It's against HN's rules to editorialize titles like that. Could you please review them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. HN titles should be accurate and neutral. If it's necessary to rewrite a title to make it so, that's fine (the guideline explicitly allows for that). But you should definitely not rewrite a title to put spin on it.
It's particularly bad to use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting something when you aren't.
Did you think you were going to get a vaccine? No - Moderna themselves suggest you are getting an operating system.
What is an operating system in a human body? Well, it would be a controller of bodily functions. Perhaps it would control emotions, re-production even.
Had anyone realised that this was on the cards? I had thought how a vaccination passport would be unwieldy and prone to being tampered with... why not have the body + vaccine be the passport? But this goes further - why not have the vaccine become an OS for the body?
I can barely wrap my head around what is going on here... Thoughts?
Nowhere do they talk about an operating system for the body. Nowhere on the page is your "not a vaccine" quote. The page is clear what they mean (even though it's marketing language): A common pattern of delivery system (="OS") that can be used for different mRNA sequences (=apps) for different vaccines. Which has always been a clear promise of RNA vaccines: being able to, compared to other methods, quickly design and make new vaccines when they become needed.
"they" are not storing anything in DNA. mRNA vaccines use the same mechanism that the body uses when it's reading its DNA (which gets copied into temporary mRNA, which encodes "instructions" on how to make a specific protein for other parts of the cell to use) to get the body to make proteins, by giving the body a dose of other mRNA to read. They explicitly do not involve DNA.
So it tells your body how to process instructions and this somehow doesn’t equate to or can be potentially portrayed as controlling your body? The idea that right now it’s not doing anything at a large scale like controlling someone’s emotions or thoughts. The FEAR is that this technology eventually will. Also someone branding it as an OS doesn’t help quell that fear.
It's not doublespeak, it's an analogy. A traditional vaccine would instead inject you directly with the proteins being made. Hows that any different for what it can do?
traditional vaccine: dumps a bunch of proteins (sometimes in the form of smashed up virus) into your body so your immune system learns to recognize them.
mRNA vaccine: gives your body a few temporary copies of the instructions to make a protein that looks like a bit of virus, so your cells make a bunch of it until the mRNA is used up and the immune system learns to recognize them. Effectively moving part of the production process into the human body instead of doing it in a lab (where it takes additional time to do and to design a process for the lab to do it).
Traditional and mRNA vaccines are two vastly different things. In a traditional vaccine, it’s learning by practice. In mRNA it is learned by teaching/programming from a set of instructions.
The programming part is what got people worried. you can’t introduce proteins to get your DNA to do something it isn’t naturally programmed to do without some rewriting like mRNA has the potential to do.
Also I’m not a bio engineer I don’t know every set of instructions this vaccine or future vaccines contain. Couple that with a blanket authority to the government to tell you what you must put into your body is creating a terrible situation waiting to happen. Yes it’s absolutely something people should worry about.
> The programming part is what got people worried. you can’t introduce proteins to get your DNA to do something it isn’t naturally programmed to do without some rewriting like mRNA has the potential to do.
mRNA does NOT have the potential to do that.
The chain of information is DNA -> mRNA -> tRNA -> protein.
mRNA injection triggers protein synthesis without DNA coding for it, but it doesn’t rewrite DNA.
> In a traditional vaccine, it’s learning by practice. In mRNA it is learned by teaching/programming from a set of instructions.
No, the learning is not done by programming. Nothing is programmed permanently by the mRNA vaccine. In both cases, the proteins to be learned by the immune system are introduced to the body, and then the immune system learns about the proteins floating around. mRNA vaccines do not "reprogram" the immune system any more a traditional vaccine does. What differs is primarily how the protein learned about is made.
> you can’t introduce proteins to get your DNA to do something
The DNA isn't "made to do something", this doesn't make any sense. DNA is not influenced by either vaccine type, and DNA is not changed when the immune system adapts to something.
You’re nitpicking words to mean what you want them to mean. I outright used the word taught in my context. If you disagree with the use of this word you should take it up with Vaccine companies since that’s how they market mRNA and literally how CDC defines how mRNA works.
I did not say that a cell is not made to do something (the entire point of an mRNA vaccine, as I mentioned multiple times, is getting body cells to temporary do something). I specifically replied to wrong statements. A cell is not DNA, and there is very big difference between claiming an mRNA vaccine does anything to DNA (which would be a permanent change) and what it actually does. And the immune system learns through the same mechanisms as it does in a traditional vaccine. Given the fear and FUD around this, it's important to be precise about that.
On second thoughts - maybe I have it wrong - maybe its not within the person being vaccinated and they are talking more generally? Its actually not that clear.
It's particularly bad to use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting something when you aren't.