Did you really get vaccinated to protect others??? & if so what was the Vacs pass all about?
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Thanks Larkswood12. I know different generations of same vaccine can be different but I wouldn’t have Moderna again currently. Not due to any immediate reaction, lots of vaccines cause short term effects that just have to be got through, but because I noticed other effects I didn’t get with Pfizer
Do you normally have the flu vaccine Fleur? I’ve never had one.
Vaccines have more than just attenuated virus on them, or whatever Pfizer/Moderna new-type build uses instead. eg an adjuvant, I think mercury can be used as one, meant to provoke your body into a reaction (in this case the reaction of producing antibodies, but it’s easy to imagine some people’s systems might get differently provoked).
@Ancient_Mariner really knows this stuff so perhaps he’ll come along and say I’m talking tosh.
Not being a doctor, I would suspect people with some auto-immune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, might need to beware of some types of vaccine?
The Pfizer & Moderna vaccines are both based on messenger RNA, designed to enable some of the virus proteins to be made by the recipients cells and then displayed to the bodies immune system as if they were the result of a natural infection. This technology has been around for quite some time, but was not as widely used as more conventional methods. There is no adjuvant used in this system, and it might be considered a more ‘pure’ approach to vaccination. mRNA also has a short lifespan in the body, and will be quickly broken down.
An adjuvant is something designed to make the immune system recognise and respond to a foreign marker more strongly. Adjuvant design is very important for more conventional vaccines, both to make sure they are effective without causing unwanted reactions.
The mercury you mentioned - usually Thiomersal (also called Thimerosal) was used at one time as a preservative, but for for obvious reasons should not have been added to vaccines for decades. I’m sure no western manufactured vaccine has contained thiomersal since the 1980s at the latest, though I couldn’t be certain about those made elsewhere using older technologies.
Historically, a lot of vaccines were produced in eggs (fertile hens eggs are ideal miniature bioreactors for growing viruses) but many people are sensitive to egg proteins, and it’s likely that many of the vaccine horror-stories have their roots in the old egg-based vaccines. As late as 1990 Wellcome were still making Yellow Fever vaccine in eggs, and I actually helped out a little with production in my last year there. With molecular biology techniques becoming mainstream in the 1990s many of the older methods of making vaccines were phased out, and recombinant viral proteins were made instead, giving a much cleaner vaccine with lower risk of a bad reaction. Some attenuated organisms are still used, but replaced as much as possible.
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Thanks for this thorough explanation Ancient.
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can you guess where the difference in the very similar vaccines could be, if the pharmacist is reporting 0 reactions on Moderna and 4 reactions on Pfizer?
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is it reasonable to think covid vaccines could re-trigger old conditions that had settled down as Corona was wondering? or is this more likely to be a different underlying cause
Call me Toni - it’s less of a reminder. 
The immune system is a complicated and sensitive thing - people can make antibodies to their own DNA (i.e. in Lupus). I’d guess the mRNA is either packaged slightly differently or has a sequence in the Pfizer that’s just recognised a little more easily as foreign by a small number of individuals. Also depending on the reaction, it might be caused by the recipients own immune system working correctly, recognising a viral infection and setting off the mechanisms designed to help deal with that kind of thing (i.e. raised temperature, aches & stiffness etc, caused by interferons released).
I’m also reminded of the ‘no-cebo’ effect, where people given a placebo think they’ve received a drug and experience expected side effects. It’s a reason why trials MUST be done blind, and preferably double-blind. Not saying that’s why Corona has experienced things, but it’s likely a cause for some individuals.
Some conditions can be stimulated by stress, and a major challenge to the immune system might be enough to trigger a response. Shingles was mentioned earlier, and classically that’s triggered by stress on the immune system - though I’ve had it at least 3 times as an adult, with no obvious cause or trigger that I was aware of.
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Thank you so much! Your clear explanations do so much to quell the fears that misunderstanding can cause.
Glad to help.
Yes, we get a letter offering it each autumn, thanks to our age. We usually go to the pharmacy to get it then take it to the infirmières who do the injection. You are perhaps not old enough… if so I envy you!
Thursday 18h59:
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Thursday 19h01
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Just found this, which seemed both amusing and appropriate.
I have worked with an Oxford prof who is distinctly ‘on the spectrum’ and I’m a little neurodivergent myself.
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Most of my family is on the autistic spectrum.
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Me 3
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Well, I know I’m a bit odd… always have been. It is a very rare condition… so rare it hasn’t been given a name… yet… 
Ahh.. that would be “the linguistic skills required to climb the French social ladder and ingratiating oneself with local dignitaries”
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ha ha … no linguistic skills required… they love my chocolate cake… and drunken chocolates
and folk are just folk… they all fart (as my dad used to say) 
How do you no its you and not the others?
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