Current vaccine is an actual virus, just a weakened (attenuated) version. mRNA vaccine causes your body to create the proteins that your immune system can target if it encounters the actual virus. That allows your immune system to train on the targets without introducing an actual virus. The mRNA version doesn't have the ability to infect a cell and use it to reproduce, it ONLY triggers the immune system.
There are plenty of vaccines that use attenuated viruses - these also force your cells to produce antigens, and in fact the virus reproduces in your cells and damages them on its own as well. You could think of an mRNA vaccine as kind of like an attenuated virus vaccine, except for the fact that it can’t reproduce itself at all, unlike a virus.
You're about right. the mRNA vaccine introduces mRNA, which is taken up by cells. The cells then use the mRNA to produce the proteins of interest, which then can be presented to immune cells to start the immune response.
mRNA is sort analogous to code that compiles to proteins
But the mRNA vaccine isn't what the immune system is responding to directly, but the spike protein produced by the cells, which got infused with the mRNA. Anything that makes the immune system attack the vaccine, prevents the delivery of the mRNA. Sorry, I don't think your reasoning is sound and very based.
mRNA vaccines do not directly stimulate the immune system. They cause the immune system itself to create protein structures that stimulate the immune system.
The definition change is simply to more accurately include this vaccine method.
What are you talking about now? The vaccine or the virus? Because that's literally true for both! And the mRNA vaccine has a fraction of the code compared to the full virus.
How is it same? I thought traditional vaccines are about injecting the diluted viral load to trigger immune response whereas mRNA vaccine is about injecting rna fragment that hijack your body cell to make the foreign protein to trigger immune response.
Isn't the whole mechanism different?
Well, it's in mice first of all. And it has nothing to do with the mRNA vaccines that are popular right now. Here's how it works in layman's terms:
The "vaccine" is really a dose of a mutant virus that is the same as the virus you are supposedly infected with, with one key difference: this mutant virus is unable to fight off your body's immune system. But, like the original virus, it still triggers your immune system (to make RNAi). So, the vaccine (the mutant virus), replicates in your body and infects you, as the original virus is infecting you. Your immune system responds (the RNAi), doubly so, since it is seeing not only the original virus but also the mutant virus, and this double-size (not really double but the idea is..."more", "stronger") immune response is enough to knock out the original virus
The mRNA vaccines work by causing the spike protein to multiply in your cells. Yes, the mechanism is different - the virus copies itself and the spike protein just happens to be part of the virus, whereas the vaccine mRNA just causes the spike protein itself to be copied. Note that with the vaccine, you're getting a massive number of cells "infected" all at once, equivalent to quite a bit of virus self-replication. So the result is the same, a lot of spike protein floating around and doing damage. The main difference in result is that with the mRNA, there is an upper bound to the number of cells which can be infected (and which therefore have to be eliminated by your immune system), whereas with the virus there is effectively no upper bound. But that doesn't translate at all into a difference of how much damage the spike protein produced by X infected cells produces, and it doesn't mean that the number of infected cells with mRNA is significantly less than the number of infected cells you would have gotten with a successfully-fought-off infection. So it could do just as much damage.
This comment and another got me looking into mRNA more. It seems like an mRNA vaccine is more akin to food you consume that produces a desired effect, rather than something permanently sticking around in your body. It doesn't permanently modify your genetics.
mRNA is usually produced by DNA and is temporarily used by cells to create proteins. In this case, the mRNA is used to create proteins with a similar structure to the coronavirus. These proteins produce the desired immune response but do not harm you. Like other proteins, they don't stick around permanently, just the immune response does. Additionally, the mRNA itself only lasts several minutes to days. [0]
It's a relatively simple biological process that's well understood. This gives me a lot of confidence in its safety profile. Unlike a regular vaccine, you also don't have to create the protein directly, which leads to fewer errors during production from my understanding. You're producing a simpler, more basic compound, and can be more certain about the quality of individual doses.
A mRNA vaccine basically sics our immune systems on something. Our immune systems are fairly adaptable and will kill even cancer cells if they can tell them apart from healthy tissue.
The mRNA vaccines literally expose your immune system to a foreign antigen, the longstanding definition of a vaccine. They use a nice trick to get your own body to manufacture the antigen, but it's not gene therapy, they don't go anywhere your genes, they give ribosomes some extra instructions.
The boosters have been extremely effective at preventing severe infections, which is plenty useful for public health even if it isn't as good as preventing transmission entirely.
The fact that it's mRNA isn't really relevant to how your body fights the virus, it's still the same mechanism.
The traditional way (as used by the Oxford/Astrazenica covid vaccine, and others) is to show the body what the virus looks like by giving it non-harmful bits of protein that look like the bit of the virus the immune system will need to recognise.
The mRNA ones (like Pfizer's or Moderna's) use mRNA code to tell your body to create those harmless proteins, and then the rest is the same - your immune system learns to recognise them, which is good because it will be more likely to recognise the real virus.
The mRNA technique is just moving the "create these harmless things" from the lab to inside the body. It doesn't change how your body fights the virus compared to traditional vaccine methods.
(mRNA vaccines have also been undergoing safety tests for years, these ones for covid are the first approved but not because previous/ongoing ones were shown to be unsafe.)
The questions you're asking are not really coherent. mRNA vaccines are pretty well understood. The vaccine delivers a payload to your own cells which cause them to produce viral proteins. These proteins in turn cause an immune response and help you fight off any future infection because immune cells have memory and leverage information from the vaccine proteins to fight off the real virus.
mRNA vaccines are essentially a form of genetic engineering but their safety record is better than basically all other forms of immunization so if you've already had 3 boosters and no negative side-effects then getting another one isn't going to hurt you any more than the previous shots.
You should also quit smoking and start exercising since that's better than whatever else you could do for your health and general well-being.
mRNA isn’t gene therapy, it induces cells primarily the dendritic cells of your immune system to produce antigens and their antibodies.
Dendritic cells are essentially your body’s CSI they roam around Hoovering stuff that is floating in your body and analyzing it.
The mRNA is picked up through phagocytosis, is decoded by the ribosome and the cell begins to produce antigens.
The cells in your body then attack the antigens with proteasomes, once the antigens are broken down they’ll be presented in the cell membrane of the dendritic cells for other immune cells to sample and produce antibodies for.
This is really not that different than how deactivated virus or protein based vaccines work, dendritic cells swallow them up analyze them, break down the antigens and present the evidence to the “cops” that then go and hunt down the baddies…
The mRNA vaccine doesn’t hijacks the cells of your body in the same way as viruses do, it doesn’t interact with your DNA or nucleus the same way that retroviruses or well actual gene therapy do.
I really don’t understand why you are spreading this misinformation.
I think you might have a misunderstanding of how the mRNA vaccines work. The mRNA in the vaccines are simply read by your cells to produce the spike proteins to train your immune system.
There is no RNA (or DNA for that matter) modification taking place in vivo.
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