Vaccines and Therapeutics 2.0 & 3.0 Merge

[canpakes]

… One of our Dr.’s came to our unit about a month ago to answer questions regarding the EUA vaccines and explained the mRNA process of how it enters and builds immunity in our bodies, but he left out information that the mRNA base is made of aborted fetal tissue. I NEVER thought I would see the day that working for a CATHOLIC hospital where I can pray with my patients that I would have to defend my judgement and religious beliefs of not wanting a forced aborted baby tissue based medical treatment. Therefore, I will not. I simply say NO and no means no.

I have a close relative who will not receive the COVID vaccine based on her belief that it is ‘made from aborted children’.

The reality of the situation may be a bit different:

Were fetal cells used in the COVID-19 vaccine’s development?

None of the COVID-19 vaccines contain any cells from aborted fetuses.

Something called fetal cell lines, which are different from actual fetal cells, were used in what is called a confirmation test for the Pfizer (Comirnaty) and Moderna (Spikevax) vaccines. The confirmation test was used to verify that these vaccines work, but they are not used in the production of the vaccines being administered to people.

Fetal cell lines have been grown in labs for decades. These cells have multiplied, creating generations of fetal cell lines. This means that the cells scientists use today no longer contain fetal tissue. Several religious groups and bioethics institutes have issued statements and guidance about the COVID-19 vaccines.

For example, The Vatican has issued clear guidance that permits Roman Catholics in good faith to receive COVID-19 vaccines that use fetal cell lines in development or production. Read the Vatican’s comments on the morality of receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.

We understand this topic is very sensitive and important for some, raising ethical and moral questions. We want everyone to feel like they are making a fully informed decision about getting a COVID-19 vaccine. We encourage anyone with concerns about the use of fetal cell lines in vaccine development to weigh the risks and benefits of the COVID-19 vaccines with their doctor.

https://www.manitobavaccine.ca/answers/ ... velopment/

More on this from a second source:

https://www.eakc.net/2020/12/31/do-pfiz ... wer-is-no/

[Gadianton]

The nurse resignation letter I give even odds of being real or fake. There are too many right-wing talking points to take it seriously. Maybe the exhaustion from the job is wearing on her powers of reason? I can totally understand medical staff feeling abused and exhausted and quitting. So factoring in exhaustion and the fact that Tennessee will have a lot of right-wing doctors and nurses, I can go with 50% on real.

This was the pinnacle of overreach:

God gave me an excellent immune system and it builds antibodies all by itself

And c'mon:

CATHOLIC...not wanting a forced aborted baby tissue based medical treatment

https://www.cacatholic.org/CCC-vaccine- ... eptability

If you really were that adamant about not taking the vaccine due to the abortion issue, then belaboring all the other marketing and conspiracy nonsense is too gratuitous to take seriously.

and "not a loving hospital that I thought I was employed by" we can't take seriously because those of us who read the first part of her letter understand that she felt her hospital had been treating them like crap from the beginning. It wasn't suddenly, the loving hospital turned mean right when they mandated vaccination.

I'll admit though, if mandating vaccination in the heart of right-wing hysteria country causes a mass exodus of medical staff, then it would be better to roll the mandate back and live with the suboptimal staffing vaccination.

[Chap]

...

And c'mon:

CATHOLIC...not wanting a forced aborted baby tissue based medical treatment

https://www.cacatholic.org/CCC-vaccine- ... eptability


...

There is no tissue from 'aborted babies' in vaccines.

Catholics accept the Pope's authority in matters of faith and morals. And as canpakes pointed out in his previous post:

The Vatican has issued clear guidance that permits Roman Catholics in good faith to receive COVID-19 vaccines that use fetal cell lines in development or production. Read the Vatican’s comments on the morality of receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.

And as for the nonsense about her wonderful immune system that makes antibodies all by itself - presumably she applies this to all the other vaccinations out there, such as the smallpox vaccine that destroyed a major killer of human beings by wiping our the variola virus? And she would refuse a yellow fever vaccine even if she was going to an area where that disease was endemic? And if an effective malaria vaccine was to be developed, she would be against that too?

If she had just stuck to the 'it's my body, so my choice' line, then even if she was a nurse the letter might have been plausible. But given the stuff in the text, I don't think the credibility of this letter is 50/50, not even close - unless there are some nurses out there that somehow skipped or ignored major parts of their medical training. I hope there aren't many like that.

[Res Ipsa]

Chap, there is some weirdness in American nursing education. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/imbala ... I've-it-up/

ETA: Found an interesting piece on the fetal cell issue. If you won’t get vaccinated because the vaccines are tested on (not grown on) fetal cells, there are lots of other medications you should stop taking: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/throughca ... -medicine/

[Chap]

Chap, there is some weirdness in American nursing education. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/imbala ... I've-it-up/

O my Goodness!! That article opens:

A recent nursing journal article reported the results of a rapid evidence assessment of therapeutic touch (TT) research, concluding:

No high-quality evidence was found for any of the benefits claimed.

This is, of course, no surprise to anyone. Therapeutic touch, a form of so-called “energy medicine“, is pseudoscience. What is surprising, and frankly disturbing, is the authors’ report that therapeutic touch

remains actively taught in many North American Colleges and in contemporary nursing literature and nurse education. A diagnosis of “Imbalanced Energy Field” is also included in the current North American Nursing Diagnosis (NANDA) manual [2018 ed.] . . .

The authors, Bernie Garrett, RN, PhD, and Marliss Riou, MSN, both of the University of British Columbia School of Nursing, undertook a rapid evidence assessment, covering 2009-2020, of studies exploring therapeutic touch as an intervention.

As background, the authors include a description of the alleged mechanism of action for therapeutic touch, its foundational assumption being that all humans possess “a massless human bio-energy field” within which “there may be balance which produces good health, or there may be an imbalance which may result in illness”. Practitioners claim they can, with their hands, but without actually touching the person, detect and manipulate a person’s energy biofield to “stimulate the body’s natural ability to heal itself” and to bring the energy biofield into better balance. The authors note that this idea of a metaphysical life force is prevalent in many cultures as well as in contemporary pop-culture, the “force” in Star Wars being one example.

(The latter might give an enterprising charlatan inspiration for a new form of “energy medicine”: the “force”. As with Oriental medicine, costumes could play a role in creating a theatrical placebo.)

Obviously, the authors continue, these notions “are in direct conflict with contemporary physics and biomedical science”. As well, “no underlying anatomical structures or physiology associated with the proposed human biofield energy has been identified” and it has not yet been proven to exist. The answer to this criticism, at least from some proponents, is that “the proposed energy is spiritual in nature and said to exist outside of” contemporary scientific knowledge.

The article contains a detailed discussion of the authors’ rationale for using the rapid evidence assessment, their methods, and their assessment of the studies, but we’ll skip to the end. (The article is open-access, so feel free to dig in.) Their conclusion:

After 45 years of study, scientific evidence of the value of TT as a complementary intervention in the management of any condition still remains immature and inconclusive:

Given the mixed result, lack of replication, overall research quality and significant issues of bias identified, there currently exists no good quality evidence that supports the implementation of TT as an evidence-based clinical intervention in any context.
Research over the past decade exhibits the same issues as earlier work, with highly diverse poor quality unreplicated studies mainly published in alternative health media.
As the nature of human biofield energy remains undemonstrated, and that no quality scientific work has established any clinically significant effect, more plausible explanations of the reported benefits are from wishful thinking and use of an elaborate theatrical placebo.

The authors then take their fellow nurses to task:

Given the deficiency of quality research evidence, it remains somewhat puzzling why nursing organizations and textbooks continue to support TT . . . as no other faith-based interventions have gained similar traction in nursing literature. The support of poor quality and biased research is clearly problematic and could affect the wider scientific credibility of the profession.

[Citations omitted.]

And, in a refreshing change from the typical “further research is needed”:

Without basic research, further clinical studies will present similar issues, and given the resources expended to date with no tangible evidence, similar work would seem unjustified.

If any research is to be done, the authors say, it should be to “establish a validated theoretic framework”:

As the claims TT practitioners make for, and their ability to detect a human biofield energy field can easily be tested with well-controlled practical experiments (as Emily Rosa attempted to do in 1998), it appears at best inept, and at worst disingenuous that this has not occurred to date.

[Res Ipsa]

Chap, if you do a search on "nursing" on the site I linked to, you'll see a number of articles on the same thing. How this kind of woo ended up in nursing schools probably has an interesting history.

[Chap]

...
ETA: Found an interesting piece on the fetal cell issue. If you won’t get vaccinated because the vaccines are tested on (not grown on) fetal cells, there are lots of other medications you should stop taking: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/throughca ... -medicine/

That list starts with Tylenol, Advil (Ibuprofen) and Aspirin ...

And of course there are no 'fetal cells' in the 'bits of dead baby' sense involved: these cells are very very distant descendants, though many generations, of cells taken from a single aborted fetus over half a century ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEK_293_cells#History

[ceeboo]

It will continue to work, largely because this entire discussion has become so politicized the players might as well dress up in costumes and wear Fauci masks.

[Gunnar]

There seems to be a growing number of promising research efforts to grow vaccines in plants. Here is just one example: Grow and eat your own vaccines?

he future of vaccines may look more like eating a salad than getting a shot in the arm. UC Riverside scientists are studying whether they can turn edible plants like lettuce into mRNA vaccine factories.

researcher in greenhouse
Messenger RNA or mRNA technology, used in COVID-19 vaccines, works by teaching our cells to recognize and protect us against infectious diseases.

One of the challenges with this new technology is that it must be kept cold to maintain stability during transport and storage. If this new project is successful, plant-based mRNA vaccines — which can be eaten — could overcome this challenge with the ability to be stored at room temperature.

The project’s goals, made possible by a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, are threefold: showing that DNA containing the mRNA vaccines can be successfully delivered into the part of plant cells where it will replicate, demonstrating the plants can produce enough mRNA to rival a traditional shot, and finally, determining the right dosage.

“Ideally, a single plant would produce enough mRNA to vaccinate a single person,” said Juan Pablo Giraldo, an associate professor in UCR’s Department of Botany and Plant Sciences who is leading the research, done in collaboration with scientists from UC San Diego and Carnegie Mellon University.

“We are testing this approach with spinach and lettuce and have long-term goals of people growing it in their own gardens,” Giraldo said. “Farmers could also eventually grow entire fields of it.”

Here is another one: The Bold Attempt to Grow a Covid-19 Vaccine in Plants.

Scientists are finding that fields of crops might be easier to manage than vats of cells

“People had questions around, well, can the plant machinery really make the virus? Because the virus doesn’t normally replicate there, is the machinery adapted to do that?” Matthew Miller, PhD, an infectious disease researcher at McMaster University in Canada, asked Future Human. “Now we’re understanding that, by and large, it is.”

Canada-based Medicago and the U.S. company Kentucky BioProcessing each hope to develop a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, using this technique. If either vaccine is proven safe and effective, it could become the first plant-based variety ever approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Medicago is already moving through phase 1 trials. Compared to traditional manufacturing methods, plant-powered vaccine production promises to be efficient and relatively worry-free. And, as concerns mount about the ability of manufacturers to meet international vaccine demands during a pandemic, its allure skyrockets. Those pursuing the greenhouse-based vaccine technique are now working quickly to overcome the final barriers to their success.

“People had questions around, well, can the plant machinery really make the virus? Because the virus doesn’t normally replicate there, is the machinery adapted to do that?” Matthew Miller, PhD, an infectious disease researcher at McMaster University in Canada, asked Future Human. “Now we’re understanding that, by and large, it is.”

Canada-based Medicago and the U.S. company Kentucky BioProcessing each hope to develop a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, using this technique. If either vaccine is proven safe and effective, it could become the first plant-based variety ever approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Medicago is already moving through phase 1 trials. Compared to traditional manufacturing methods, plant-powered vaccine production promises to be efficient and relatively worry-free. And, as concerns mount about the ability of manufacturers to meet international vaccine demands during a pandemic, its allure skyrockets. Those pursuing the greenhouse-based vaccine technique are now working quickly to overcome the final barriers to their success.

Both chicken and cell production options come with complications. Because viruses tend to mutate inside eggs, the extracted pathogens may stray too far from the version originally injected, making the vaccine less effective. And to use bioreactors to grow cells, companies must shell out for expensive fluids that keep the cells alive.

Most often, the tanks carry mammalian cells, like those from dog kidneys or hamster ovaries. “There’s always the possibility that those cells could be contaminated with some sort of pathogen that could affect humans,” Miller said. That’s because viruses that infect one mammal may hop to another, as the coronavirus has demonstrated. That nightmare came true in the 1950s when some polio vaccines grown in monkey kidney cells wound up carrying a potentially carcinogenic virus. Though the cancers never materialized in people who got the vaccine, the contamination sparked the development of federal guidelines to avoid the scenario ever happening again. Following the stringent but necessary regulations drags out the vaccine manufacturing timeline, Miller said.

Plant-based production relieves these concerns: Instead of a temperature-controlled factory and expensive liquids, crops need only sun, soil, fertilizer, and water. Though of course, the setup can get fancier — Medicago, for example, operates greenhouses with robotic arms that lift plants around. Additionally, no known viruses hop from plant to human, so that worry — and the precautionary measures they necessitate — disappear. Increasing production with bioreactors means repeatedly achieving a delicate balance between nutrients and cells or installing new and expensive equipment. But when crops are your factory, scaling up is more straightforward: Plant more rows.

Palmer and many other plant-based vaccine researchers want to turn this concept into reality with Nicotiana benthamiana, a close relative of the tobacco plant. It’s also the species of choice for Medicago’s and Kentucky BioProcessing’s SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. “I like to refer to it as the lab rat of tobacco research,” Palmer said. The species grows fast, handles lab conditions well, and most importantly, is susceptible to infection — a weakness researchers take advantage of.

I highly recommend linking to and reading both of the above articles. I only quoted a few of the more interesting points.

See also: https://www.bing.com/search?q=growing+v ... c225e2ce5e for more examples.

[Doctor Steuss]

There seems to be a growing number of promising research efforts to grow vaccines in plants. Here is just one example: Grow and eat your own vaccines?

With the growing "let's return to the dark ages" anti-GMO movement, this method of delivery might end up getting even more pushback (and a lower vaccination rate) than the IM method.

At least that's my knee-jerk reaction from your snippets and summary. (Maybe once my noggin' is firing on all cylinders, and I give it a more in-depth perusal, that'll change.)