I never thought that mRNA and cytokine cascades (which I won’t describe here – cytokines are the things your body makes that result in inflammation among many other things) would appear in anywhere other than the scientific literature. But then we had Covid and here we are.

So – mRNA. Most people will just say “huh?”. It stands for messenger ribonucleic acid. You can see why it is shortened just like DNA – deoxyribonucleic acid. DNA. DNA, of course, is our genetic code and it codes for all the proteins in our body – collagen, insulin, albumin, antibodies, enzymes and so on. In truth, a lot of the DNA in the cells that make up our body does not code for proteins but does other things that I’m not going to talk about here for brevity’s sake. DNA is very stable. RNA is not.

What is mRNA a messenger for? It is the intermediary, copied from your DNA, that is used to code for strings of amino acids that make up the backbone of proteins.

There are two tricks that are used for the form of mRNA in Covid (and other) vaccines. The first trick is to make it more stable so it isn’t destroyed on sight – this was a method developed by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman in the early 2000s – they won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2023. The other trick is to use a piece of RNA that codes for a protein on the surface of the virus. When your immune system encounters that protein, it learns to make antibodies against it, taking it out of circulation.

To do this, it has to get into your cells, where the machinery for making proteins can translate the genetic code and make the protein.

One more trick – the mRNA is trapped inside a little fat bubble. When this is injected, it fuses with far bigger fat bubbles – your cells.

So that’s it – for a short time, some of your cells make a harmless piece of the virus, an antigen, that lets your immune system recognize it as “foreign stuff.” Antigens are the things that your immune system learns to see and that it makes antibodies to.

Is this dangerous? Well, that is where clinical testing comes in – how much do you use and how often to avoid unpleasant things happening but for it to actually work? Speaking for myself, the injection site aches for a couple of days – this is simply your body mounting an inflammatory response – “something ain’t right here, best do something quickly!”

There is absolutely no medical intervention that is 100% safe. But life itself is not “safe.” Vaccines, and the Covid vaccine, are very, very good. Much less dangerous than the disease they are keeping to a manageable level. They are not cures. Their job is to preempt the body’s normal adaptive defenses, so that if the virus appears later, your body recognizes it quickly and specifically. As a result, the disease is either very mild or you simply don’t notice it.