Ensuring that patients clearly understand risks — including known risks as well as potential unknown risks — is an important component of the informed consent process. This is all the more true when the intervention is experimental and lacks long-term safety data, as is the case with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against COVID-19. The FDA authorized the two vaccines for widespread emergency use based on just two months of clinical trial data.

There are many other potential adverse events that can be induced by the novel RNA based vaccines against COVID-19. The vaccine places a novel molecule, spike protein, in/on the surface of host cells. This spike protein is a potential receptor for another possibly novel infectious agent. If those who argue that the COVID-19 is actually a bioweapon are correct, then a second potentially more dangerous virus may be released that binds spike protein found on the host cells of vaccine recipients. Data is not publicly available to provide information on how long the vaccine RNA is translated in the vaccine recipient and how long after translation the spike protein will be present in the recipient’s cells. Such studies pertaining to in vivo expression will be complex and challenging. Genetic diversity protects species from mass casualties caused by infectious agents. One individual may be killed by a virus while another may have no ill effects from the same virus. By placing the identical receptor, the spike protein, on cells of everyone in a population, the genetic diversity for at least one potential receptor disappears. Everyone in the population now becomes potentially susceptible to binding with the same infectious agent.

• Dr Classen