Hey Rose, good to see you pop up again here...! The mRNA technology is actually fantastic as it makes the production train for vaccines much shorter, way less time than growing cultures up in eggs which is the traditional way of doing things. Turns two years of work into maybe 2 to 3 months. There has actually been a lot of work on the Covid family of viruses. Researchers actually have a "backbone" so to say to build on quickly once they sequence a new and novel Covid virus that pops up and get a new vaccine out quickly. The company I work for actually supplies the lipid nanoparticle that is used to house the mRNA "pieces" which glom onto your cells and transfer the "instructions" to your cell as to what to look out for and make the counter protein, or antibody. I actually made a kit for the CDC last year that they needed right away. It was a detection kit that my company makes. Needless to say I dropped everything and worked on that kit for a week and got it out to them ASAP. The Moderna and Pfizer shots are mRNA and I believe the J&J shot is an adenovirus carrier that uses another, safe and harmless virus, adenovirus, to carry the "code" into your cells. In the past most if not all vaccines were "attenuated" which means they injected a live virus into you (of the kind that makes you sick) but they just hobbled it to not give you the disease, made it sick but alive, just enough. Your body would make antibodies to combat this "hobbled" virus and thus give you immunity to the virulent one that would make you really sick or dead. This is not done so much anymore.... mRNA is now the way to go....! Fast, cheap, safe, efficient, and scalable to massive production...!
And to help explain it better than I would I got this off of the Kaiser Permanente site...... Good stuff...!
How does an mRNA vaccine work?
When you look at images of the coronavirus, you see spikes sticking out from all sides; these spikes are actually proteins. The mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 contain the instructions cells need to make a piece of the spike protein but not the fully functioning COVID-19 virus.
The formation of these spike proteins tricks your body into making an immune response against the spike protein, which works to protect you against the COVID-19 virus if you are exposed to it. This immune response is what gives you protection against the disease.
How are mRNA vaccines different from traditional vaccines?
Most traditional vaccines inject an inactivated or weakened (attenuated) virus into the body to trigger an immune response. For example, the annual flu vaccine uses an inactivated virus. The vaccines for measles and chickenpox use a live attenuated virus.
The mRNA vaccines teach our own cells to make a piece of the spike protein that is unique to the coronavirus, and that causes the body to have an immune response.
With any vaccine, though, the goal is the same: to trigger an immune response that helps protect us from getting infected if the real virus enters the body.
The first 2 authorized COVID-19 vaccines in the United States use mRNA technology. Is there a reason for that?
Scientists began developing all the potential COVID-19 vaccines at roughly the same time using different types of vaccine technology. A big part of why the mRNA vaccines were authorized first is because making a vaccine using mRNA technology is a relatively fast process.
Making mRNA is a standard technique in a lab. So, once researchers got the genetic sequence of the coronavirus — essentially the instruction manual for making it — they were able to make the vaccine quickly.
What would you say to people who are afraid that mRNA vaccines alter your DNA?
It’s simply not true. In fact, it’s the other way around. DNA makes RNA. The mRNA in the COVID-19 vaccines only goes into a certain part of the cell — the outer part known as the cytoplasm. It doesn’t go into the cell’s nucleus, the part of the cell where the DNA lives. And, mRNA doesn’t last very long because its job is to give the information to the cell — a blueprint for how to make a protein — and then it goes away.