Aren’t all vaccines just watered down versions of the actual virus that enable your body’s immune system to fight it.
“ Aren’t all vaccines just watered down versions of the actual virus that enable your body’s immune system to fight it.”
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Yes. But you can’t just come out and say that.
You need to walk them through it as they themselves make the astounding discovery.
“Aren’t all vaccines just watered down versions of the actual virus”
No. Many vaccines use only a certain identifying feature of the the target virus (called an epitope) - just enough for the immune system to recognize, but without all the rest of the virus (such as its ability to replicate).
These epitopes can be spliced onto common harmless viruses as carriers (like the Russian Sputnik V, the AstraZeneca or the Chinese COVID-19 vaccines).
The mRNA vaccines instruct ribosomes to produce just the desired epitope - fresh perfect copies, not degraded in storage or handling, and free of other viral components, that might have unwanted or unknown effects. Whole virus vaccines (especially whole coronavirus vaccines) can have lots of side effects, triggered by other features of the virus, not needed to develop effective immunity. That is an inherent safety advantage of the mRNA vaccine approach, over the use of whole virus.
The mRNA vaccines are like blueprints or work orders to the ribosomes (the factories within cells). While the mRNA vaccines are circulating (half life ten hours), the ribosomes will produce an epitope of COVID-19 (a snippet off the head of the spike protein, that COVID uses to attach, like a key into a lock).
After the mRNA vaccine itself (rather quickly) degrades away, the ribosomes stop producing the epitope off the spike protein head, but those spike proteins produced circulate until they themselves are degraded a bit more slowly, while the immune system learns to recognize them.
If memory serves, until this year all vaccines were attenuated virions (virii?) incapable of entering the cells of the host and co-opting it’s replication function. Therefore their only intended or legitimate function was to trigger the body’s own immune response.