mRNA vaccines — also called “genetic vaccines” — arise from an innovative biotechnology approach that turns the body’s cells into molecular factories to produce proteins that activate a pathogen-specific immune response.
The technology holds great promise but also presents significant risks which are not yet fully known.
Summary of what’s in this article:
– mRNA vaccines promise an intriguing new platform for immunization that does not rely on the growth or harvesting of pathogens from animal tissue. This offers mRNA vaccines several key advantages over traditional vaccines.
– Research into mRNA vaccines is still in its infancy, even though various biotech pioneers have been working on ways to achieve mRNA vaccines for around two decades. It is very likely that yet more decades of research will be required to achieve acceptable levels of safety and efficacy.
– mRNA vaccines can be produced far more rapidly, safely and uniformly than traditional vaccines. Production can be easily scaled up, and there is zero risk of introducing “live” pathogens into the body of the patient, since these vaccines don’t use weakened pathogens in the first place.
– There are very real risks associated with mRNA vaccines including “enhanced” inflammation and auto-immune reactions, where the body’s cells are inadvertently programmed to attack critical proteins required for normal health (such as hormones).
– The profit-motivated rush to deploy mRNA vaccines to prevent the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus is causing regulators and researchers to skip (or accelerate) many critical steps in quality control and clinical trials. This is likely to result in catastrophic consequences — unintended side effects — if such vaccines are granted approval for widespread deployment without proper long-term clinical trials.
– mRNA vaccines could be maliciously exploited to weaponize vaccines to target critical physiological functions in humans. This is similar in effect to “RNA interference” technology which is a gene suppressing innovation that has been studied for use as an insect-killing pesticide technology in crops. Although the mechanisms of mRNA vaccines and RNA interference technology are very different, they can achieve many of the same outcomes such as induced infertility or death in targeted organisms, which could include humans. Technically, this could also be exploited to target specific genetic subgroups of humans such as those of African descent.
– The best current application of mRNA vaccines seems to be found in personalized medicine cancer treatment applications, where “vaccines” are customized to teach the body’s immune system to attack and kill cancer cells.
– A reasonable tolerance risk for mRNA vaccine side effects would be proportional to the mortality risk of the pathogen or disease condition the vaccine is treating. For example, if stage IV cancer kills 80% of patients, and a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine cures 50% of patients while killing 5% of patients, the lives-saved-to-patients-killed ratio is 10:1, which would arguably be a reasonable risk to assume. However, if an mRNA coronavirus vaccine is widely given to healthy individuals who are at very low risk of mortality to begin with, then if the mRNA vaccine kills 1 in 1,000 of those people (for example), the vaccine might cause far higher mortality figures than the pathogen itself.