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(Five-minute read)
Now before I start trying to answer this question I wish to make it crystal clear that I am no doctor, scientist, or professor of Epidemiology.
Over my life, I have visited countries that have to require one to be vaccinated for everything from Yellow fever to you name it.
The one thing that is stopping some people from getting vaccinated is not understanding how mRNA technology works and its long term effects ( Yet to be seen)
So I am going to try to explain in layman terms the difference between an mRNA vaccine and a traditional vaccine.
There are three sorts of vaccines.
Live, attenuated vaccines are the closest to a natural infection. They contain a weakened version of a living virus or bacteria
Subunit vaccines contain only parts of a virus or bacteria instead of a whole pathogen.
Inactivated vaccines contain an inactivated or dead version of a virus or pathogen.
Most vaccines up to now work by presenting your body with a weakened or dead version of a virus or some of the proteins found on the surface of the virus.
By showing the virus or parts of the virus to your immune system, the vaccine teaches your body to recognize the pathogen and turns on the production of antibodies, which are proteins that attach to the virus and allow killer immune cells to gobble it up.
In other words, traditional vaccines teach the immune system to make memory cells.
So if you are exposed to a virus at a future date, the immune system has the ability to rev up the production of antibodies rapidly and fight off the pathogen again.
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The coronavirus pandemic infected millions of people in a matter of months and vaccines usually take years, and sometimes even decades, to develop, test, and approved for public use.
For example:
Smallpox – several centuries.
Plague – to date no vaccine.
Typhoid – around thirty years.
Yellow Fever – around thirty years.
Influenza – around thirty years – ineffective today because of seasonal changes.
Measles/ Mumps – around eleven years.
Anthrax – around 58 years
Polo- around sixty years.
Chicken Pox – around thirty year
Shingles – around forty years.
Hepatitis B – around twenty-four years.
mRNA vaccines have existed for more than 10 years and have been used with the Ebola and Zika viruses. What is new is in terms of how widely it’s being used on the market.
When the COVID-19 epidemic arrived, never before in modern history, has the entire world and all of the governments in the world banded together to get a vaccine to market so quickly.
Researchers worldwide sprang into action to identify and insert the correct genetic code into the mRNA platform.
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This of course raised questions.
How a vaccine can get put together in such a short time?
Were corners cut?
Is the trial period too short?
Will there be side effects in years to come?
These are questions that can not fully answer. Time will tell.
In layman’s terms, the technologies already existed, and with vast amounts of money made available to produce a vaccine, it happened in months not years.
The result was mRNA vaccines which use what is called RNAi research that is widely used by researchers to silence genes in order to learn something about their function.
The result is siRNAs that can be designed to match any gene, can be manufactured cheaply, and can be readily administered to cells.
In other words, a cellular mechanism that uses the gene’s own DNA sequence of the gene to turn it off.
However, RNAi is much more than a research tool that encompasses an array of ancient and sophisticated cellular mechanisms that regulate a variety of biological functions.
The advantage of RNAi is the ability to design precisely targeted medicines for almost any gene, regardless of the function of the gene.
So each different vaccine aims to use a slightly different approach to prepare your immune system to recognize and fight SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
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Think of your DNA as the “instruction manuals” in genes that tell a living thing—what to do.
The mRNA helps cells to read those instructions. It is synthetic there is no COVID virus in this vaccine.
You can not get COVID-19 from the vaccine as mRNA vaccines never enter the nucleus of the cell, where our DNA is stored. Rather than presenting your body with the dead virus or parts of the virus, mRNA vaccines show your body the blueprint needed to make a viral protein.
The difference with mRNA vaccines is that it gives a recipe to our immune system.
Your body uses this blueprint to make the SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins without including any part of the virus itself.
However, unlike less virulent or killed vaccines, the person is not infected with a virus, not even one that’s been weakened or killed.
mRNA is a small fragile fragment of genetic information that’s rapidly broken down within the bloodstream and within cells.
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Finally, the world will need several different vaccines to fight the Covid-19 pandemic as the virus mutates.
Of course in the short term, there are billions to be made by not sharing. But in the long term, it is taxpayers’ money that has helped the development of the vaccine.
At the moment we have a handful of drugmakers dominating the global coronavirus vaccine race.
To fight a global pandemic these companies must be made to share or waiver any patents, along with sharing the manufacturing process worldwide.
The Data from all Vaccines must be shared.
While world governments must remove any trade barriers blocking the production of the vaccine.
So far 75% of the world’s Covid -19 vaccines have been distributed in just 10 countries.
It is a glaring fact that we are not going to end this pandemic anywhere until we do it everywhere.
It is also a glaring fact while the virus spreads Covid mutants will evolve to trick our immune systems.
It is also a glaring fact that unless Inequality is tackled on a world basis we humans will struggle with any future pandemics that are coming with climate change.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Basically, we’re entering the era of machines controlling everything.
If we want to create new different societies with human dignity for all we need to do something about it.
The difficulty of predicting the future is not just a cliche, it’s a basic fact of our existence. Part of the hypothesis of Singularity is that this difficulty is just going to get worse and worse. Yes, creating AGI ( Artificial General Intelligence) is a big and difficult goal, but according to known science, it is almost surely an achievable one.
However, there are sound though not absolutely confident arguments that it may well be achievable within our lifetimes.
If artificial general intelligence is on the not too distant horizon, surely we should be ensuring that it is not owned by anyone corporation and that at its core it respects our core values.
If we think in months we focus on immediate problems such as the present-day wars, the Covid crisis, the Donald Trumps, the economy, if we think in decades, climate, growing inequality, the loss of jobs to automation are all presenting dangers. But if we look at life in total, science is converging on data processing and AI that is developing itself with algorithms.
When intelligence is approached in an incremental manner, with strict reliance on interfacing to the real world through perception and action, reliance on representation disappears.
It won’t be long before we will not be unable to distinguish the real world from the virtual world.
Since there is only one real world and there can be infinite virtual worlds the probability that you will inhabit this sole world is zero.
So it won’t matter whether computers will be conscious or not.
Is starting to feel like it’s every man for himself, Is possible that right now, a global crisis is upon us, Without even knowing… And the virus may not be the biggest threat, but the crisis that follows, Everyday goods that keep us alive will be gone, I’m talking, food, freshwater, medicine, clothes, fuel…
Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness and soon rather than later it will be consigned to Google, Facebook, Twitter, Smartphones, and the like to make decisions that are not possible to reverse.
You might think that the above is stupid but it won’t be long before we will be witnessing the most unequal societies in history.
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We humans will soon be living with robots that process data without any subjective experiences or consciousness or moral opprobrium.
As we watch robots, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence machines, and the like slowly (and sometimes rapidly) permeate our world, it’s not hard to imagine them going from permeating to taking over.
Algorithms are increasingly determining our collective future.
It will only matter what they think about you.
We are already halfway towards a world where algorithms run everything.
This is why many of the issues raised in this post will require close monitoring, to ensure that the oversight of machine learning-driven algorithms continues to strike an appropriate and safe balance between recognizing the benefits (for healthcare and other public services, for example, and for innovation in the private sector) and the risks (for privacy and consent, data security and any unacceptable impacts on individuals).
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WHAT CAN GOVERNMENTS DO?
Please regulate AI, this is too dangerous.
Given the international nature of digital innovation, governments, should establish audits of algorithms, introducing certification of algorithms, and charging ethics boards with oversight of algorithmic decisions.
Why?
They are bringing big changes in their wake.
From better medical diagnoses to driverless cars, and within central governments where there are opportunities to make public services more effective and achieve long-term cost savings.
However, the Government should produce, publish, and maintain a list of where algorithms with significant impacts are being used within the Central Government, along with projects underway or planned for public service algorithms, to aid not just private sector involvement but also transparency.
Governments should not just simply accept what the developers of algorithms offer in return for data access.
To this end, Governments should be at the forefront of the creation of a “statutory building code”, which describes mandatory safety and quality requirements for digital platforms.
Social networks should be required by law to release details of their algorithms and core functions to trusted researchers, in order for the technology to be vetted.
This Law should enable the enforcement of,
If we are not careful they will have no notion of self, existing only in the present unaware of the past or future, and therefore will be unable to consciously plan for future eventualities.
Unconscious algorithms in our brains rather than conscious images in a mind.
If you are using a smartphone, it indirectly means that you are enjoying the AI knowingly or unknowingly. It cannot be modified unknowingly or can’t get disfigured or breakdown in a hostile environment.
We should not be regulating technology but Artificial Intelligence.
It is so complicated in behavior we need to be regulated it at the data level.
In lots of regulated domains, there is this notion of post-market surveillance, which is where the developer bears the responsibility of how the technology developed by them is going to be used.
As William Shakespeare wrote in – As you Like it.
” All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players, they have their exits and entrances. ”
Sadly with AI, Machine Learning Algorithms no one knows or for that matter will ever know when they enter or exit.
Probably like AI learning is actually an ongoing process that takes place throughout all of life. It’s the process of moving information from out there — to here. Unfortunately with the brain, has its own set of rules by which it learns best, unlike AI, the information doesn’t always stick. Together, we have a lot to learn.
Humanity is in contact with humanity.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the cloud bin.
