Toxin has a real meaning and its not the meaning you are using. mRNA as such isn't toxic, its how your cellular machinery functions. Its removed from your body because that's the mechanism your body uses to produce the effect size it wants and not more, as mRNA production is used as a communication mechanism by your cells. A real toxin disrupts your normal cellular fucntion and / or causes direct damage in some way.
> It's very unclear to me, as a layman, how this artificial "self amplifying RNA" that incorporates elements from a virus is so very different from an actual virus, given that the SARS-CoV-2 is itself basically RNA surrounded by a coating in a form that can self-replicate.
For one, we can implement protocols to ensure the mrna we are generating contains the instructions we want, at the effect size we want. We could go the non mrna route and grow it as a virus, but that is going to be less accurate, more costly, and take longer. We could also just let people develop natural immunity, which will also work. People will get varying effect sizes, and vary from barely immune to dead. Obviously no vaccine and no virus would be the best outcome. But we don't get that choice.
I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing. Expressing spike protein and being destroyed by the immune system is a disruption of the normal cellular function. No, mRNA in general is not toxic but the mRNA vaccines specifically absolutely are. That's the entire point of them, to train the immune system by actually giving it targets to practice on. However the targets are our own cells, in this case.
We could go the non mrna route and grow it as a virus, but that is going to be less accurate, more costly, and take longer.
These are things that concern vaccine makers for understandable commercial reasons, but what you're saying is that there's effectively no difference to the recipient beyond the fact that the artificial self-replicating mRNA might be higher "quality" in some way.
Let's put it like this: given the apparently low probability of being infected (for people my age, in a way that we actually notice, at current prevalence levels etc), most of us actually can choose "no vaccine and no virus". Or put another way we can choose between guaranteed cell damage from vaccines, or the chance of cell damage from virus the exact probability of which is some integral of prevalence, individual risk behavior, how quickly you get treated (e.g. with ivermectin), and how many people around you are vaccinated. To me it looks like a good tradeoff to not take the vaccine, especially when so many other people are: the chance of avoiding cell damage entirely is really quite high, and I like my body spike-free. Stories like the Reuters article this thread is about just reinforce that decision.
> Expressing spike protein and being destroyed by the immune system is a disruption of the normal cellular function.
That’s how the immmune system works in general, with or without the vaccine.
> what you're saying is that there's effectively no difference to the recipient beyond the fact that the artificial self-replicating mRNA might be higher "quality" in some way
It’s the difference between taking a known dose with quality control or an unknown dose with no quality control.
> Let's put it like this: given the apparently low probability of being infected (for people my age, in a way that we actually notice, at current prevalence levels etc), most of us actually can choose "no vaccine and no virus".
Let’s put it like this. you can take vaccine and have an extremely rare chance if pericarditis, or eventually get the virus (it’s not going away) and have a higher chance of pericarditis.
There are many viruses in the world that have never been wiped out, and which I've never caught, nor have any other people I know.
The assumption that eventually SARS-CoV-2 will infect 100% of the population is a common modelling assumption. When I went looking for validation of it, I couldn't find any.
As for known dosages, as I say above, I couldn't find any information comparing dosages or cell death levels of vaccines vs actual viral infections. That would certainly be helpful to know, assuming such reports were reliable.
> When I went looking for validation of it, I couldn't find any.
It's unlikely you will find validation outside an entry-level text book for virology or epidemiology. From my understanding it's a fundamental assumption that's easy to verify: ALL viruses with a similar transmissibility profile as SARS-Cov-2 (high R0, aerosols) have become endemic, that includes e.g. seasonal influenza and all other human coronaviruses.
That's the reason seasonal influenza is not a big issue most of the time, because we already had it in the past (or a related strain) and our immune system is primed. This happens usually as children and is the reason why both young children and their parents are a lot more ill than the average.
A completely new influenza strain, however, has a similar pandemic potential as SARS-Cov-2, and one hypothesis why the 1918 influenza was so deadly for younger generations is that they likely had not encountered it before, while the older had.
In fact, if SARS-Cov-2 wouldn't go the same route as basically all similar viruses have done before, it would be a big surprise. Try to speak to an expert in the field, preferably a virologist or an epidemiologist.
Somewhat related: it's a common cognitive bias to trust self-generated knowledge more than the knowledge from others.
It's unlikely you will find validation outside an entry-level text book for virology or epidemiology
Absolutely nothing in modern epidemiology is validated against real world data as far as I can tell, and virology isn't concerned with the course of epidemics, so I doubt this very much.
The problem this assumption faces (and it is as you point out, only an assumption) is it quickly runs into definitional and logic issues. That's a very common problem in epidemiology and public health as far as I can tell. Viruses evolve, and so when talking about whether they can eventually infect the whole population you have to very carefully consider:
1. How fast they evolve.
2. How fast they spread.
3. How much evolution is required to make something a "new" virus vs an "old" virus.
4. What those evolutions do to disease which is what everyone actually cares about.
If you don't have a very firm grip on these things (and epidemiology doesn't) then you can get into a situation in which by the time a virus has infected "everyone" it's no longer the same virus at all, and thus cannot be said to have actually infected everyone. All the talk of different COVID variants is pointing in this direction. Taken to an extreme it boils down to "everyone will get infected with a virus at some point" which isn't an interesting statement.
Somewhat related: it's a common cognitive bias to trust self-generated knowledge more than the knowledge from others.
Indeed it is, and scientists are very often guilty of this: they reject any and all negative feedback that comes from people "out of field", even if it's extremely relevant to what they're doing. For example rejecting feedback by computer scientists of the form "your program does not work" because computer science isn't the same thing as epidemiology.
But in this case I actually don't trust self-generated knowledge more than the knowledge from others, because I don't claim to have any superior knowledge of epidemiology. I just know the people who claim to be experts, actually aren't.
> It's very unclear to me, as a layman, how this artificial "self amplifying RNA" that incorporates elements from a virus is so very different from an actual virus, given that the SARS-CoV-2 is itself basically RNA surrounded by a coating in a form that can self-replicate.
For one, we can implement protocols to ensure the mrna we are generating contains the instructions we want, at the effect size we want. We could go the non mrna route and grow it as a virus, but that is going to be less accurate, more costly, and take longer. We could also just let people develop natural immunity, which will also work. People will get varying effect sizes, and vary from barely immune to dead. Obviously no vaccine and no virus would be the best outcome. But we don't get that choice.