An mRNA vaccine has never been mass-produced and licensed to treat an infectious disease. The mRNA vaccines to treat the novel coronavirus would be the first. … The biotechnology giants Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech announced [November 2020] that they had seen promising results as they near the end of clinical trials for their vaccine candidates. Both vaccines are likely to be produced on a wide scale and distributed en masse to the public. Yet what is particularly striking is that both are mRNA vaccines- mRNA being short for “synthetic messenger RNA.” Understanding why these are so novel requires some background on the history of vaccination. … “Live-attenuated vaccines are often very effective but they sometimes induce adverse events” … Another related subtype of vaccines are called protein subunit vaccines… Viral vector-based vaccines- and genetic vaccines like those which use DNA and RNA- are the second and third main vaccine technologies. “When you use viral-vectoredbased or genetic vaccines- you deliver a blueprint that will allow the host cells to produce protein antigens that will then induce an immune response” … you’re giving the cells a blueprint rather than a piece of the pathogen itself …
You can read more about this on the AIU Campus Mundi January 2021 Magazine
