cell populations; those with PVS had lower levels of effector CD4+ T cells and higher levels of TNF-alpha+ CD8 T cells — both are types of white blood cells — among other differences.
TNF is one of the suspected accomplices in a lot of autoimmune conditions, and the target of a class of drugs called TNF inhibitors. (Not everyone responds to them equally well, so TNF might not play an equal role in all patients; other people respond better to drugs that target various interleukins or integrins). These aren't the cheapest drugs ever, so it would be hard to experiment with off-label use, but if TNF plays a role in long COVID/immunization reactions, I'd be very curious whether TNF inhibitors could help.
Would be interesting if the vaccine was simply excessively powerful in doing its job rather than a more direct issue. Like thanks for saving millions of lives, but did you have to be so loud?
There were probably hundreds of thousands saved in even in what at the time were considered very low risk demos. It may be over 1 million (if you mutliply infection fatality rate times number of people in the 0-49 age demo, you get just over a million). And, perhaps more relevant, the vaccine probably prevented a numer of long covid cases that is a multiple of that and many times higher than the reaction this article is writing about.
It was in no way reckless. All interventions have risk. If a vacccine saves a life/prevents long term illness for 10x as many people as it hurts, it's a highly positive intervention, and the numbers for these were probably much better than 10x.
"In the medium-term post-COVID period, the risk of death was reduced by 8% for those who had been vaccinated while in the long-term post-COVID period, the risk of death almost doubled for those who had been vaccinated. While in the medium term, there was a reduction in mortality risk for those who took two or three doses, in the long term the risk of death was greater for those who took one or two doses."
All lives are only saved in the medium term, humans age and die.
> the risk of death almost doubled for those who had been vaccinated
Not when you adjust for age. People who survived COVID after vaccination being an older population then end up dying faster, but few people die in any given year.
Doubling the base death rate suggests the populations will equalize in roughly 35 years. Though some people who survived the vaccine will still be alive in 40 years.
PS: The 8% decrease and doubling are looking at wildly different underlying populations/rates.
All of the data that would be needed to answer this question is hopelessly confounded and corrupted. There wasn't even reliable tracking of the highly gamed definition of "vaccinated" in the first place. The only real control group that ever existed was in the manufacturers' trials, and the only thing they attempted to measure was prevention of symptomatic infection.
There's a whole article there talking about measurable immune system changes from post-vaccine syndrome... How do you explain those away? Psychosomatic changes to White blood cell counts?
A doctor dismissing something they don’t know the cause of as psychological is common, but that doesn’t mean the diagnosis is correct.
Many things used to be thought of as psychological before we found the underlying physical causes. It’s just as meaningless an explanation as “God did it.”
Those examples I referred to where the generally accepted practice not just individual opinions. IE many doctors/researchers all dismissed the same thing.
> Typically spike protein can be detected for a few days after vaccination, but some participants with PVS had detectable levels more than 700 days after their last vaccination.
Something like this; cells with vaccine RNA are producing spike protein (at least) but are spared by the immune system, possibly for good reasons (such as being part of critical organs or tissue).
These cells will eventually recycle, which is why the symptoms dissipate over years.
The advertised mechanism of action was that once the mRNA itself had dissipated, the cells would no longer create spike proteins. The idea wasn't that the shots would cause some of your own healthy cells to become targets of your immune system.
When we don't understand how the spike protein is still being created in the first place, I don't think we could say with any confidence that it will stop once cells are cycled out.
>When we don't understand how the spike protein is still being created in the first place
One possibility is due to reverse transcription of the spike production into the human DNA, as demonstrated in vitro by https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/44/3/73
My understanding was rather that the immune system removes cells with vaccine mRNA, which causes the various advertised negative side-effects. When the cells are removed, spike protein production stops.
Apparently it's now downvote-worthy to simplify recapitulate claims that were made in bog standard "here's how the mRNA vaccines work!" videos in 2021.
TNF is one of the suspected accomplices in a lot of autoimmune conditions, and the target of a class of drugs called TNF inhibitors. (Not everyone responds to them equally well, so TNF might not play an equal role in all patients; other people respond better to drugs that target various interleukins or integrins). These aren't the cheapest drugs ever, so it would be hard to experiment with off-label use, but if TNF plays a role in long COVID/immunization reactions, I'd be very curious whether TNF inhibitors could help.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNF_inhibitor