Unrelated to Advertising: How mRNA vaccines work

Y’all, I seriously just want to talk about advertising stuff, and then people want to mess with me.

I should have realized that trying to talk in a reasonable manner about public health communication was going to bring out the kooks, so that one’s on me. And now this one is, too. Is an advertising blog the appropriate venue to dispel vaccine misinformation? Dunno, but apparently the comments section is a venue to try to spread it, so let’s dance: Here’s how mRNA vaccines actually work.

How mRNA vaccines work: The actual explanation

Human cells aren’t just li’l bags of goo with DNA double-helices floating around — they have li’l structures and organelles and molecules that each have their own function. Ribosomes are essentially biomachines in all our cells that make the various proteins the body needs to grow, repair, and sustain itself. They make these proteins based on information delivered by mRNA.

Messenger RNA — mRNA — is a molecule that carries instructions from the DNA in the cell nucleus to the ribosomes to tell them what proteins to make. That’s all it does. It’s a one-way trip — once the mRNA is translated, it usually degrades and is recycled for parts, or in some particular cases it can be stored for future use, but it never goes back to the nucleus.

Again: mRNA isn’t DNA, and mRNA doesn’t have any effect on DNA.

The mRNA vaccines created for COVID deliver the instruction to produce one specific protein found on the outside of the COVID virus. The body’s immune system then recognizes there’s a protein in its midst that isn’t supposed to be there and creates antibodies to destroy it. Once the protein is destroyed, the antibodies stay in the body, and the next time they encounter that kind of protein — for instance, on the outside of a COVID virus — they’re ready to go to kill the virus and keep you from getting seriously ill.

The mRNA in the vaccine doesn’t do anything to the DNA — the DNA is in the cell nucleus, and the vaccine doesn’t go into the cell nucleus. Everything it needs to do is happening outside the nucleus, in the cytoplasm. And once the mRNA in the vaccine has been translated, it breaks down and is flushed away by the cell, since it’s done its job and isn’t needed anymore.

So that’s that.

Right?

How mRNA vaccines work: A metaphor about Olive Garden

Okay. Say you manage an Olive Garden. You hear there’s been a rash of Outback employees going around to different restaurants, beating up the staff and stealing the customers. Several restaurants have already gone out of business because of it. But that’s not gonna be you. You find a recipe for Outback’s Bloomin’ Onion, take it into the kitchen of your Olive Garden, and tell some of the cooks to make a few. They do.

This throws the front-of-house staff into a rage — this is an Olive Garden, we do not make Bloomin’ Onions, these are not supposed to be here, and I swear on all that is holy, if I see someone walking in with a Bloomin’ Onion, they’re getting their shit wrecked. And sure enough, when a couple of Outback employees show up at your Olive Garden with their Bloomin’ Onions, Madison stops them at the door, beats them bloody, and leaves them on the front lawn covered in their own appetizer as a warning to any other Outback employees who might start feeling froggy.

Now that your restaurant has made a Bloomin’ Onion, has it become an Outback? No. Will the kitchen be forever tainted by the Bloomin’ Onion? No. Will the restaurant add Bloomin’ Onions to the menu? Once again, no, it is an Olive Garden and Olive Gardens don’t serve Bloomin’ Onions. Having a Bloomin’ Onion recipe in the kitchen for an afternoon — you didn’t even take it back to the office, much less send it up to corporate — didn’t make any fundamental changes to the restaurant itself. All it did was make your front-of-house staff that much more prepared to fight off invasion by hostile Outback employees.

Why would you want to do that?

The mRNA vaccine is a way to prepare the immune system for fighting off a pathogen without having to actually put that pathogen into the body. You could wait for Outback employees to come into your restaurant and hope your front-of-house staff can fight them off. You could bring a couple of Outback employees in yourself, maybe rough ‘em up first so they can’t put up as much of a fight, and you’ll almost certainly survive that, although your restaurant might take some damage during the scuffle. The Bloomin’ Onion approach helps you prepare your staff to fight off Outback invaders without risk to the restaurant — you don’t have to bring the people inside at all, just the appetizer.

Plus, it’s versatile. mRNA vaccines are quicker to design and produce than traditional vaccines. So if a virus mutates — say the Outback employees realize they’re getting clocked for their Bloomin’ Onions and start carrying Chocolate Thunder From Down Under instead — it’s just a matter of getting ahold of the recipe and delivering it to the kitchen.

And again, mRNA vaccines do not have any effect on the DNA. They will not make you a mutant. They will not affect your future children (unless you’re pregnant when you get the vaccine, in which case your baby will get your antibodies, which is the point, you’re welcome). You will not become an Outback. You won’t even become some weird Olive Garden-Outback hybrid. You’ll just be protected against attacks from Outback employees who want to take over your restaurant.

But I heard— 

No. This isn’t brand-new, untested technology. Yes, the mRNA COVID vaccines were developed super-extra-fast, but the first-ever injected mRNA vaccine (against cancer) was in clinical trials in 2008, and the first one against an infectious disease (rabies) was in clinical trials in 2013. (The biggest challenge they faced was with getting the mRNA all the way to the ribosome before the body broke it down — they came up with a li’l lipid bubble to put it in, problem solved.) The reason drug companies were able to come up with a vaccine so quickly was that the technology used to make it had been in development for decades.

No. Yes, VAERS (the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) can look intimidating. But keep in mind it is a self-reported, unverified database. If you have an allergic reaction to a vaccine and your doctor reports it, it’s in, and if your spouse dies in a car accident three days after getting the vaccine and you report that, it’s in. And if you report that you died immediately after getting a vaccine you never even got, that’s in. VAERS is an important source of data for public health professionals who know what they’re looking at, but holy shit one million adverse events!!! is not what it’s for. (For instance: The database includes 4,298 reports of death four months or more after receiving the Moderna vaccine. I’m not personally a doctor, but I have to question if all 4,298 cases really were causative.)

No. Vaccines don’t cause autism.

(And I’m sorry, but as an autistic person, am I allowed to bristle just a little bit that “Sure, maybe my kid will die from measles encephalitis, but at least they won’t end up like Caperton” is apparently an acceptable tradeoff?)

So there you go. If you are the kind of person foolish enough to turn to an advertising blog to learn information or spread disinformation about vaccine technology, you should be fully satisfied, and I hope we’ve all learned our lesson.

Now back to your regularly scheduled self-indulgent quasi-advertising-related blathering.