I was waiting for it for months, and would have taken it in august, if it had actually come out on schedule.
We don't have the stats but it is in theory safer. That's not to say safe. It's safer.
The mRNA (and viral vector, which is just mRNA with extra steps in this case) involve genetic material hijacking your cells and making them make the spike protein. They then make them, display them, and eject them into the bloodstream.
I initially thought it was the displaying that might be the issue, you're teaching the immune system there to attack these cells, like muscle cells (cough cough heart) and nerve cells, hence the auto-immune Guillain-Barré stuff. The whole hijacking of your own cells to do it was what I was wary of.
Back in the day we had 3 broad types of vaccine. Live attenuated/live inactivated, in which whole viruses or bacteria are injected in, but they've been killed or weakened. Polio is a good example of these kinds, the west gets the wholly inactivated one while the third world uses the cheaper and easier to store one that's merely weakened and carrys a risk of becoming full blown polio. I've seen a lot of 'confusion' over this one, people saying the viral vector style is this old-school live-attenuated style. It very much is not. Shut that shit down where-ever you see it.
Then there's toxoid. The issue with tetanus isn't so much that our body can't learn to fight it, it's the toxin it produces. So the tetanus vaccine is actually a form of that toxin, teaching our bodies to effectively neutralise that, so that the fight against the bacteria can be had before it becomes too much of an issue.
Then there is subunit (under various names and forms). Basically its a fragment of the virus or bacteria that is injected, and your body learns to fight that fragment, so that when a virus covered in that fragment comes along, it gets fought quicker and easier. Hep B and shingles are an example of this
Now all of these old ones will have other things in them too, an adjuvant, a chemical you're immune system really doesn't like, something that's basically a mild allergenic and gets your immune systems attention so it will come and fight the thing you actually want it to, the subunit, or the toxin...
Novavax is a subunit vaccine, it's just the spikes (harvested from moths IIRC) and the adjuvant, rather than genetic code to hijack your cells to make and display it. But with subsequent reading, and the concerns over antigenic original sin and ADE developments, and the utter lack of any protection after 1m, I'm still refusing this one. I'm thankful novavax suffered continual delays, because it means I learnt more, and learnt to be more wary of it. Only if the aus government locks me up and forces me at gunpoint to take one, I'd opt for novavax. It's the least bad of the bunch at least in theory sure. But that doesn't mean it's good.
I was waiting for it for months, and would have taken it in august, if it had actually come out on schedule.
We don't have the stats but it is in theory safer. That's not to say safe. It's safer.
The mRNA (and viral vector, which is just mRNA with extra steps in this case) involve genetic material hijacking your cells and making them make the spike protein. They then make them, display them, and eject them into the bloodstream.
I initially thought it was the displaying that might be the issue, you're teaching the immune system there to attack these cells, like muscle cells (cough cough heart) and nerve cells, hence the auto-immune Guillain-Barré stuff. The whole hijacking of your own cells to do it was what I was wary of.
Back in the day we had 3 broad types of vaccine. Live attenuated/live inactivated, in which whole viruses or bacteria are injected in, but they've been killed or weakened. Polio is a good example of these kinds, the west gets the wholly inactivated one while the third world uses the cheaper and easier to store one that's merely weakened and carrys a risk of becoming full blown polio. I've seen a lot of 'confusion' over this one, people saying the viral vector style is this old-school live-attenuated style. It very much is not. Shut that shit down where-ever you see it.
Then there's toxoid. The issue with tetanus isn't so much that our body can't learn to fight it, it's the toxin it produces. So the tetanus vaccine is actually a form of that toxin, teaching our bodies to effectively neutralise that, so that the fight against the bacteria can be had before it becomes too much of an issue.
Then there is subunit (under various names and forms). Basically its a fragment of the virus or bacteria that is injected, and your body learns to fight that fragment, so that when a virus covered in that fragment comes along, it gets fought quicker and easier. Hep B and shingles are an example of this
Now all of these old ones will have other things in them too, an adjuvant, a chemical you're immune system really doesn't like, something that's basically a mild allergenic and gets your immune systems attention so it will come and fight the thing you actually want it to, the subunit, or the toxin...
Novavax is a subunit vaccine, it's just the spikes (harvested from moths IIRC) and the adjuvant, rather than genetic code to hijack your cells to make and display it. But with subsequent reading, and the concerns over antigenic original sin and ADE developments, and the utter lack of any protection after 1m, I'm still refusing this one. I'm thankful novavax suffered continual delays, because it means I learnt more, and learnt to be more wary of it. Only if the aus government locks me up and forces me at gunpoint to take one, I'd opt for novavax. It's the least bad of the bunch at least in theory sure. But that doesn't mean it's good.