So, the more spike protein, the worse the symptoms, but also vaccination with Pfizer/BioNTech reduced the number of spike proteins stuck in the marrow. I wonder why mRNA making more spike proteins improves the situation
The Moderna spike and the Pfizer spike are both “inflated” by edits to the gene that cause some different arrangements of the protein structure that causes the spike to be more rigid and closer to the shape it has when embedded on the virus surface. I imagine that there is some threshold where something too thin or too small begins to be hard to clean up, and the vaccine-induced spikes are above that line, while the natural spikes detached from the virus are under. I’m a computer person so probably not correct, but I’m not blindly guessing, either.
It’s things like this that constantly remind me that biology is far more complex in practice, and even while having a deeper understanding than most, I’m relying on some very grossly oversimplified abstractions.
Anecdotally, this strongly mirrors my personal experience with long covid symptoms. I’m relatively young (32) but have noticed I don’t recover well in result to neurological injuries: loud noises which didn’t damage my hearing but left me with tinnitus, and a very mild concussion which has now taken the greater part of a year to stop feeling dizzy from.
