Re:mRNA vaccines – a new era in vaccinology (2018)
by thehappypm on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @10:36AM
(#26890200)
This is an excellent article. Thank you for sharing.
This whole pandemic I've been waiting for us to "get lucky" and find that the virus has some weakness. Like some simple off-the-shelf medicine is a cure. Or that it spreads through some simple mechanism we can beat easily. Or that it can't handle summer. Or that it would never mutate.
Nothing seemed to go our way though.
Then the mRNA vaccines came and that was finally our lucky break! Now thanks to this article I can see that the real breakthroughs came years earlier, from basic researchers. Without these breakthroughs -- which I'm sure didn't excite the public or earn anyone a Nobel prize -- we'd have only inferior vaccines out there.
Especially the part about poly-A tail. IIUC, it means that each mRNA "particle" that gets delivered into your body has an upper limit on how many times the protein will get synthesized from it, and the payload only contains info on the spike protein, so there should be no runaway synthesis of something else that would take over my entire body. Standard disclosure: IANADoctor. Also, got my first shot 3 days ago.