NEW ORLEANS — As the COVID-19 vaccine begins rolling out, the general public still waiting for the vaccine has a lot of questions.
So we’re asking, what’s in the vaccine? And what bout it makes it work? We went straight to a vaccine expert for the vax facts you need to know.
Dr. Lisa Morici, PhD., is a professor at the Tulane University School of Medicine who specializes in next generation vaccine development.
She’s been in the lab during the discovery and development of vaccines, and understands better than most how a COVID-19 vaccine could get us back to normal.
“We were just hoping that these vaccines would be provide 50 percent protection to people that got them, but it looks like they’re almost perfect. I mean, it’s really, really amazing,” said Dr. Morici.
The Pfizer Vaccine and the Moderna Vaccine, now both cleared by the FDA and being distributed, use similar ingredients and work the same once in your body.
They use a platform called messenger RNA – or MRNA – to carry special instructions into your cells.
“They are actually what we refer to as ‘plug and play’ platforms. Meaning, they serve as a platform, and you can plug any type of piece of a virus or part of a virus or part of a bacterial pathogen into that platform and then use that to immunize an individual and hopefully protect against that particular disease,” she said.
We tried to break the scientific terminology into layman’s terms:
In this case, the mRNA brings code for the COVID spike protein into your body, not the actual virus, and triggers an immune response within your body.
Next time you’re exposed to that same COVID protein, your body should remember how to fight it off.
The technology necessary to get this kind of vaccine out to the public in 9 months has been in the works for decades.
“The public really thinks that these vaccines were rushed through,” said Dr. Morici.
“And I think what the public doesn’t necessarily see and that scientists appreciate is that these technologies, these platforms that the vaccines utilize, they’ve been in development for at least 30 years. So they didn’t just work like magic right off the bench. They’ve been in development for a very long time.”
She also warns against misinformation you might see online, and encourages people to do their own research.
“People forward me these posts and they look really scientific. They look factual, they look like they’re from a scientist, they’re written really well, but they’re fictitious,” she said.
“And if you talk to your healthcare provider or if you simply Google, there will be at least ten scientific articles telling you why that’s not true.”
Dr. Morici sys she has not yet gotten her vaccine because she’s not a clinician, but says she’ll get either Moderna or Pfizer’s vaccine as soon as its available.
