Pfizer and Moderna's vaccines are the stars of the ball but what's in them?
Boston, Wednesday,
Are the new 'mRNA' vaccines safe? Indeed, what exactly are they? The Buffo investigates.
Vaccines typically use weakened or completely inactivate viruses to trigger a person's immune system to respond to a particular disease. Some vaccines, such as that for hepatitis B, use an individual protein to trigger an immune response. The new mRNA vaccines, however, go a step further and trick the body into making the viral protein itself. This, in turn, triggers an immune response.
The battle against smallpox, measles and polio is a solid proof that vaccines have enormous health benefits. However, the cost and speed of development of conventional vaccines has always been seen as limiting their use.
But now supporters of the new technology insist that mRNA vaccines are superior to conventional vaccines for three main reasons:
• high potency
• capacity for rapid development
• low-cost manufacture
Their safety, though, is less clear. Even if French President Emmanuel Macron (43), firmly announced on November 9 2021: "Billions of people on earth already have had the vaccine, we now have hindsight."
The fact is that Pfizer's vaccine is still in the test phase until 2023. This is because Covid-19 treatments, such as those made by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, are the first mRNA vaccines to be
licensed for mass roll-out. Given to hundreds of millions of people around the world, global sales are thought to have topped US $50 billion in 2021 alone.
Proponents argue that the technology has been around for a while. The breakthrough came with an observation in 1987 by Robert Malone (62), then a graduate student in California, that if strands of messenger RNA were mixed with droplets of fat in a kind of molecular stew, human cells bathed in this absorbed the mRNA, and began producing proteins from it. For years, the technology was considered too unstable and dangerous to be usable in a public health context.
Proponents argue that the technology has been around for a while. The breakthrough came with an observation in 1987 by Robert Malone (62), then a graduate student in California, that if strands of messenger RNA were mixed with droplets of fat in a kind of molecular stew, human cells bathed in this absorbed the mRNA, and began producing proteins from it. For years, the technology was considered too unstable and dangerous to be usable in a public health context.
In the 1990s and for most of the decade following, the conventional wisdom held that mRNA was too prone to degradation, and its production too expensive.
"RNA in general had a reputation for unbelievable instability," says Paul Krieg, a developmental biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who himself helped research the early technology. "Everything around RNA was cloaked in caution."
Nonetheless, human trials of cancer vaccines using mRNA technology have been taking place since 2011. Supporters, such as Professor Michel Goldman (67) of the Université Libre in Brussels, Belgium say confidently: "If there was a real problem with the technology, we'd have seen it before now for sure".
Nonetheless, human trials of cancer vaccines using mRNA technology have been taking place since 2011. Supporters, such as Professor Michel Goldman (67) of the Université Libre in Brussels, Belgium say confidently: "If there was a real problem with the technology, we'd have seen it before now for sure".
Other scientists are less sanguine. In an eerie turn of events, in December 2021, Twitter permanently suspended Malone, "the inventor of the mRNA vaccines", for posting a video quoting Pfizer's own data that warned of harms from the company's vaccine and problems with the clinical trials.
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