The spike in COVID-19 cases in Louisiana continued over the weekend. Louisiana Department of Health reported over 16,000 new cases and nearly 300 positive hospitalizations, 91 percent of which were unvaccinated. State officials say the vaccination rate is climbing, but they are still fighting misinformation and myths about getting vaccinated. Newell spoke with Dr. Lisa Morici, who does vaccine research at Tulane University of Medicine, about mRNA technology and dispels myths about the COVID vaccines.
"What are the ABCs of mRNA vaccines," Newell asked. "How do they work and how do they interact with the body?"
"Messenger RNA is the instructions that our cells use in our own bodies to make proteins," Dr. Morici said. "And so for the messenger RNA vaccines, the mRNA is synthesized in a laboratory and then it's packaged in such a way that when it's delivered to the body through a vaccine, our cells take that messenger RNA up, see it, and read it just as they would the messenger RNA that's already in our cells. Messenger RNA in the case of the COVID vaccine provides the instructions for making a piece of the virus, in this case, that spike protein, by telling ourselves how to make this little protein. We can then mount an immune response to that protein because our immune system recognizes it as something foreign in our bodies and to not make that protein."
"With this mRNA, there's a vast difference in the science behind it, as opposed to traditional vaccines," Newell said.
"The flu shot every year is usually an inactivated version of the flu virus," Dr. Morici said. "What we're doing there is injecting the entire flu virus into your body, and it can't cause infection because it's inactivated... In childhood vaccines, for example, measles, mumps, rubella, are live weakened viruses, so they can't cause infection. They are live and they can replicate in ourselves to induce an immune response... That's what people are used to... What people should appreciate is those mRNA vaccines are some of the safest vaccines that have ever been developed because we're not injecting anything into the body that's harmful. It's simply a copy of messenger RNA."
"If so many people have this vaccine hesitancy, for us to get herd immunity is for people to get infected," Newell said. Is that not true?"
"There's really no good example of ever achieving herd immunity to an infectious disease without the benefit of vaccination," Dr. Morici replied. "What we know about the vaccines is when they were first rolled out and we had a few variants emerging at that time, the vaccines were still doing a really great job at preventing the vaccinated from developing severe disease and being hospitalized, but also from preventing the vaccinated from acquiring the infection. Right now what's happening in the United States and other parts of the world that are not vaccinated sufficiently, the virus continues to mutate and that means a person who's vaccinated is protected against severe disease and deaths, but they can still harbor the virus and they can still transmit that virus to someone who is unvaccinated."
Hear the entire audio clip in the audio player below.
