Saturday, December 25, 2021
Merry Christmas to all my lovely readers. I wish for happiness to wrap you in this winter season with it’s warmth and may you be showered with unlimited blessings on this day. Omicron cases in India and all over the world are on a sharp rise, owing to its ability to spread rapidly, and potential to spread much faster and infect vastly more people than delta variant. Bill Gates expresses his concern on twitter over the new variant and asked people to be cautious and stay indoors whilst enjoying their holidays. Pertaining to the topic, today let’s discuss about vaccines. ‘mRNA’ vaccines in particular which have been the hot topic during this pandemic.
To get a fair understanding of how the mRNA vaccines work, we first need to understand how the traditional vaccines used to save us from diseases. To get a better grasp and understanding of how things work, let us think it this way - your body is a battlefield, with it’s own set of warriors in the form of WBC, RBC, proteins etc. etc. Then there are viruses and bacterias who thrive in the air and external environment and are waiting for that perfect opportunity to declare war on the battlefield and start replicating themselves. Studying this violent war under a microscope where the viruses were seen to be overpowering our sweet, delicate warriors, scientists came up with a backdoor.
The conventional vaccines, in order to prevent infection, introduce in the body a dead/harmless piece of the concerned bacteria. This triggers an immune response in the body and the body produces antibodies to fight the virus. Hence, the next time body is infected by a live virus, the antibodies which were already developed in response to a dead/harmless version of the same virus will come into a play.
mRNA vaccines on the other hand take a completely different approach. And all of this has been possible because of our ability to understand and read genes better because of the Human Genome Project. mRNA vaccines are a blueprint that tell the cells in your body to create a variety of proteins. mRNA instructs your own cells on how to build a part of a protein that the virus has. As part of the normal process, the immune system recognizes that the protein is foreign and starts training and preparing the immune system against this foreign protein. If you were to encounter the virus now, your body would recognize that spike protein and send the immune system into “attack” mode. These vaccines are not made up with inactive pathogens, hence they are non infectious. These vaccines can be produced much faster and at a rapid pace, improving responsiveness to emerging outbreaks.
Getting them is as simple as getting a conventional vaccine. The vaccine goes into your arm and hurts like a normal needle. The muscles take up the RNA and build the spike proteins as suggested by the blueprint. The immune system recognizes it as a foreign protein and trigger antibodies in response. When the body next sees the viral protein, the immune system acts immediately, thus preventing the infection.
mRNA vaccines serve as a really important breakthrough in this century. They can serve as a cure for cancers and other life threatening diseases which have been haunting us forever. This may infact turn out to be our biggest leap towards a better and healthier future.
See you on next Saturday, until then have a great weekend :)
Cheers!
Some things that you may find interesting-
Twitter thread: A little procrastination hurts nobody
Video: The Big Misconception About Electricity
Podcast: The Joe Rogan Experience - Alex Jones and Tim Dillon
Song I am listening to: Manja by Amit Trivedi
Thought of the week: “Logic is a good way to defend a decision, but it is not a good way to make a decision.”
Here are the last three posts if you were too occupied to read them: