Vaccines are one of the best and most important discoveries of humanity, which have saved many, many lives and have been able to eradicate a disease (smallpox) that was deadly until around fifty years ago. The principle of vaccines is very simple: use your own body to protect yourself from pathogens.
When you are infected with a virus or bacteria, your immune system reacts and "fights" against that infection. Sometimes you win (most of the time with mild illnesses) and sometimes you lose (and then the infection usually kills you).
In order for your immune system to work, it first has to "become familiar" with the pathogen.
Your white blood cells literally start to make combinations to recognize parts of that virus or that bacteria and thus be able to eliminate it. Those parts of the virus that the immune system can recognize are called ANTIGENS and are normally coat proteins of viruses or pathogens (I'll talk about viruses only now, for simplicity).
Antigens are recognized by ANTIBODIES (small proteins that also recognize these antigens) by binding to them and serving both to interrupt the function of viruses and for other white blood cells to be able to recognize and kill them.
It takes time for the immune system to make these antibodies, as they have to "find" the antigens and then make the combination against them "that works."
For this reason, when you suffer from chickenpox as a child, you are sick for a while, that week that your body has no defenses and that it must "learn" to make them.
During that time, if you are not able to defeat the virus, you can suffer sequelae or, directly, die. But if you don't die and you have been able to generate antibodies and defeat the infection, your body always keeps the "memory" of those antigens and always has some antibodies or some cells that can generate them ready, in case the virus comes again. .
In a second infection, your immune system would be ready, it would kill the virus and you would not even know it. This is what is called being "immunized."
What does a vaccine do?
Well, expose your body to antigens BEFORE the virus comes, so that your immune system "thinks" that it is infected, generates the antibodies and leaves you already immunized for the true infection.
So far, let it be clear that vaccination serves to present an antigen to the body and to generate antibodies to the disease.
What type of vaccines are there? Are they dangerous? How are they made?
There are several ways to build immunity, which is why there are different types of vaccines.
The first vaccine (vacuna in Spanish) is so called because it came "from the cow." Some people were observed to get “mild” smallpox from being in contact with the cowpox virus. Therefore, using a cow virus, we could get cross immunity with the human virus. In a very rudimentary way, that was done using a live virus.
Currently, "killed" or attenuated viruses or protein bits that can act as antigen can be used for the immune system to recognize. There are times when the immune system needs a booster dose and that is why you have to vaccinate again, such as tetanus every five or ten years.
Vaccines are intended to stimulate the immune system, therefore, they can cause reactions, usually mild and very local, of inflammation at the injection site, but they are among the drugs with the fewest side effects and enormous benefits on a personal level and social far outweigh the risks.
Now there is a new generation of vaccines, like Pfizer and Moderna for COVID, which instead of injecting a protein, inject the messenger RNA.
What is messenger RNA?
RNA or RNA (ribonucleic acid) is a chain of molecules that extract information from DNA or DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) that we have in the nuclei of all our cells.
Its function is to carry that information from the nucleus to the cytoplasm (that is, "to the body") of the cell and there convert that information into a protein, which will then fulfill a certain function.
As we said before, most of the antigens are proteins, so these vaccines carry the information for our own cells to "make the antigen."
Is RNA genetic material?
Well it depends on the definition. If we consider genetic material that which carries information about an organism, most of the time (with the exception of some viruses) this is not the case. The genetic material is carried by DNA and RNA simply codes for a very specific fragment that will give rise to a protein.
If we want to consider that the RNA carries "encrypted material from the nucleus" then we could say that this RNA is "genetic material".
Can RNA get into our genetic material when we get one of these vaccines?
No. For various reasons:
1. Our genetic material is a double helix of DNA, RNA looks like it, but it is different and there is no way it can get into that chain.
2. One of the characteristics of RNA is that it is very sensitive to degradation (that is why these vaccines must be kept at -80C) and it is normal ... Because its function is to carry the information at a specific moment, that the protein and then disappear. The RNA will have just enough time to transcribe into protein and disappear.
3. For an insertion of genetic material to occur, which occurs with some types of viruses, many things have to happen that include the action of very specific enzymes. The fact that you have genetic material (if you consider the RNA as such, or the DNA itself) lying around is not going to make you a hybrid.
Think that everything you eat (and everything is EVERYTHING) is full of genetic material, both the steak, and the lettuce, as tomatoes are or have been living beings with their cells and their nuclei full of delicious RNA and DNA and nobody is it has turned red or photosynthesized after eating a salad.
Can they force you to get vaccinated?
Nobody can force you to get the vaccine, if you don't want to (at least for now), but seeing how things are, the high level of mortality of the virus, the transparency that there is so far in the security data, etc, etc, I will be the first in line to get the first vaccine to hit the market.
The good news is that everything seems to indicate that the level of immunization with all vaccines to date is very high.
Written by Miguel López-Toledano, PhD in Neuroscience.
For more information, you can visit this website:
https://www.cvdvaccine.com
Comments