March 26th, 2023

Before we dive head-first into the complicated world of vaccines, I need to make a few things clear.  I am not writing this article to villainize folks who chose not to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, nor do I want to blindly praise the companies that provided them.  My goal is to make Appalachian Health Blog as non-partisan as possible.  Granted, there will always be hints of unintended bias, as right now I am the only person writing articles for this website.  I hope you will forgive me for this (or head over to my contact page and let me know) as I work to build a casual, fact-based conversation about health and science.  Now, if you’ll join me, let’s have a discussion.

 Messenger RNA (mRNA) is a molecule that, as you might deduce from its name, is related to DNA.  In biology, we have what we call the “central dogma,” meaning this is our main understanding of how life works.  Simply put, we know that living organisms have DNA.  DNA, which is centrally located in our cells with its own protection system, can be transcribed to mRNA.  mRNA serves as a middle-man that can travel outside of the protective bubble around the DNA (we call this the nucleus of the cell).  After it does this, it physically attaches to little conglomerations of molecular machines that take its message and turn it into a protein.  The proteins produced by this process are our DNA in action.  

The main point that I want to make about mRNA technology is that it’s not as new as you might think.  Although it definitely seemed to, it didn’t randomly pop up out of left field just in time for the pandemic.  mRNA wasn’t discovered until 1961.  After twenty-eight more years of research on its function and capabilities, it was used experimentally as a less permanent way to express a protein of choice in cells.  mRNA is not stable, meaning that it will quickly degrade.  This allows our cells to respond to changing conditions such as being sick or injured by building different proteins that have unique jobs within our bodies.  Because of its instability, it can be used to temporarily express a protein, after which it will be degraded.  This is how mRNA vaccines work.  In the case of COVID-19, mRNA that contains the instructions for a unique portion of the virus is used by our cells to make just that specific protein rather than the whole virus.  Once our cells have constructed that piece, our immune systems recognize it as not a natural part of our bodies and build a defense against it.

The first mRNA vaccine was tested in mice before the year 2000.  Obviously, this technology was not ready, and it would be years before the COVID-19 pandemic introduced publicly available mRNA vaccines.  However, scientists have been continually developing this technology since before the beginning of the twenty-first century.  Since then, outbreaks of diseases like Ebola and Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) have driven the experimental development of using mRNA in vaccines.  Because biotech companies had already been refining this technology when the recent pandemic hit, it quickly took over in the race for a COVID-19 vaccine.  The process of vaccine approval, like drug approval, is long and complicated.  Technically, mRNA COVID vaccines underwent the same clinical testing and trials as other non-pandemic vaccines, but the process was sped up considerably in attempt to combat the rapid worldwide spread.  Even tried-and-true vaccines that underwent the normal route of FDA approval a long time ago are still being studied and perfected today (I used to work in a lab that still studies the vaccine for whooping cough, which has been approved in its modern form since 1991).  This isn’t to say that they are unsafe or ineffective (FDA clinical trials are designed to ensure this), but scientists continue to learn about the immune system and how we can best use it to our advantage when designing vaccines.  

The subject of how exactly different types of COVID-19 vaccines work and how they were created is another topic for a different day.  In writing this, my goal is to show you that mRNA vaccines are not quite as new as we tend to think, and that this should give us all some peace of mind about present and future vaccines that utilize this technology.  Scientists are continuing to study these vaccines, as they should.  I had the unique opportunity to take a vaccinology class as the first COVID-19 vaccines were starting to be used at the end of 2020.  Not only did we learn about different types of vaccines and the process leading to their approval, but we were taught to think independently and critically about the science we were being presented.  Unfortunately, the long-term effects of both the COVID-19 virus and vaccines cannot be known for sure without the passage of time.  In the meantime, we can all hopefully take a little comfort in knowing the history surrounding this new (to us) technology.