Hey everyone, Jonathan12345 here, and today I’d like to discuss a topic that might have been on your minds a year or two ago: what’s an mRNA vaccine, and how does it work?
Now before I get into it, I’d just like to say that I created this community because many people to increase public awareness about how these biomedical things all work to prevent the spread of ecofascist “all-naturalism” sentiments. Now, back to the article.
There were a lot of people talking about how these were “experimental,” “untested”, and “unsafe”, which is of course anti-science fearmongering. In fact, mRNA vaccination has been around as a concept since the 1970s. So, without further ado, let’s get into it.
To understand how an mRNA vaccine works, we first need to know how a normal vaccine works. As many of you may know, it takes a deactivated virus and injects it into the body, stimulating a reaction and causing immune cells to produce antibodies targeting parts of the virus called antigens. That way, when the real virus attacks, the body comes prepared with antibodies targeting it ready for production.
Some vaccines don’t use a dead virus and instead use parts of the virus, directly injecting antigens into the bloodstream. It’s important to know that these two methods are not necessarily better or worse, they are simply different strategies with their own drawbacks and strengths.
An mRNA vaccine takes the second concept a bit further by having the body manufacture the antigens, the virus bits, itself using mRNA, which is a long molecule used as basically a photocopy of DNA to direct the construction of proteins. Now, while a foreign substance entering your body and hacking your cellular mechanisms might sound scary, it actually isn’t that big of a deal. mRNA is unstable and so naturally decays(hence the storage issues), and only a small fraction of your ribosomes (protein factories) will be making antigens anyways.
Finally, it’s important to know that antigens themselves are not harmful. They’re simply bits of viruses that are used by the body as markers for targeting, like a missile searching for a specific insignia on enemy vehicles.
Thank you all for taking the time to read this, and see you in the next post.
Thanks for the explanation.
Random question: what’s the perspective on mRNA being used accidentally or intentionally to have the host ribosomes produce prions?
What protein would the mRNA be used to make, in this case?
My understanding is that prions are merely misfolded, and that the mRNA sequence for a properly folded protein has no difference from that of a misfolded protein.
Prions are misfolded. Ribosomes cannot make misfolded proteins, they get that way through heating and such stimuli.
TIL thanks!
Sounds like a great premise for a spy/mystery/medical mystery drama. I would think you could get similar results by feeding somebody prions which would skip needing 10s of millions of $$$ and creating a paper trail to develop such a weapon.
It wouldn’t necessarily be scientifically accurate, but neither is 90% of the medical shows and stuff out there.
When is it more useful to use mRNA vaccines rather than normal vaccines?
Well, they’re both different means to the same end, which is exposing your body to antigens, so it shouldn’t really matter.
Great post!
