Quote (IceMage @ Mar 19 2021 04:06pm)
Who here has received the vaccine? Which one did you get, and how were the side effects? Asking so I have more information to argue against the vaccine skeptics I come across.
I haven't received it yet, but a friend of mine has posted this online as an "ELI5" about the vaccine. Good basic info, backed by science.
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"Messenger RNA" is basically an instruction manual which can be read by the body to help the body create proteins. When a cell encounters these instructions, the ribosome reads those instructions and produces the proteins accordingly.
(Think of a cell as an office, and each office has a printer. The ribosome is the printer.)
This synthetic mRNA in the vaccine contains instructions to build the "spike protein" from the Covid-19 virus.
(Think of the spike protein as the car that the virus arrives in. The nucleocapsid is the driver... and the guy with the gun. Our cells will only produce the harmless car with no driver.)
Once these spike proteins are built, the body checks them out and notices that they're not supposed to be here, and immediately gets to work mounting an immune response.
(Incidentally, this immune response can include pain around the injection site, fever, fatigue -- you know, the "adverse reactions" folks are worried about. It's called reactogenicity, and it's actually a good thing because it proves your immune system is on the attack!)
The immune response consists of building antibodies to attack the spike protein, but also memory cells known as T cells and B cells to remember that car in case it ever rolls back into the neighborhood. Eventually, the antibodies fade, but the memory cells stay on the lookout.
(In particular, CD8+ T-cells are proving very effective at recognizing the spike protein on future reinfections.)
When the spike protein from a real infection comes in, the memory cells alert the body, and since the body already knows exactly how to attack, they destroy the entire virus before it can cause an infection, all because they recognized the "car" it came in.
Fun fact: mRNA shares its instruction manuals with those ribosomes and then just... dies. It's broken down and expelled from the body within a few days. Our own natural immune system handles it from there.
Let me know if there's anything else you'd like to know!