[takeda]

Thank you.

So as I understand you are involved by the vaccine that AstraZeneca is also behind. So I kind of understand (well, as much as layman can understand, lol) the vaccine that Pfizer and Moderna works. I guess it is a bit better explained on Wikipedia. So their vaccines inject mRNA to our cells which start producing antibodies. While this is brand new kind of vaccine, it's hard to know long term effects of it, but there's a chance that it could cause an autoimmune disease.

When reading about vaccine created by Oxford, the biggest concern seems to be that people could have or develop antibodies for the adenovirus after first dose. I'm guessing someone with HLA-B27 has even a higher chance of doing that. I understand that, but I'm still not understanding how it works. Is it same as the mRNA vaccine, with the difference that the adenovirus is just used to deliver it?

[nextos]

I have collaborators in the vaccine group, but I'm not directly involved in the trial. In fact, I think the Oxford vaccine has 2 potential design issues, 1 of which is shared with all other vaccines.

The first issue is what you pointed out. Adenovirus delivery is potentially more risky. I'm incidentally also HLA-B27, and I will personally stay away from it.

The second issue, shared with all other vaccines, is that IMHO they should not have vaccinated us for the whole spike protein, but just for some fragment. The spike protein contains some mimotopes to confuse the immune system, and I'm worried that this might also be a source of autoimmunity in very rare cases. Naturally, because vaccines had to be rushed, this was not easy to account for.

Nonetheless, they all seem safe. Theoretically, mRNA ones might be safer, unless there's gene transfer/integration of mRNA into cells. But this is a very exotic issue unlikely to cause problems.