Here Come the Monkeypox Vaccines
Moderna now working on an mRNA monkeypox vaccine?
The news today is now pushing the availability of monkeypox vaccines for “some people.” The “some people” in question are health-care workers and people exposed to monkeypox. From MarketWatch (Monkeypox vaccines are available for some people. Here’s what you need to know.):
Jynneos (also known by the brand names Imvamune or Imvanex) has been licensed in the United States to prevent monkeypox and smallpox. The CDC estimates that the vaccine is at least 85% effective in preventing monkeypox. The U.S. has 1,000 doses of the Jynneos monkeypox vaccine in its national stockpile, and also has 100 million doses of the older smallpox vaccine, which could potentially be used.
But the Jynneos vaccine, given as two doses four weeks apart, is being reserved for health-care workers and people who have been exposed to monkeypox, and is not intended to be a mass vaccination effort. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonoses lead, and technical lead on COVID-19, said in a Q&A, “We will be making recommendations on who should be prioritized for this” soon.
(See my post from yesterday for some photos of horrible side effects of the older smallpox vaccine in babies.)
Jynneos is an old-school vaccine, described on Drugs.com as an “attenuated, live, non-replicating smallpox and monkeypox vaccine that elicits humoral and cellular immune responses to orthopoxviruses.”
It is apparently much safer than the older smallpox vaccine, ACAM2000. Unfortunately, the United States has a very small number of Jynneos vaccine doses but has stockpiled more than 100 million doses of ACAM2000. From Insider via Yahoo News:
The US has also stockpiled more than 100 million doses of another, older smallpox vaccine, called ACAM2000, but infectious disease experts warn it carries a higher risk of heart problems, brain swelling, blindness, and in the most severe cases (one in a million) — death.
Note: This article is headed up by a ridiculous propaganda video filled with lies while claiming that the “vaccine hesitant” are the ones spreading “misinformation.” Among the lies in the video - one, that an association between MMR vaccines and autism was completely debunked (check out this story from Sharyl Attkisson: CDC senior scientist: 'We trashed data showing vaccine-autism link in African-American boys') and two, that mRNA vaccines cannot alter your DNA (oh, it’s highly possible, based on one study).
Meanwhile, Moderna is now working on a monkeypox vaccine, and since their primary technology is mRNA, I am assuming this will also be an mRNA vaccine:
Now, if you’ve read me for a while you hopefully know that I am not anti-vaccine across the board, but I am more in favor of true informed choice, transparency, and vaccine safety. I am in favor of evaluating individual risk of disease vs. risk/benefit from a vaccine. In some cases, the risk of the disease may outweigh the risk of the vaccine, but I do not believe this applies to covid vaccines in the vast majority of (if not all) cases.
I have not done any research into the true safety profile of Jynneos, but for people at high risk such as healthcare workers, an old-school attenuated vaccine may be the smart choice, provided it is as safe as they say (which we are all now skeptical about, aren’t we?).
(My recommendation, if you are around 50 or older, would be to get antibody testing done first, as you may have gained immunity without the telltale shoulder scar. I’m right at that age where smallpox vaccines stopped being given out, with no scar, so I probably didn’t get it, but I would request a test to be sure.)
If the Jynneos vaccine is available to you, this would be the one to take at any rate.
The older smallpox vaccine, ACAM2000, is not so great. For one thing, it causes blisters on the shot area that can shed (emphasis mine):
ACAM2000 is a live virus vaccine (Jynneos is not) and as such it prompts a smallpox-like "pock" to form on the arm, in the days after it is injected.
"With ACAM2000 you do develop, it's called a 'take,' you develop the lesion on the arm — it's an indication of successful vaccination," McCollum said.
For her, it wasn't a big deal, because she knew what to expect — feeling "crummy" for a "couple days" — and she knew how to take care of the blister, which scabs, falls off, and eventually leaves a small scar.
"It has to remain covered, and you have to do frequent handwashing and appropriately take care of the site and any of the bandages," to avoid infecting others in the roughly three weeks after vaccination, McCollum said.
Ummm…am I reading here correctly that if people got the ACAM2000 smallpox vaccine, they could potentially spread smallpox to others? WTF?
Could this be how the oft-predicted return of smallpox is orchestrated? Either accidentally or on purpose?
Yeah, yeah, call me a “conspiracy theorist.” Eff off, disinformation hacks. As if this isn’t a mainstream bioterrorism concern.
Now here’s another big concern I have: Moderna mucking around with smallpox and mRNA.
They are working on a smallpox/monkeypox mRNA vaccine. Exactly how is that going to work? Here’s a diagram I found of the smallpox virus…I don’t see a “spike protein” here - what portion of the virus will the mRNA reproduce in the human body?
Would people’s cells be trained by mRNA to reproduce portions of the smallpox and/or monkeypox viruses? Can I say, yikes?
Also…how will getting yet another vaccine impact those folks whose immune systems are already stressed out from 3 or 4 or soon to be 5 covid shots?
Follow me on GETTR @stephaniebrail.
mRNA or viral-vector DNA vaccines both have the same potential issue: By fooling your own cells into producing the antigen that you're supposed to develop an immune response to, your immune system will almost certain attack the cells doing that, especially if it already has an existing response to that antigen! It's nuts to take any such "vaccine" more than once, because by the time you take the second, third, or Nth shot of that product, your immune system should already be primed against that antigen. Now this wouldn't be so bad if the mRNA or viral-vector DNA stuff stayed in the muscle that it was injected into. You'd get a sore arm because your immune system attacked the muscle cells there, but muscles readily regenerate after being damaged. Of course we now know the stuff doesn't stay there, it ends up all over the body, meaning that your immune system will attack cells everywhere that stuff goes and gets taken up, and some things, like heart tissue don't regenerate!
Of course, it would also be nuts to take such a "vaccine" even once if you already have any kind of immunity, whether from natural infection, or in my cause with 'pox, vaccination in my youth.
We do have to keep in mind the differences between the vaccines implemented. The original vaccine appears to just be the regular virus, and so it appears that it a dose-dependent vaccine that hopes to elicit an immune response and control for the initial viral exposure before it spreads and transmits. Of course, that method is extremely high in variability and you are likely to just infect someone and spread to others.
The attenuated vaccine is one where the virus has reduced functionality and replicability, and so this is intentionally crippling the virus to hope it doesn't spread through infection, but again a possible outbreak may occur especially in those who may be immunocompromised.
As to Moderna, I suppose they are using this and the "phenomenal" results of their mRNA vaccines and just translating it over. It wouldn't be difficult if they have the sequence of the binding antigen and just mess with it in a similar manner. Of course, there's a completely valid reason why people are looking at this with such leery eyes since this just raises a lot of red alarms.