The COVID-19 Vaccine Explained

Not actually Erin.

Picture by KJ Photography

& is used with permission.

This is an informative post, not a political post. 

If you're like me, you have some questions about the COVID-19 vaccination, such as:

• How can it work? I thought viruses mutated and that's why we can't vaccinate against them. 
• What is mRNA and what does it have to do with a vaccine?
• Will this vaccine affect my DNA at all?

I am neither a doctor nor a scientist, so I cannot answer these questions for you myself. However, I know several doctors and scientists, and I am able to present to you some information about the science behind the COVID-19 vaccine that will allow you to make an informed decision about whether or not you want to take it. 

I have two ways to explain it: the short, colloquial version, and the more in-depth version which is less conversational. 

The Colloquial Explanation

These are a series of Tweets by a Canadian physician. I know that Twitter is not peer-reviewed, so I asked my Doctor of Microbiology friend to look at them and she said "Other than one typographical error it is correct."

1:

The mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) are kind of brilliant at a science level. I’ve had a few people in my real non-Twitter life ask me to explain how it works so I’m going to try my best here in this thread while I’m waiting for a patient to show.

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

2: 

The first thing to know is how your immune system works. Basically, your immune cells attack anything foreign to your body. If it sees a protein or a virus or a bacteria or anything that it doesn’t recognize, it launches an attack.

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

3:  

The first thing to know is how your immune system works. Basically, your immune cells attack anything foreign to your body. If it sees a protein or a virus or a bacteria or anything that it doesn’t recognize, it launches an attack.

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

4: 

Once it fights off the virus, though, it remembers it. You’ve got memory cells in your immune system and if you run into that virus again, your memory cells say “I’ve seen this asshole before”. Your body uses it’s past experience to demolish the virus before it can make you sick.

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

5:  

So, with that in mind, we return to the vaccine. Scientists looked at the COVID virus and saw a protein on the outside of the virus that looked like a good candidate to launch an immune attack against.

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

6:  

That protein, by the way, is an important one for the virus. It uses that protein to get into your cells. That protein makes the virus more infectious. In short, that protein makes the virus more of an asshole.

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

7:  

Now COVID has DNA in it that codes for all of its parts. So scientists looked at the entire DNA sequence of virus and found the sequence of DNA that is the blueprints for that protein. The asshole protein.

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

NOTE: This is where the typographical error lies. "COVID carries its genetic material as RNA, not DNA," says my friend the Doctor of Microbiology.  I asked if this changed the information at all, or if it was simply a case of strike the word DNA in this Tweet and replace it with RNA? "Strike and replace," she says.

In fact, the person who originally tweeted this admitted and apologized for the typographical error as well.
 

8:  

Side note: DNA is the blueprint to make things in a cell. Cells take the DNA and transcribe it into RNA. The RNA is the instructions that tell the cell what to make. mRNA (literally messenger-RNA) literally just gives instructions to the cell to make something.

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

9:  

So scientists took the blueprint for the asshole protein on COVID and made an mRNA version of it. Literally just the instructions on how to make that protein.

These instructions “are” the vaccine.

Let me explain.

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

10:  

The vaccine contains no actual part of the virus. It has only the instructions on how to make the asshole protein. So, you can’t get infected with COVID from the vaccine. You just get these instructions.

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

11:

Your cells see these instructions and say “sure, I’ll make this”. So your cells make a bunch of the asshole protein.

You immune system sees this new protein you’re producing and immediately says “what... the fuck... is this?” And it starts attacking the protein.

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

12: 

Remember it hasn’t seen this protein before. It takes awhile to ramp up production. Then it launches an all out war against the asshole protein. The fevers, chills, muscle soreness, etc you might get as vaccine side effects is your body bombing the hell out of the asshole protein

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

13: 

So you destroy the asshole protein (which in and of itself can’t infect you, it’s just a protein, not the virus).

Now here’s the important part. Your memory cells ‘remember’ the asshole protein. They remember exactly how to destroy it.

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

14: 

By the way, your body breaks down the mRNA instructions that you got with the vaccine pretty quickly too. That’s normal. You don’t need a bunch of instructions hanging around forever. Your body breaks those down and gets rid of them.

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

15: 

So you’ve broken down the mRNA instructions. You’ve destroyed asshole proteins. Everything from the vaccine is gone.

Except for those memory cells who remember that protein very well.

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

16: 

So then, a COVID virus enters your body. Your body has never seen the virus before.

BUT it’s seen that protein that’s on the outside of the virus. Your memory cells say “you’ve got to be kidding me, THIS asshole again? Get the fuck out of here!”

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

17: 

Your body’s own ‘natural immune system’ quickly and efficiently launches an all out war, using the template it has from when it destroyed the asshole protein last time. It destroys the virus before it can take hold, replicate, and make you sick.

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

18: 

Congratulations! Now, you’re immune to COVID! You’ve got the blueprints to defeat it as soon as it enters your body.

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

19: 

What if the virus mutates so it doesn’t produce the asshole protein any more? Well, since it uses the asshole protein to get into your cells, if it mutates away from the asshole protein, it’ll probably also be less infectious. That’s what makes the vaccine low-key brilliant.

— WheatNOil (@WheatNOil) December 17, 2020

The Technical Explanation

The more in-depth and less colloquial version is too large to post here.  Cedar Sanderson, author and scientist, explains it in this post on her blog. 

Now You Know

And now you can make an informed decision whether or not to get vaccinated