Comment on Or in 2025. Looking at you, Florida.
Allero@lemmy.today 1 day agoI’m pretty sure you misunderstood the way these vaccines work - no judgment, media is ass these days - so let me clear it out for you.
mRNA vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna) give cells a piece of RNA (ribonucleic acid) coding the spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19. mRNA normally serves as a translation layer: it simply comes to rRNA, lays down and says “we make THIS”. And there’s the end of it. No long-term changes are made, the cell just produces respective proteins for a while, before new genuine orders come along.
In this process, spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2 are being created, are being recognized by the immune system as something that is clearly not yours, destroyed and remembered. Spike-coding RNA does not replicate without being written into DNA and ceases to function.
Vector vaccines (Johnson & Johnson, Sputnik V) put the spike-coding sequence into another virus that is otherwise harmless. Then this virus enters your body with a shot, and then much the same thing occurs.
To be clear: viruses do these kinds of things all the time. SARS-CoV-2, that very virus causing COVID-19, does this too, except it instructs cells to replicate the entire thing, so that it could infect other cells and proliferate. In this way, such vaccines are no different than just getting infected, with one MAJOR difference in that you don’t get sick in the first place and don’t have random dangerous code replicate all around your body. Harmless spike proteins get formed in a controlled manner and quantity - and that’s it.
Even if you were an evil billionaire wishing to decimate human population or something, you’d have very hard time making something RNA-based that somehow persists in the body and also doesn’t reveal the effects for a long while. Easier to do with vector-based vaccines, but very hard to make it unnoticeable, either.
analog_fluffy@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
A vaccine was once “a weakened form of the pathogen, introduced so the body could create antigens without actually becoming ill”. Your technobabble (sorry) sounds like something different.
Allero@lemmy.today 23 hours ago
Yes, because we knew no better. Now we can be more precise and replicate specifically the parts immune system can recognize that are not harmful to us. If anything, we made vaccines safer than they were before.
It’s like saying solar panels are technobabble because we once gathered nearly all energy by burning wood or coal. Sure, we did, but why do it now? We know better options.
Besides, it takes school-level knowledge of biology to understand the reasoning behind these vaccines. They rely on the knowledge we had for many decades now; it was only hard to produce such RNA sequences at scale and to meet all the standards while doing so. Now we can do this, and it makes no sense to do otherwise.
Traditional vaccines are more dangerous and, at their best, just as efficient. Besides, they typically take longer to develop and test, and time was a pressing issue. Some traditional-style vaccines got eventually rolled out, but they did not outperform the alternatives, and so they didn’t gain much traction.
analog_fluffy@lemmy.zip 18 hours ago
It’s a nice story but I’m not buying it.
Allero@lemmy.today 17 hours ago
Because I studied well at school (which is enough as a prerequisite), and also happen to have a major in microbiology, which is related to what we’re talking about.
If there are things in particular that you are skeptical about, let me know.