Yes. In particular, the contents of the mRNA vaccines are a subset of what a covid infection produces.
The anti-vax stance is similar to the claims that tightly regulated nicotine vapes are worse than high tar cigarettes. (Except that you can just choose to not smoke, of course.)
I hear a lot of anti-vaxy stuff about how the spike protein is damaging in itself (implying that you shouldn't get the vaccine because you'll have spike proteins flowing around in your blood), but they seem to ignore the fact that when you get actual covid the virus is multiplying in your cells and spike proteins are more widespread and more numerous.
I see the argument here in this thread that the vaccine isn't really preventing you from getting covid at this point (which is probably largely true) but shouldn't being vaccinated mean that you'll have a lower viral load and shorter duration of illness?
The mRNA vaccines work by causing the spike protein to multiply in your cells. Yes, the mechanism is different - the virus copies itself and the spike protein just happens to be part of the virus, whereas the vaccine mRNA just causes the spike protein itself to be copied. Note that with the vaccine, you're getting a massive number of cells "infected" all at once, equivalent to quite a bit of virus self-replication. So the result is the same, a lot of spike protein floating around and doing damage. The main difference in result is that with the mRNA, there is an upper bound to the number of cells which can be infected (and which therefore have to be eliminated by your immune system), whereas with the virus there is effectively no upper bound. But that doesn't translate at all into a difference of how much damage the spike protein produced by X infected cells produces, and it doesn't mean that the number of infected cells with mRNA is significantly less than the number of infected cells you would have gotten with a successfully-fought-off infection. So it could do just as much damage.
> The main difference in result is that with the mRNA, there is an upper bound to the number of cells which can be infected
Reverse-transcriptase enzyme in liver cells in a lab has been shown to convert the mRNA vaccines into DNA. While it's unclear if it would actually be a permanent change to cells, DNA is a lot more stable than RNA and could hang around a lot longer than expected, and result in a lot more spike protein than expected.
You're missing part of the argument: Vaccine-generated spike protein is free-floating, while virus-generated spike protein is attached to the virus. The free-floating spike protein is a lot smaller than the virus, so it can get a lot more places, and while some will break off of the virus and become free-floating it wouldn't be in anywhere near as large amounts as vaccine-generated spike protein.
It's been a while since I've looked at the ins-and-outs of the immune system, but doesn't this basically not hold up to scrutiny? Again, correct me if I'm wrong:
A) The general method of action of the vaccines is that the mRNA enters a cell (generally dendritic cells), the cell transcribes it into the spike protein, then the cell detects something off about the proteins and presents them on their cell wall for the immune system to respond to. The proteins aren't just "free floating" unless your immune response is
B) The likelihood of an immune response to an active infection never doing the same thing with cells that contain partially constructed virons / viron components, or achieving the same effect by breaking down full virons, is basically zero. So it's almost certain that an active infection would have "free-floating" proteins in some capacity as well.
The anti-vax stance is similar to the claims that tightly regulated nicotine vapes are worse than high tar cigarettes. (Except that you can just choose to not smoke, of course.)