Almost everyone has heard that the new COVID vaccines were developed in less than one year. Many people are afraid of these vaccines because they believe that the process was rushed.  But these new vaccines were not really designed in just one year – it has actually taken 30 years of research to produce today’s Covid vaccines. 

Last year, when scientists first began to look for a COVID -19 vaccine, they got a fortunate break from the nature of COVID itself. Scientists quickly found that the COVID-19 virus is actually a new strain of an older virus, called SARS.  (SARS means Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.) Because COVID-19 is a member of the SARS family, scientists were able to use the structural foundation from a current SARS vaccine, as the primary building block for the new COVID-19 vaccines.  

Scientist were also able to use the amazing power of a concept called CRISPR. (CRISPR is a technique used to find a specific bit of a DNA gene sequence inside a cell.) The possibility of using CRISPR was first suggested thirty years ago, in the 1990s, but it did not become workable for vaccine development until recently, in 2015. It used to take three to six months to complete some key laboratory tasks in virus research, but CRISPR now allows scientists to do this work in just a few days. 

Another remarkable modern technology, called mRNA, was also discovered about thirty years ago. (mRNA, or Messenger RNA, is a process that makes multiple copies of a specific characteristic found in the DNA of the virus.)  Both the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines are mRNA vaccines. 

In the last ten years, Messenger RNA technology has become a viable lab process, and has allowed COVID-19 vaccines to be developed with breathtaking speed. Scientists use mRNA to create millions of copies of the protein “spike” that appears inside the COVID virus. When placed in the vaccine, these copied “spikes” are recognized by our immune system, which prevents us from getting the disease. The new COVID-19 vaccines are the first mRNA vaccines ever created. 

Just about all the vaccines we used for the past 60 years contained some of the live virus, or a weakened version of the live virus, or some inactive (dead) virus.  What makes mRNA vaccines so unique is that they contain none of the deadly virus – none at all! Messenger RNA vaccines are the first ever vaccines that do not contain any of the deadly virus.