Abiology professor recently brought a bill introduced in the Minnesota Legislature to my attention. This bill attempts to criminalize a certain vaccine technology, the newer messenger RNA (mRNA) method which was used to create some of the Covid vaccines. The MN bill has gained national attention.
An article published on a medical website, medical website, "Medscape Today" was entitled "Minnesota Bill Against Vaccines Promotes Disinformation." It seemed appropriate to briefly describe the main ways vaccines have been discovered and made over the years, and then try to put the bill in perspective without political bias.
A wonderful, unbiased article on the Internet was published from the College of Physicians of Philadelphia titled "The History of Vaccines." It begins, "Vaccines have transformed human health by preventing diseases that once claimed millions of lives.
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The journey from inoculation practices to today's cutting edge mRNA technology is a story of scientific curiosity, collaboration and innovation."
"The concept of giving someone a small dose of what makes people sick to trigger immunity traces back over a thousand years. In the 10th century, healers in China practiced variolation, using the material from cowpox sores on animals to protect against smallpox. This laid the groundwork for Edward Jenner who developed a smallpox vaccine using the same method centuries later. This vaccine has saved countless people from suffering and death.
Jenner observed that milkmaids who often contracted cowpox seemed immune to smallpox. He introduced the term vaccine from the Latin vacca for cow. As the actual microbes that caused the several infections were discovered, many other vaccines have been developed using these microbes directly.
Inactivated or "killed" vaccines inject the dead germ that causes a disease. This stimulates a person's system to react with a "mini version" of the illness that creates a lasting memory of it which reacts later to the living thing. A prime example of that would be the original Jonas Salk 1955 polio vaccine The virus was "pickled" in formaldehyde. Killed virus vaccines don't give as durable protection as "live" vaccines.
Live, attenuated vaccines contain viruses or bacteria that provoke strong immune responses without causing severe illness. They have been somehow weakened or attenuated so they can't do the same amount of harm as the "wild" ones. Albert Sabin's oral polio vaccine, developed in the 1960s, exemplifies that approach. The measles, mumps, rubella (German measles) or MMR all use the weakened virus versions. These vaccines often confer lifelong immunity to severe disease with one or two doses. But they are unsuitable for people with compromised immunity.
Toxoid vaccines are made to attack a substance produced by the microbe and not the microbe itself. The prime example is the tetanus vaccine, which was developed in the 1920s and 1930s. The toxin from the bacterium Clostridium which causes tetanus, a life-threatening condition where muscles contract and people die because they can't breathe. The toxin was pickled or inactivated to use as the immune stimulus in the tetanus vaccine. It is the T in the DPT vaccine.
Subunit vaccines isolate a portion of the microbe instead of the entire bug to create the immune response. Hepatitis B and wart or HPV vaccines are that type.
Viral vector vaccines employ harmless viruses to shuttle genetic instructions into host cells to trigger the immunity and memory. An Ebola virus vaccine was made with that technology.
The newest vaccine variety is the messenger RNA technique. Messenger RNA is a genetic coding cell technique for normal intercellular communication and protein production. Here, the injected mRNA is made to get the host cell to make the viral protein that generates the immune response. (This is incredibly simplified! Bear with me.) It has produced some highly eff ective COVID vaccines. This research began in the 1970s and has opened possibilities that might create other new vaccines, perhaps for cancers.
The bill in the Legislature written by a group of Republican members of the House targets only mRNA. It is entitled "the mRNA Bioweapons Prohibition Act." A professor of medicine and pediatrics in infectious diseases at Rutgers Medical School said in an interview, "The Covid-19 mRNA vaccines have excellent track records in safety and eff ectiveness. ... The bill seems to ban an entire technology field, with no proven concerns, which would potentially limit or end groundbreaking therapeutics." There are no bioweapons here.
When dealing with people's health, we need to do like Sgt. Joe Friday said on the series Dragnet, "We want the facts ma'am, just the facts." The above information about these vaccines are just the facts, not unproven conjecture. Promise.
Dr. Frank Bures, a semi-retired dermatologist, has worked in Winona, La Crosse, Viroqua and Red Wing since 1978. He also plays clarinet in the Winona Municipal Band and a couple Dixieland groups.
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