Your ideas, although possible in theory, seem to come from the conspiracy domain, but anyway.
Your use-cases are far more easily archiveable the other way round: Get genetic fingerprint via blood sample and put the information in a database. So taking this effort to tag people, with much less metadata makes no sense to me.
Even if you wanted to tag people for some weird reason, just assign them a unique identifier once, instead of vaccinating them repeatedly in order to store their entire employment history in their immune system.
You make an interesting argument that this is theoretically possible to do, but the big question is "Why would anyone bother?"
I have no idea, but I can take a guess. 1) Because crime scenes will have more information left in them. We can't tell your age all that easily from a blood sample, but if your vaccinated with something suitable for your age range...
and 2) obviously being the spike protein being present on your cell surfaces is like an interacellular backdoor. But that isn't my area of expertiese at all, just pure speculation on my part :)
If you want more information in crime scenes sequencing the DNA of population is much more effective. It tells you actually who the person is instead of just broad information about them.
In the UK the NHS has the goal to provide DNA testing to every newborn and as the technology progresses we will likely see more treatments that depend on information from DNA testings.
It's much easier to explain to policemen who actually enforce the laws why the government has DNA information then explaining why the government secretly put barcodes into people and police loyality matters.
and 2) obviously being the spike protein being present on your cell surfaces is like an interacellular backdoor. But that isn't my area of expertiese at all, just pure speculation on my part :)
The spike protein is only present for a short time (that's why you need the booster shot).
We can't tell your age all that easily from a blood sample
Also I suspect it's easier and more accurate to directly get an age range from a blood sample by looking at things like NAD levels than to determine if the immune system reacts to a specific protein.
I still don't think there's enough motive for anyone to do this:
- Because crime scenes will have more information left in them. We can't tell your age all that easily from a blood sample, but if your vaccinated with something suitable for your age range...
For this to be useful, you'd have to:
Even if you do that, it's unclear how useful it is for detectives to know that a blood sample came from someone who is or isn't over 65 years old or someone who was probably a healthcare worker in January 2021.
And then you've only answered "Why would the police want this?" and not "Why would Moderna's executive team volunteer to go to jail forever to make this happen?" Even if courts decide that allowing this as evidence is in the greater good, there's no chance the people who made it happen will avoid going to prison for injecting millions of people with a non-FDA-approved drug. Why would they do that?
- obviously being the spike protein being present on your cell surfaces is like an interacellular backdoor. But that isn't my area of expertiese at all, just pure speculation on my part :)
I think the mRNA vaccines only provide the desired proteins for a short time, since they have no way to replicate themselves. I also don't think making "the spike protein present on your cell surfaces" is an accurate description of what they do, but this is also not my area of expertise.
Even assume these did create a way to target biological warfare at people over 65 and/or people who were healthcare workers in January 2021, it's again unclear to me why the founders of Moderna and everyone else who has studied the effects of this vaccine would be willing to go to prison forever to do that.
Nothing about what I described would be illegal, per se. It's their vaccine, if they want small but specific change from batch to batch, i'm not sure that would be illegal. Police will probably use the immunological profile of suspects regardless of whether they are in on it or not. Intentional or not, this wasn't a problem with previous kinds of vaccine.
Nothing about what I described would be illegal, per se. It's their vaccine, if they want small but specific change from batch to batch, i'm not sure that would be illegal.
It's illegal for Moderna to add slightly more vaccine than expected to a vial without permission from the FDA. I guarantee that changing the contents of the vaccine without telling anyone is illegal.
With RNA/DNA vaccines, you are essentially programing a person to have a very specific immunological state. An immunity that is perfectly identical/reproducable between individuals vaccinated against the same sequence, resulting in a real homogenous kind of protection across the population.
That's not true. Whether you inject someone a spike protein or let the cells of the person build the spike protein in both cases the body will try to build antibodies that bind the spike protein.
Geneticists know that DNA sequencers essentially do such barcoding at the individual fragment level as a required step of many sequencing protocols. It is extrodinarily unlikely - no, impossible - that those developing nucleotide-base vaccines wouldn't have considered this possibility.
If you give an mRNA vaccine then there won't be any new DNA in which you can hide DNA sequences and the RNA that you put in the cells is gone after a few days/weeks.
My understanding is that the only difference between RNA and traditional vaccines is that the RNA version enlists the body cells to make the virus proteins, instead of making the proteins in a lab and then injecting them. So, there is no grater ability to "tag" people with an RNA version than the traditional version.
Ah OK i understand the confusion, and it's from an oversimplification of how the vaccine works. While both the DNA and RNA vaccines are said to produce spike proteins that ultimately present on the surface of the host cell, triggering an immune response, there is also the viral DNA/RNA immune system, sometimes described as the RISC: How Drosha and Dicer work in RNA interference - YouTube
This works with both double-stranded and single-stranded RNA, but the system seems to be much more aggressive against double-stranded, which would make sense as since humans don't make dsRNA very often, while their are whole classes of virus dedicated to it. It's way less "self", because self RNA has special sequences (poly-A) and is decorated in special proteins (CAP) that it acquired due to being made at the right place at the right time. Kind of like a hallway pass.
I don't know if the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, which are RNA, are ssRNA or dsRNA, but suffice to say they will absoluely kick off the immune response. To my knowledge it would be unfathomibly hard to sneak synthetic DNA/RNA past the RISC (and there are homologs for DNA by the way - DNA is supposed to be in the nucleus only, and decorated in all sorts of shit). If it can be done, it can't be done on the cheap, which is what these new class of vaccines are supposed to provide.
This system is not some abstract complex that doesn't play a role, it is THE method by which the cell protect itself from viral attacks, at the front-line. The presentation of the spike protein on the surface of the cell is the white flag of surrender, as it will kick off necrosis through immune recognition for sure. The RISC and similar pathways also hold back all retrovirals, so it's a constant background thing going on. Also present in germline cells, just FWIW.
But even if the RISC and similar pathways are not involved at all, the digital nature of the vaccine in that all of our cells will present the exact same spike protein in pre-packaged form for the immune system to digest, be it RNA or DNA as the route, creates a situation where that spike protein could be cheaply designed to be reliably and specifically different from batch of vaccine to the next, as a tag, with no obvious effect on the efficacy of the vaccine. The modification of an internal fold for example would be all that is needed, and now that person will express that information in their blood for as long as they stay immunised.
I don't know if the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, which are RNA, are ssRNA or dsRNA, but suffice to say they will absoluely kick off the immune response.
Basically, you don't know what you are talking about. They are mRNA vaccines not ssRNA or dsRNA vaccines. They don't program the body to build any ssRNA or dsRNA.
>Don't people have different immune systems, thus even if you gave them exactly the same 'bits' that wouldn't result in differing outcomes?
Essentially, there is a region of DNA called the Major histocompatibility complex that is, er, the Genetic equivilent of a computer's PRNG, except it actually does shuffle DNA around (twins aren't even identical), so it's true RNG, but static after conception. This random DNA is used by the immune system to make basically every kind of antigen-receptor possible (the thing that does the sensing/binding for a white blood cell). During development, there is a mechanism by which if antigens match, it's assumed to be matching to "self" and it gets whitelisted and not made again. Eventually you are left with a library of antigen-receptors that don't bind to anything inside you - the correct state for a mature white blood cell. Then you are born, and the immune system kicks in and starts recognising all new antigens of these antigen-receptors as foriegn, and long story short when that happens the white blood cell will both divide and suicidally attack anything it's receptors bind too.
So all of the antigen-receptor based part of the immune system is different between people, giving us group diversity, even in a small isolated family of individuals. However. The miRNA suppression complex and other DNA/RNA based facets of your immune system - some of which i probably don't even know about, but I know of at least 2 - do not work in this way. They work at the DNA/RNA sequence level, in a non-analog way. A digital way. They are triggered by the detection of a forigen sequences, and stop infection before any viral protein is produced. By comparison, these digital parts of our immune system counteract the bulk of our protection to viruses. While the analog antigen-receptor method will work for poisons, viruses, moulds, worms, cancer, etc, the digital immune system is much faster and much more energy efficient, and essentially once your cells are updated (which we assume they each do individually but maybe there is co-ordination) they simply can not be hijacked by that kind of virus. No amount of viral load will overcome the cellular innate immune system, that is constantly having to supress retrovirals, let alone exogenus fractions of a fraction. It's the information in a virus that is the problem.
>If DIY is viable then it would be trivial to forge ID and/or make something communicable that screws up the ID. You can presumably write and over write fragments as easily as the initial write.
I hadn't considered that. Actually a lot of the older genetic tools in the toolkit only let you "insert", and even then only in a pre-determined place. CRISPR allows in-place editing, but even then it's not so easy/pragmatic as one would hope. More importantly, if I wanted to barcode you I would use technology out of your reach to do it, or to load it up, or whatever. You see this a lot with DRM. The point being, if they have a cool trick to hide DNA/RNA from sequencing machines - and to be honest that is as trivial as using synthetic bases and/or paying off the sequencing monopoly that is Illumina - then it's possible we won't be able to find the barcode for a while, and when we do we might not have the technology to get our new stuff to where it got it's stuff back when you were vaccinated. I'd imagine they write to your white bloodcell's genome in a sort of hap-hazard way, which is probably what is suppressing the immune system of some older people, as some of those cells might die if the barcode is inserted into the wrong region. But if the white bloodcells survive then they will eventually have daughter cells that will carry the insertion onwards, and it will remain in your blood and sweat. If that's the case, it's all doable with modern technology developed in the last 5 years, but targeted removal of the sequence will be out of reach for at least 50 years.
>What you want is a unique identifier that never changes. You can hang everything else off that one variable.
Yeah, actually, that sounds far more likely. And also totally doable with synthetically made DNA/RNA, it's done all the time to basically barcode individual cells in a suspension of cells before sequencing them all at once, and there is literally billions of cells. You assumed it would be expensive, and I don't blame you, but it's actually really cheap and has been par for the course for about 4 years now. It's as easy as having the synthesis reaction simply extend the DNA with a random base in solution, so it basically doesn't cost anything extra to write random junk than it costs to write a specific base. What costs extra is very long sequences, over 100 letters long. But with just 20 letters i can usually target a specific portion of a 3-billion-base human genome. So a per-citizen tag per-vaccine is no problem at all. All automatable. Actually the automatable was only invented in the past 3 years hahah. My poor arms.
This is my first post on LW so I hope I get it right, please let me know if I don't!
I've been a Geneticist for 15 years (academia and industry) and while there are several issues I feel people aren't addressing with regards to Covid-19, the one that has me most concerned is the digital nature of these new vaccines, over the traditional analog method of letting your body figure out which antibodies it is going to develop on its own. So why is this an issue?
With RNA/DNA vaccines, you are essentially programing a person to have a very specific immunological state. An immunity that is perfectly identical/reproducable between individuals vaccinated against the same sequence, resulting in a real homogenous kind of protection across the population. Vaccines have traditionally left the act of designing the actual antibodies up to your immune system itself, with weakened/attenuated/fragmented versions of the disease presented but importantly no directions on what to do with it. Like any rigged fight, the outcome is known in advance, but the specifics of the fight very much depends on the specifics of the night, and of course dumb luck. As a result we develop different sets of different polyclonal antibodies from one person to the next using the traditional vaccination method.
It means something significant that one can essentially put people into immunological cohorts with identical reactions to a known substance/sequence. Particularly when we all must trust that what goes into your arm in the doctor's office is really what it says on the tin. If the RNA/DNA vaccination method is as generic, safe, reliable and interchangeable as everyone hopes, that dramatically increases the ability to give people slightly different coded immunological states without them ever knowing. Barcoding through vaccination, essentially.
What does it mean that we can now tag taxi drivers from Essex who make less than $50,000 a year with one vaccine, and nurses from London over the age of 40 with another, without either knowing that they've been tagged or without any understanding that this may mean their immune system can be targeted selectively in the future?
If this tagging hypothesis is correct, we can make a few predictions for what we are likely see over the next few months:
1) A hardline position taken on DIY vaccines, or vaccines from foreign governments, because they introduce noise into the system and thereby undermine it's utility. People who have evidence of being vaccinated in Japan, for example, will be required to get vaccinated again upon entering the UK even though an antibody test has shown they are positive for vaccination against Covid-19 already. Because it isn't about preventing the disease, it's about aquiring the tag.
2) If the tags do not contain coded information specific to the individual (i.e. they give the exact same thing to everyone in the same cohort), you would expect to see an increase in the notion of frequent/excessive revaccintion, because of course people don't only belong to 1 cohort at a time. You would want to layer people up with different tags to fully describe their position in society, since you can't do it in the actual vaccination's sequence alone.
3) You would expect something akin to "vaccination events", where a call is put out to people of a desired cohort to self-identify and come in for their vaccine at the same time/place. The alternative - keeping all the cohorts in a cupboard and selecting the right one for the person standing in your office - is just not going to scale. For starters those giving the injections need to be in on it in the latter example, whereas with "vaccination events" only the event co-ordinator (or more specifically, the vaccine supplier) needs be in the know. Locality alone is a definable cohort so of course vaccination events aren't a certainty, but what is certain is that it makes more sense from a tagging perspective than an immunisation perspective to create a concentration of unvaccinated people.
4) Situations where those that attended a well defined vaccination event all react in the same way, but different to a group of people who attended a different vaccination event, despite the manufacturer's claims that they got the exact same vaccine. Perhaps if the difference is as stark as death vs no-death between otherwise identical groups, an inquiry will be lauched upon which it will turn out that "small batch differences between vaccines that were previously thought to be inconsequential"... turn out to be pretty consequential. So is the jig up at that point? Absolutely not, infact it would be desirable for this to happen as far as the pharmaceutical companies are concerned, because now they can come clean about these delibrate (non-consequential) differences used by manufacturers for "in house" identification of the different batches. Having not read this prediction beforehand and adjusting your baysian priors, the news of this will seem completely reasonable to people and in fact a smart thing to do. Skeptics who haven't considered that there might be seemingly legitimate reasons for the existance of non-consequential differences between vaccines will refrain from asking further questions, and those that don't drop the "tagging conspiracy" will be ridiculed. The focus will be on keeping the tags non-consequential, rather than removing them entirely.
In conclusion, while I accept this all sounds kind of nutty, barcoding things with custom DNA sequences is what I have spent most of my life doing. Geneticists know that DNA sequencers essentially do such barcoding at the individual fragment level as a required step of many sequencing protocols. It is extrodinarily unlikely - no, impossible - that those developing nucleotide-base vaccines wouldn't have considered this possibility. What's odd is that I haven't seen anyone in the field talk about it.
EDIT: So the CEO of Moderna apparently agrees this is a digital vaccine, and a lot of what I descibe above and in the comments he touches on in this presentation: Moderna CEO Describes the Vaccine As An Operating System