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After more than 50 million
doses have been injected, just since the recent
inauguration, notes Dr. Williams, the results have been
positive. And will continue to be.
There is no plot to harm
Black folks with the vaccines, says Dr. Williams. “There is
no conspiracy to kill Black people using the COVID vaccines;
they wouldn’t need to. We are already dying from
hypertension, diabetes, obesity and other issues.”
The science of the Moderna
and Pfizer vaccines is indeed novel as far as treatment for
a virus. The vaccines, m-RNA (messenger-RNA) are a new type
of vaccine used to trigger an immune response and teach the
body’s cells how to make a protein to trigger an immune
response in a body. “A building block for protein,” says Dr.
Williams.
“It is fundamentally a
template to hold protein,” he says.
The difference between
this new type of vaccines and the traditional ones is that
previously vaccines were made from the virus itself. The
traditional vaccine science goes back centuries when people
in various places such as Africa and Asia discovered that a
bit of disease, scraped from the pustules of a diseased
person, could be used to place into the body of a healthy
person so that cells could be fooled into thinking that the
person already had the disease and was immune from further
infection.
Compared to the new m-RNA,
says Dr. Williams, the smallpox vaccine, and similar
vaccines developed since, are “a riskier way of developing
immunity since people with weaker immune systems may develop
problems.”
On the other hand, m-RNA
does not contain the virus, potentially much safer than
traditional vaccines. These m-RNA vaccines give instructions
to the body’s cells to make a harmless piece of “spike”
protein which will force cells to begin to build an immune
response and make antibodies, simulating a natural infection
against COVID-19. Thus, a body is protected against future
infection without having to risk actually getting sick, even
slightly, with a COVID-19 live virus.
While this is the first
time m-RNA vaccines have been applied to such a virus, they
are not new. Scientists have been studying and working with
m-RNA vaccines for decades – which accounts for the relative
speed with which the COVID-19 vaccine was completed. Cancer
research, for example, has used m-RNA to trigger the immune
system to target certain cancer cells.
In 2005, Katalin Kariko, a
Hungarian-born scientist at the University of Pennsylvania,
and her collaborator Drew Weissman, an immunologist,
uncovered the key to rendering synthetic m-RNA effective by
tweaking the original formula and creating a hybrid m-RNA
that could sneak into cells without alerting the body’s
defenses.
Such long-time work in the
laboratory has meant that the process was standardized
enabling COVID-19 vaccines to be developed much faster than
the traditional methods of producing vaccines.
So, it was fast, but it
safe, emphasizes Dr. Williams. And there is no grand plan
behind all this to harm anyone.
“This ain’t a plot,” he
says. “This is real business. This is real.”
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