How do the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines work?
Another thing that I was wondering about is this:
> … no [mRNA] vaccines of this type have been approved for widespread human use.
according to [CBC](https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-19-vaccine-pfizer-faq-1.5795486).
Why is this the case? Thanks!
In: Biology
Basically we give cells a part of a virus, enough for the immune system to learn how to fight it but not enough of the protein blueprints to make full viruses that could spread.
So now weve shown the immune system what an infected cell would look like and how to get rid of it, and oncea cell actually becomes infected the immune system knows whats going on and how to fix it
My limited understanding is that we are in effect not putting in a dead or weakened virus into our body, but instead giving our body the blueprints to print out the right antibodies that will defeat the virus.
This has an advantage that because your own molecular machinery is building the “cure”, your body shouldn’t react negatively to it, because it is all native to your body.
This is my limited understanding.
mRNA vaccines take harmless viruses that our body can efficiently identify and respond to, and they basically insert RNA from the virus you are actually trying to fight into the carrier virus. This allows our body to mount an immune response to an active virus, but not one that can damage the body.
mRNA is the blueprint your cells use to make proteins. If you make the MRNA sequence for a virus protein, your cells could take that mRNA and make those virus proteins. This is good, because your cells could make a lot of those proteins, and since they aren’t the whole virus (like in other vaccines), it can’t make you sick. But, it can expose your immune system to the viral proteins, so that when real virus comes along, your immune system will attack it
Latest Answers