one.opinion

This is an interesting article, but it is 100% speculation, and 0% data. I’ll be happy to read the article when it is published.

But it is NOT gene therapy. Plain and simple. Back up your statement with evidence. Who are these other scientists and where can we read about what they said?

For those interested in how the Johnson & Johnson vaccine works: https://www.vcuhealth.org/news/covid-19/johnson-and-johnson-vaccine-how-is-it-different

False. It will not change your DNA. None of the vaccines will change your DNA. Many vaccines do contain antigens or parts of antigens. Some newer vaccines do not. I posted a direct quote from the CDC website showing this. The adenovirus is a vehicle for delivery of the vaccine, not the vaccine itself. If the adenovirus was the vaccine, it would be completely ineffectual in mounting an immune response against a different virus. If you stopped spreading misinformation, chatting would be a whole lot nicer.

The J&J uses the adenovirus to introduce DNA that encodes the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. The adenovirus spike protein IS NOT the agent that elicits the development of immunity. Spike proteins are very common on viruses and typically initiate binding to a target cell at the beginning of a viral replication cycle. Some vaccines, like the traditional flu vaccine, do target one of these binding-type proteins. The spike protein equivalent on the influenza virus is called hemagglutinin. This is false. No vaccines work by altering the DNA of the recipient. Vaccines work by introducing a target for the host immune system to build a response to. Traditionally, this has been done by direct introduction of a specific antigen. The new mRNA vaccines do this indirectly - essentially introducing a recipe for the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Human cells are then able to make the protein and initiate an immune response to it. That way, the body is already prepared to fight off the virus, should it be encountered. ADE has been a problem and related safety issues did stop trials for vaccines against dengue and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). However, this has not been an issue with the current COVID vaccine. It is true that there have been bad reactions to the vaccines, that is indisputable. However, the incidents are extremely rare and present an extremely limited risk compared to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. You cannot think about this rationally and refuse the vaccine because of the risk.

By minimize, what I mean is having a normal visit with my parents, without masks, including hugs and sharing a meal, etc, while doing what I can to reduce the risk of exposing them to a deadly virus. You are making a silly point to combat a pretty straightforward comment. Relatively, sure. That relative risk would be even lower if you were vaccinated. Then why would you possibly NOT want to get a vaccine? The CDC still recommends a few precautions until all parties are fully vaccinated, but that's the whole point of the vaccine - to help us bring life closer to the way we used to experience it. The only issue with vaccination is that there are way too many people that are either apathetic or anti-vax. The more people delay/avoid vaccination, the longer this pandemic will last and the more disease, suffering, and death will occur. I'm not saying we should fear death. Personally, I'm looking very much forward to the next life! However, I do not want to contribute in any way to the illness, suffering, or death of anyone else. I'm fully vaccinated more because I can care for others that way, rather than the personal benefit to myself. Do you have any sort of reason for this opinion, or is it basically just intuition? Most people have been very willing to wear masks this year and check out what happened to the flu (in red). Flu cases dropped like a lead balloon once people started wearing masks and have not yet picked back up again. MASKS. WORK. Again, if you want to move on to life after mask-wearing then great, go get vaccinated and encourage others to do the same. Herd immunity only works when a high majority (we don't know what that number is for this novel pathogen) of the herd actually acquires immunity. I won't even bother arguing with the conspiracy theories. The honest truth is that there have been adverse reactions. However, the rate of these incidents is something along the order of 5 in 1,000,000 vaccinations. The risk of the virus is much greater. You cannot think about this rationally and refuse the vaccine because of the risk.

There is a distinct difference between swelling (inflammation) and spasming (muscle contraction). Having said that, I should have considered the smooth muscle contraction in the walls of coronary arteries. On the flip side, you have not presented anything supporting the statement that the vaccine has caused heart attack by any sort of mechanism. No, let's check out how the CDC defines a vaccine. Vaccine: A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease. Vaccines are usually administered through needle injections, but can also be administered by mouth or sprayed into the nose. As you see, although traditional vaccines involve introduction of part (or all) of a pathogen-specific antigen, the key to a vaccine is in the immune response, not the substance that directs the immune response. The Moderna and Pfizer mRNA vaccines are just as much of a vaccine as the AstraZeneca. Notably, all of these vaccines carry a miniscule risk compared to COVID. I'll repeat this point because it is important - you cannot think about this rationally and refuse the vaccine because of the risk.

Yes, fine - that is a subjective term. How about this? I am looking forward to spending time with my parents, while doing what I can to minimize their exposure to a deadly virus.

Irrelevant and off-topic.

What does it do? Vaccines essentially "trick" your immune system into thinking there is a threat, and mounting a specific response to an actual threat mimicked by the vaccine. So although the vaccines are completely safe in an overwhelming percentage of cases, it basically prepares the body to fight off infection much more quickly and effectively - usually preventing disease altogether.

The vaccines absolutely do NOT alter your genome.

Exactly. There is risk of a negative reaction, but it is extremely rare. I've had both my doses. I felt cruddy for a day after my second dose, but have been fine for 3 weeks now. Looking forward to safely doing things like spending time with my parents again.

Arteries do not swell closed in a day. They become closed after years of atherosclerotic build-up. A nearly closed artery combined with a blood clot is a possibility, but I don't know enough about the case. Very rare blood clots have been reported associated with the vaccine, but the statistics show us that the chances of having a blood clot due to an airplane flight are greater than blood clots associated with the vaccines available in the US. I don't know if the vaccine used in India has a different rate of blood clotting issues. Some people have indeed had a anaphylactic shock response to vaccination. Vaccine centers have patients wait for 15 minutes before driving away for a reason! However, there are exactly zero cases of anyone immediately acquiring Bell's Palsy or Guillain-Barre syndrome, or full paralysis, or anyone that died on the spot after vaccination. There were reports of some issues days afterward, but it is extremely difficult to rule out simple coincidence. Reputable story on Henry Aaron's passing - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/31/us/hank-aaron-death-covid-vaccine.html Reputable story on Marvelous Marvin Hagler's passing - https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-marvin-hagler/fact-check-boxer-marvin-haglerwas-notmurderedbythe-covid-19-vaccine-he-died-of-natural-causes-idUSL1N2LH22J An educated choice is great, provided it is truly educated. Choices based on someone's wild instagram story is not an educated choice. So 500,000+ Americans have died from COVID, a number even the wildest speculations regarding vaccine dangers can't come close to approximating. You cannot think about this rationally and refuse the vaccine because of the risk.

Agreed, Trump did not break any laws. Adding more Supreme Court Justices would also not break any laws. If adding Judge Barrett (in 8 days) was good and right, then you are stuck trying to explain why blocking the nomination of Merrick Garland (for 8 months) was good and right. It is plain to anyone looking objectively that both sides will do ANYTHING in their power to shape the Supreme Court. Blatant hypocrisy will not stop anyone.

The Constitution says nothing about the number of Supreme Court Justices. Both political parties will do what they can to try to shape the Supreme Court in their favor. It is absurd to pretend that this type of behavior is one-sided.

Your reluctance to actually read anything related to my point really doesn't support your claim that you are open minded. That's fine. It just doesn't do much to support your credibility. However, in case anyone reading is interested, I'll give some more details. One of the early reports on the Human Genome Project (reference here) showed a little over 200,000 different identified endogenous retrovirus (ERV) sequences. A few years later, the chimpanzee genome was also sequenced (reference here). When comparing genomes, researchers discovered that 279 ERV sequences were specific to chimpanzees and 82 where specific to humans. As I mentioned earlier, a number of ERVs were expected to be specific to one genome or the other since acquisition of infection and eventual fixation in the genomes would be expected since divergence of the two lineages is hypothesized to have occurred about 5 million years ago (more on this later). So if we do the math, 361 out of 200,000 works out about 0.17% difference when we look at the compared ERV profiles of humans vs chimps. Or if we flip that around, 99.83% similarity. Alignment of the two genomes confirms that those 99.83% figure really does represent sequences that are in the same chromosomal position and have very similar DNA sequences. Now on to the lineage split time estimate. The best tool scientists have available for estimating the date of the lineage split is the "molecular clock". The concept is pretty simple, but it is more difficult to put into practice. You may remember an equation from a physical science class that distance = rate x time (d=rt). Of course, this can be re-written as t=d/r. Distance, in this case, is the genetic distance between two sequences and rate is the calculable mutation rate. The distance value and rate value can differ a bit, depending on what sequence is being analyzed, so scientists have been very careful to select many reasonable sequences, rather just relying on a small number, to build that clock. One landmark paper in 2001 (reference here) used 53 sequences that were intergenic (between genes) and non-repetitive (to prevent any skewing of the numbers) to try to accurately measure the rate of divergence in DNA sequences not under any selective pressure. Recognizing that this technique may not be highly precise, the authors estimated that the divergence between the two lineages occurred somewhere in the range of 4.6 to 6.2 million years ago. The fossil record for the human lineage is more complete than the chimpanzee lineage, but the fossil evidence is also consistent with this particular window. Regarding the rate value calculations, estimates from the early 2000s have been further supported by the more recent ability to sequence DNA from Neanderthal remains. You are misunderstanding this point. I'm sorry, I should have been more clear. The MRCA is the same species. Picture some guy named Frank Smith tracing his family tree back, including all the current cousins he could identify, and finding the one guy where the surname "Smith" came from. That Smith would be the most recent common ancestor to Frank and all his cousins. In Frank's case, and in the case of the mtDNA barcoding, the MRCA is still the same species. And also like Frank's case, finding that MRCA does not mean that there were not any Smiths in previous generations. The study just does not mean what think it means. Additionally, it makes zero sense to use something you don't believe as argumentative evidence. It is like me arguing that the existence of Santa Claus means that the Tooth Fairy isn't real.

Interestingly, the DNA evidence you won't look at and the fossil evidence you won't look at support this same conclusion. I also hesitate to call it "proof", but the evidence is strong and the evidence is there. So you refuse to engage with the evidence, yet continue to tell yourself that you are open minded, breezing on past to your next argument rather than taking a serious look. You may be able to fool yourself, but I doubt you are fooling anyone reading the thread. You seem to have forgotten, but I already debunked this claim. The mitochondrial barcoding - at best - shows us a most recent common ancestor (MRCA). It does not show us anything about previous generations prior to that MRCA. I don't know why you've brought this up again, because you don't believe the erroneous conclusion in the first place! You are attempting to use something you don't even believe as evidence.

Because humans and chimps most likely diverged roughly 5 million years ago. There is a small percentage of ERVs unique to both lineages that are presumed to have occurred since divergence.

I'm quite skeptical regarding your open-mindedness on this issue. I'm not yet willing to invest any significant amount of time explaining the evidence, but I'll happily take advantage of a summary that has already been written. If you want to prove you have an open mind, check out the following link and let me know what you think: https://letterstocreationists.wordpress.com/2015/11/07/endogenous-retroviruses-in-your-genome-show-common-ancestry-with-primates/ If you want a quick summary, there are tens of thousands of complete and partial copies of retrovirus genomes that are easily identified in various genomes. Remarkably, over 99% are shared in position between human and chimpanzee genomes. What this tells us is that either tens of thousands of these sequences inserted into the exact same position independently, or that insertions occurred in a common ancestor, and we now share these inserted sequences. The thread is over 50 pages, I think a few replies today won't make much of a difference.

You already have your mind made up. It wouldn't matter one iota how much evidence I showed and explained.

Absolutely! We may disagree about what God did to bring it all here, but His creation is wonderful, intricate, and beautiful. It tells me a lot about Him and His character!

Just letting you know that I don't need lessons in Genetics. If you want to appeal to your interpretation of Genesis 1-2 to shape your opinion of natural history, that's fine. You just can't claim that the scientific evidence supports that view.

That's a bold claim. How would you possibly know that conclusions are not based on evidence if you are unfamiliar with the evidence? Just to be forthright, I have a PhD in Molecular Virology and have been teaching Genetics at the University level for over 20 years. I don't know everything in the field, but I do have a pretty good grasp on large portions of it. This argument could be meaningful if we were only comparing exomes, which comprise about 1.5% of the entire genome. However, the similarities go far past the exomes. Introns are parts of genes that are removed as the DNA code is used to make mRNA, so these are not used to make any parts. However, these also show a very high degree of similarity. The endogenous retrovirus sequences that make up a much larger portion of our genomes than our exomes also show a tremendous degree of similarity in both sequence and chromosomal position. There are MANY pieces of the genomes that do not make any functional parts for the body, yet show a very high degree of similarity. Basically, it is much more than just the "parts" that show this relationship. You are again displaying a seriously lack of familiarity with the scientific evidence and accepted scientific conclusions. Scientists do not claim that one came from the other, but that both had a shared ancestor. This is supported by anatomy, paleontology, and genetics. You can dismiss it if you don't like it, but you cannot dismiss it on anything resembling a scientific basis.

Darwinian evolution was proposed about 150 years ago. The scientific community is well past "Darwinian" when it comes to evolution. The most compelling evidence for evolution is the consilience of many different fields that all point to a single conclusion. The fields of paleontology, anatomy, biogeography, and genetics (and more) all support the theory that life currently on the planet is the result of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. If you wanted me to pick one specific field, it would be Genetics. The genomic comparisons between human and chimps, particularly in non-coding genetic anomalies like transposable elements, clearly show a relationship of past shared history. This is a single example, but the biological world is full of examples of supporting evidence.

Not in the least. However, I think the evidence He gave us makes it pretty clear that He didn't.