Should I Get the Covid-19 Vaccine?

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 2021. FOR QUESTIONS ABOUT THE THIRD DOSE/BOOSTER, SEE OUR NEWER ARTICLE.

I made my choice. I got my first dose on January 4^th and am scheduled for the second dose soon. 

Other than my openness about my relationship with God, I try to avoid controversial topics when I chat with patients and write this blog.  However, I’m gonna go out on a limb on this one.  Please be gentle with your responses.  

Everyone needs to be responsible to make their own decisions in life.  It took me years of counseling to get that firmly hammered in my head.  It’s not my intent to convince you but to make sure you have more facts rather than what your friend posted on social media. 

Many of my own friends and family members do not want to get the COVID-19 vaccine.  Why?  Major reasons include: It’s too new, worries that the vaccine permanently inserts and alters your DNA, and the use of aborted fetuses to manufacture the vaccine are the reasons that I hear most often.   

To be honest, I’m not a big vaccine fanatic. As a health professional, I have received every necessary and recommended vaccine for my stage of life, plus a few others like typhoid and yellow fever required for travel.  However, I honestly don’t always get the flu vaccine. GASP!  More out of laziness than anything else.  But to be clear, I am on a roll, and I got my flu vaccine this year as well.  Vaccines aren’t fun, but they enable me to live a healthy life and travel without too much worry.  

I’m gonna put on my Ph.D. cap and do some basic science review here.  I’ll try to make it easy to understand, though.    

How do vaccines work?  Vaccines work to trigger your immune system to fight something off.  In general, we have two major types of immune cells – B cells that make antibodies and T cells.  We can measure the B cell response by measuring antibody levels.  But, there is no easy way of measuring or testing the T cell response.  In the past, there have been two major types of vaccines – Active/live virus and inactive/killed virus.   The new COVID vaccines are a new class of vaccines.  Why something new?  Let’s be frank, given the tremendous death toll and trauma caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, who in their right mind would have wanted to be vaccinated with any form of the ACTUAL virus – live or killed.  No one.  So, with this vaccine, they used a new technology that has been widely researched and used in scientific studies for many years called messenger RNA (mRNA) that has ZERO actual virus in it. 

What is the difference between DNA, RNA, mRNA, and proteins?  OK, this is where it gets a little technical.  DNA is your basic central code.  RNA “reads” that code and provides a recipe for proteins to be made.  In the COVID-19 vaccines, we are receiving messenger RNA (mRNA) instead of the actual virus.  This new technology allows the vaccine to provide a recipe for your body to make a protein found on the outside of the Coronavirus cell.  Once receiving the vaccine, our body starts making this protein only, not the whole virus.  Amazingly, that protein alone is enough to stimulate an immune response.  The desired immune response is B and T cells that fight against the virus.  Pretty cool, right?  Sounds much better than being injected with actual Coronavirus, alive or dead. 

Here are some more detailed but simple definitions I’ve found.  

DNA encodes all genetic information, and is the blueprint from which all biological life is created. And that’s only in the short-term. In the long-term, DNA is a storage device, a biological flash drive that allows the blueprint of life to be passed between generations². RNA functions as the reader that decodes this flash drive. This reading process is multi-step and there are specialized RNAs for each of these steps. Below, we’ll look in more detail at the three most important types of RNA.  

What are the three types of RNA? 

• Messenger RNA (mRNA) copies portions of genetic code, a process called transcription, and transports these copies to ribosomes, which are the cellular factories that facilitate the production of proteins from this code.   
• Transfer RNA (tRNA) is responsible for bringing amino acids, basic protein building blocks, to these protein factories, in response to the coded instructions introduced by the mRNA. This protein-building process is called translation.  
• Finally, Ribosomal RNA (rRNA) is a component of the ribosome factory itself without which protein production would not occur³. 

So will this new type of mRNA vaccine alter my DNA?  No.  Plain and simple. The messenger RNA does not enter the nucleus of the cell where DNA is contained. 

How is the vaccine manufactured?  I heard they use aborted fetuses. Well, there is some credence to that.  The first two vaccines to market, Pfizer and Moderna, as well as a number of others, DO NOT use aborted fetuses to manufacture the vaccine.  However, some others, not yet approved, do use aborted fetuses to manufacture the vaccine, requiring an ongoing supply of aborted fetuses.   

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccine WERE tested on a cell line that originated from an aborted fetus.  Cell lines are commonly used in science.  After obtaining a type of cell ONE TIME, that cell is grown in a cell culture medium and replicates billions of times over and over again.  Unfortunately, for some scientific experiments, actual human cells are needed.  If you are concerned about the use of aborted fetuses, the current vaccines are your best choice.   

Do we know it will actually work? And what about side effects?  So far, the current vaccines are promising.  Will it not work for some people? Possibly.  Will some people have side effects? Possibly.  When the other options include dying and remaining quarantined for the next year, I opted for getting the vaccine.   

Like many things in life, we all have to make a choice that we believe will provide us with the best chance of good health.  My goal was to provide you with some educated thoughts about the vaccine controversy.  Again, please be gentle and don’t attack me in your responses. Thanks in advance! 

Next week, we’ll talk about the reports of problems with the Moderna vaccine and filler.  This will be of great interest to our cosmetic patients (and me), so stay tuned! 

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