mRNA Vaccines
What is a vaccine?
A vaccine is a tool used by doctors and scientists to train your body to fight off viruses and bacteria by showing a small, but important, piece of the germ to your body’s immune system. Once your immune system knows what the invaders look like, they create antibodies against the germ and let the other immune cells know to attack anything that looks like them.
History of vaccines
Vaccines in some form have been around since 1000 C.E. when healers in China gave people small exposures to smallpox to help their bodies learn how to fight the disease. Similarly, in 18th century England, a man named Edward Jenner pioneered modern vaccines against smallpox by introducing patients to a tiny bit of the disease. We have been improving vaccines and using them against different germs ever since!
Different types of vaccines
Traditional Vaccines
Traditional vaccines have been around since the 18th century. Often times, they use pieces of the actual virus or bacteria to help your body build an immune response. This is how the flu, chicken pox, MMR and most other vaccines work.
mRNA vaccines
Messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccines have been around since 2010. Different from traditional vaccines, mRNA vaccines use a blueprint of a virus’s RNA
The mRNA vaccine steals that blueprint to show our bodies a harmless piece of the virus, so our immune system can recognize it when the real virus attacks.
What is my immune system?
Your immune system protects your body from outside invaders. It’s made up of two different parts, the innate and the adaptive. Your innate immune system is the one you’re born with and the adaptive immune system is the one that learns what things are bad when we’re exposed to things that make us sick. Vaccines work with your adaptive immune system to train your body how to respond when an invader gets past your innate immune system.
Types of immune cells
We have different types of immune cells in our bodies with special jobs, like white blood cells, or leukocytes (LOO-kuh-sytes). Some types of white blood cells, called lymphocytes (LIM-fuh-sytes), help the body remember the invaders and destroy them.
B-Cells are lymphocytes that help our bodies remember the virus, then send the T-Cells out to attack the invaders. Both B and T-Cells have long memories and can learn to recognize more parts of the virus AFTER we get a vaccine.
What is RNA?
RNA stands for Ribonucleic Acid. It’s inside of every cell in our bodies and scientists think it existed even before DNA! It's made of sugar and nucleotides (nuke-lee-oh-tides) and is the molecule in charge of reading the instructions from DNA and telling the ribosomes what proteins to make. Proteins like collagen in your bones or keratin in your hair or hemoglobin in your red blood cells. There are over 20,000 different proteins in the human body and RNA helped make all of them!
Why do I sometimes get sick even when I’ve been vaccinated?
A vaccine helps train your immune system to protect your body from outside invaders, but that protection isn’t perfect. Germs are sneaky, and sometimes they get past our defenses before our bodies recognize them. The good news: vaccines give your immune system a better shot at recognizing a virus, so you’re less likely to get seriously ill. So even when it seems like a vaccine isn’t working – it is.
Our immune system knows something is wrong, even if it doesn’t recognize who the invaders are yet and will start to turn up the heat (give us a fever), force the germs out of our lungs (give us a cough) and flush out our sinuses (give us a runny nose). Once the immune system recognizes the invaders, it finds and destroys the germs and stops our symptoms.
Want to learn more?
Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services
Find a vaccine clinic near you!
Communities for Immunity is made possible with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. For more information, visit www.CommunitiesForImmunity.org