Can someone help me with a simplified explanation I can give an anti-covid vaxxer. His rationale the mRNA style vaccine isn't designed to kill COVID like past traditional vaccines. He's claiming while vaccinated people aren't getting as sick we do know they can spread COVID and vaccinated people are more responsible for mutations.
I don't know enough about vaccines to respond.
All vaccines are designed to present a target to your immune system in order to recruit the body into building neutralizing antibodies (and prime other defenses.)
Traditionally this was done in a number of ways, including injecting attenuated
live virus into your body ( Eg MMR, Chickenpox, stuff everyone got as a baby) or killed virus (eg polio, flu.)
"Where do we get all this volume of virus to make vaccines?" you may ask. Good question.
A common manufacturing technique is injecting chicken eggs with virus and incubating them to grow mass quantities, then harvesting and processing into vaccines.
Yes. If you visited a vaccine manufacturer, say Merck, you will literally see thousands of infected chicken eggs sitting in an incubator.
The original innoculating virus comes from govt heath orgs (eg CDC, WHO).
For flu, they guess what the strain will be for the next season by monitoring other parts of the globe, modeling and collecting samples. It's not an exact science and they miss often enough
Overall, this process is slow, caveman level bullshit, but its worked well for the speed of viruses we've faced, but too fuckin slow for COVID.
Instead of spending months building chicken egg factories to build viral particles, mRNA vaccines work to use the protein factories that already exist inside every cell in your body, and skipping all the bullshit.
Ribosomes, the most ancient and highly preserved organelles inside your cells, builds every protein inside your body from instructions encoded in messenger (m)RNA, that was made as a copy of a small part of your DNA (ie central library.)
The mRNA vaccines are simply work instructions to your ribosomes to pretty please build this section of coronavirus' spike protein.
It does in quantity, and the expressed protein is now available to be presented to your body's immune system for reaction, just as you would have it was a an attenuated or killed virus grown in a fuckin chicken egg, and also without all the other proteins that may have not been purified out and possibly cause allergic reactions.
It's far faster, better targeted, more adaptable, and more effective than traditional processes. Yay for science.
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