On Thursday and Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention held a meeting of its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a key panel that gives the CDC’s director guidance about what vaccines to recommend to the public.
The panel, in the end, postponed its most controversial vote and made recommendations that seemed aimed at fostering doubts about the Covid-19 vaccines while still keeping them widely available. But some presenters and panelists raised concerns that the mRNA Covid vaccines — the ones made by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech — may have unconfirmed safety issues.
In particular, Retsef Levi, who chairs ACIP’s working group on Covid vaccines, raised concerns that mRNA, the lipid nanoparticles they are encapsulated in, and the spike protein the vaccines produce may all persist and be widely distributed in the body. He also said they may provoke an immune response that is not understood and could even change the way the body reads its own genetic material. Moderna and Pfizer said that the claims were refuted by well-done studies that met global regulatory standards.
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