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Originally Posted by imperiouskitten
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he's talkn bout mrna vaccine vs mashed-up-virus vaccine. mRNA vaccine is basically gene therapy, aka they infect you with a virus which writes DNA into your cells. CLassical vaccines were just "attenuated viral agent", aka take virus and smash it up so it doesn't work right, but your body learns to recognize the various surfaces of the smashed virus and builds an immune response that prepares it for encountering active virons.
to explain the alternative to classical vaccines -- we are capable of using these viruses we found in the wild and reprogrammed to recognize a string of DNA and insert whatever string we want before/after it -- that's how gene therapy is done. I'm not sure exactly what DNA we add to make for immunity, but I bet we just add the right string to the sequences that encode for our immunoglobin's recognition factors (not actual terminology) which causes our immune response to recognize some common pattern on the coronavirus surface. To explain that: so, we have these immunoglobin proteins that basically spawn out and recognize various surfaces. It's a lock and key thing; if the lock of the immunoglobin fits the key of the encoded surface, then they bind together and the immunoglobin is triggered by that to murder the thing which bound to it. So we just take the "lock" sequence we either engineered or more likely extracted from a person with a developed immune response, and encode it into our immune system with gene therapy, and then we have an immune reponse ready for COVID without ever being exposed either to COVID or attenuated COVID.
This scares people because you're messing with their genome. These people probably don't understand how malleable their genome is. But it's probably safer than giving people boiled COVID. When you hear about people developing the flu from flu vaccine, it's because the virus in the vaccine was not properly killed. This approach removes all that. ANd I think will be the first instance of mass gene therapy, which as we all know made Snake very bad ass.
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That's close to how it works but not quite. mRNA vaccines don't permanently or even temporarily change the genome of anything-- they don't touch the genome. Cells use mRNA, which is transcripted as a 'copy' of a section of your genome, to encode the production of proteins elsewhere in the cell. Like if you think of a cell like a corporation that has a headquarters and a factory, your DNA is in the headquarters, which writes mRNA mail to send to the factory across town in the endoplasmic reticulum, which uses the mRNA directions to build a protein.
mRNA vaccines simply insert those directions directly into the cell, which takes them and makes them into immunity-significant pieces of the virus, which the cell then excretes. Those pieces get picked up by your immune system which recognizes--and destroys-- them when they show up again in the form of covid.
mRNA vaccines have a potential safety advantage in that they don't actually use any form of viable virus at all-- it is impossible for anyone to get infected with anything through the use of one. It is also cheaper and more efficient to mass produce. The downsides are that it is difficult and costly to transport and store because the mRNA is very fragile. We've also never mass produced and mass vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine before, but it's extremely cutting edge, and is thought to produce superior protection more safely than the traditional viral vector vaccines developed by Russia and China. But given the novelty we simply haven't seen how things pan out long term (multiple years). Still better than risking it tangling with covid as long as they finish out the phase III trials.