As we know, coughing and sneezing spread the COVID-19 virus which remains infectious for up to several days.  Soap destroys the virus by breaking up the fatty outside of the virus.  Until recently we didn’t have a very effective treatment to help our bodies destroy the virus once it had already infected a human or an animal.  The virus enters the body through the nose, mouth or eyes and then the virus attaches to cells in the airways.  The virus then injects a piece of genetic information called RNA into the healthy cells.  The injected code reprograms the cell into making proteins that will make new copies of the virus which spreads through the body infecting other cells.  The takeover eventually kills the hacked cells.  The body starts producing antibodies to fight the virus, but the coronavirus has been too fast for a lot of people.  The body’s immune system keeps fighting but can start attacking healthy lung cells too.  The buildup of dying cells and fluid is what makes it harder and harder to breathe.

The human body already has a little bit of lots of different kinds of antibodies that protect us against viruses, germs and bacteria.  When our body meets an intruder, the antibodies we already have grab on to it and signal to the rest of the body to make more antibodies to 1) fight the intruder and 2) to remember the intruder for any future encounters.  Viruses keep mutating or changing in order to keep getting around the body’s defenses.  Humans have been able to completely beat viruses like smallpox and polio with vaccines, but every year the flu virus adapts and infects plenty of unprotected people.  The human body naturally develops antibodies to viruses but not without a fight first, sometimes with or without symptoms.  Our body does not know which part of the virus is responsible for the attack, so it produces antibodies for all different parts of the virus.  Vaccines, like for measles or chickenpox, introduce a weakened version of the virus can help the body make the right antibodies without having to get really sick first. The covid-vaccines are a different kind of a vaccine, called recombinant vaccines, and they work the same way that vaccines for HPV and Hepatitis B. The vaccine only introduces a piece of the viral gene so that the body will make antibodies specifically for that one part of the virus.

Vaccines have made some viruses a thing of the past. The days when every kid got chickenpox or the measles are gone and scientists have been make big developments in making more effective and targeted vaccines.  Viruses, though, have upped their game too — viruses like H.I.V., Ebola, and Zika.  So, scientists started working on vaccines that send only a message that tells the body how to make an antibody for a specific part of a virus.  Scientists with different companies have developed recombinant vaccines that work using either single-stranded RNA delivering the genetic material in a yeast cell or a double-stranded DNA delivering the genetic material in an adenovirus.  The Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna developed mRNA vaccines and AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson made adenovirus vaccines.  All of the vaccines, except for Johnson & Johnson, have received emergency authorization use in various countries and began distribution in December 2020.  Johnson & Johnson submitted their application for emergency authorization early in February 2021. Read more about how the two different kinds of COVID-19 vaccines work next week in A Tale of Two Vaccines.

This video produced in Majuro explains in Marshallese a little about how vaccines work, in particular the Pfizer and Moderna covid-vaccines. You can watch the other captioned videos linked in this article from the Vaccine Maker Project.