mRNA is a basic building block of life. Your body makes and breaks it down constantly. If there was any worry about it life itself wouldn't be possible.
While that is technically correct, mRNA is something your body makes in relatively large quantities every day. As such if it was harmful life itself wouldn't be possible.
> mRNA can only be used to make the body make proteins that, well, the body can make.
That's an important point we need to keep in mind: mRNA can be used to fix the body where it is broken/or not producing specific proteins when it would be needed. But it doesn't give us superpowers or change us into other beings than what we are.
mRNA has potential to be dangerous. There is nothing inherently dangerous in what our bodies already use as building instructions, nor is there evidence to suggest current mRNA vaccines cause any of these theoretical issues.
With regards to mRNA, mRNA is a fragile molecule that is quickly broken down inside the body after injection, so there's unlikely to be much long term risk with mRNA itself.
The human body is like an alien computer. We don't actually understand it; we can only hack and reverse engineer it.
Maybe mRNA delivery systems are as harmless as throwing a garbled CSS file into a repo that gets trashed before ever making it into a build. But what if it's not? Could be something bad.
So its effect on the immune system lasts even after it's gone. So if it were to cause any problems (in the immune system, for example), those could also persist after the mRNA is gone. So how exactly is this line of reasoning reassuring?
I'm no biologist, but mRNA is ephemeral by design - it's constantly being broken down in the body. The fact that mRNA is converted to proteins by ribosomes is one of the best understood processes in cellular biology, and synthesizing the mRNA for a new protein is not a new idea. Getting actual viral vectors injected into my arm seems much more concerning on the surface (though it's obviously also very safe).
I agree that we need more long term study of mRNA. It’s super promising for sure and probably safe, but I worry about auto immune consequences.
A mRNA vaccine against skin cancer for example seems particularly desirable for me, but also particularly dangerous potentially, given that skin cancer cells are very close to normal body cells. What if the vaccine goes slightly wrong sometimes and your body learns to destroy your skin?
Interesting. It seems like the mRNA itself breaks down in most cases like expected, but sometimes the particles/packages that contain the mRNA don't ever get opened, meaning the mRNA is never processed or exposed to the body.
We have learned a lot about how the human body works. There is no plausible way that there could be something bad: the vaccine breaks down in the way RNA does withing minutes of entering the body. If anything bad happens because of RNA breakdown: you wouldn't have been born as RNA is basic to cell biology and breaks down as part of normal processes all the time.
The first mRNA vaccine went to phase 1 trials more than 10 years, which means we have a few people walking around who got a mRNA vaccine more than 10 years ago - if they got a side effect it wouldn't be noted. The sample size is of course too small, and it was a different vaccine, but there some long term safety data.
Anything is possible. My physics teachers like to point out that all the air in the room can teleport to the moon - but the odds of that are too low to worry about, even on the time frame of the universe.
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