Moderna & Pfizer mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines

Immunology Simplified

So, the human body is extraordinarily intelligent. Whenever an invading bug gets into our body, our immune system creates things called antibodies that remember what type of bug made us sick the first time. This is why we don't usually get sick with the exact same bug twice because we generate immunity

Vaccines As A Whole

Vaccines thus mimic this process (of immunity) without us actually having to get sick in the first place. Vaccines prep the body's immune system as sort of a trial run in order to be ready to fight and ultimately kill whatever little bug crawls into the body. Normally this is achieved in one of three ways…Immunity can occur by introducing:

1. A weakened form of the bug

2. The dead bug

3. A piece of the dead bug (a protein called an antigen)

COVID 19 Vaccine

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are mRNA vaccines. What is mRNA? Well to start, let's look at mRNA and how it works in the coronavirus itself. mRNA is located inside of the virus and is basically the blueprint instructions on how to create proteins that the virus needs to thrive and replicate. In the context of the coronavirus itself, the mRNA creates an antigen (or a protein) that is expressed on the viruses surface, which is known as its spike protein. This spike protein is used by COVID 19 to attach to specific cells in our bodies and ultimately allows it to replicate inside our own cells

Summary of mRNA in the coronavirus

mRNA inside cells—> proteins. Proteins—> present on the surface of the cell in the form of spike proteins which allows it to attach to our human cells leading to infection

mRNA Vaccine and Immunity in Humans

Now us as humans, we all have mRNA in all of our cells that allow us to create specific proteins we need to survive. What the COVID 19 vaccine does (specifically the Moderna and Pfizer ones) is it uses a synthetically made, mimicked version of the COVID mRNA blueprint, which, once injected, gets taken up by our cells and allows our body to create our own versions of these spike proteins. As we talked about the intelligence of the human body before, our immune system will recognize these spike proteins as foreign and produce antibodies against them. So when the real virus is introduced with its own spikes, the body's immune system will know how to kill the corona virus before it can replicate high enough to cause infection.

Summary of the mRNA vaccines

A vaccine full of millions of the mRNA particles is injected into your body. The cells of your body take this mRNA and use it as a blueprint to produce very similar spike proteins on the surface of our own cells that are present on the surface of COVID19 cells. The immune system recognizes these spike proteins as foreign and begins to create antibodies against them. When the real coronavirus enters your body with identical spike proteins, your immune system already knows them to be foreign and wipes out the coronavirus before it can be super harmful