- Feb 2, 2014
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thank you for breaking it downI'm not a vaccine guy so there may be some technical inacurracies but my understanding of vaccines is that traditionally they're whole viruses that are weakened or killed that we take inside our bodies so the immune system will learn to build a defense against it for when we encounter the virus when it's not neutered (there are exceptions to this like subunit vaccines that only contain part of the virus like the tdap vaccine)
The kinds of vaccines that Pfizer and Moderna are making won't contain the whole virus. What they did was they took mrna and coated it in lipid so it won't break down until it gets inside our cells. After it's injected inside us and gets inside our cells, our body will read the Mrna instructions and mass produce a crap ton of the covid protein spike, and just the protein spike. The idea is that our immune system will recognize the covid protein spike as foreign and mount a defense that targets those protein spikes specifically.
There's some advantages to this. One, since the vaccines only contain part of the virus, the chances of us getting sick from it should theoretically be slim. Two, the body will be mass producing these protein spikes for weeks to give us a chance to mount a defense. With a traditional vaccine the nerfed virus might not be around for that long so the body may not develop a potent defense.
Reading this boosted my confidence in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines (at least my confidence in not getting sick from it)... Whenever an mrna vaccine is made available to me (maybe they'll offer it to me work) I'll take it.
*edit
When I find the article that explains this I'll put a link on it below