Dear Editor,
I am writing to you today, amidst a pandemic, with information regarding the new Covid vaccine and why not you, but everyone should get it. Nearing almost a year since the first outbreak of the virus in China, Americans have become restless waiting for normalcy to return to their lives. I am here to inform individuals why they need to choose science over fear.
Vaccines have been around for decades and it puzzles me that people are refusing to get the Covid vaccine. It puzzles me that people are choosing now not to trust science. Edward Jenner, of the 18th century, was the first person to create a vaccine.(1) This vaccine helped render immunity to the smallpox epidemic, creating a revolutionary race in medicine towards creating more vaccines.(1) Hundreds of years of research and science has gone into creating vaccines, which have saved numbers of lives. Now, with time, there has become a variety of different types of vaccines including but not limited to, inactivated vaccines, attenuated vaccines, chimeric vaccines, polysaccharide vaccines, toxoid vaccines and mRNA vaccines which is what the Covid vaccine is.(2)
Unlike alternative vaccines that use weakened or inactivated germ, the mRNA Covid vaccine teaches the bodies’ cells to make a protein (the spike protein which is found on the surface of the virus) which causes the body to trigger an immune response.(3) When the vaccine is injected into the body, cells are prompted by the mRNA to start creating the spike protein but which then the cells break down the mRNA. Once spike proteins are present on the surface of cells, the body recognizes that the protein is foreign, and cells start creating antibodies against the spike protein to make you immune.(3) These antibodies protect us from future infection and further prevent the spread of the virus. You’re maybe thinking at this point ok, well isn’t mRNA like DNA? What if it interferes with my genetic makeup? It won’t. DNA and mRNA aren’t the same and mRNA is not able to combine with DNA to change it.(4) The mRNA used in the vaccine is like a set of "instructions", it is used to build the spike protein. DNA is held in the nucleus which is also where mRNA is made, but the mRNA from the vaccine is not able to pass into the nucleus.(4) Not only all of that but mRNA only lasts in the body for a matter of hours until it degrades which the CDC reports.(3,4) This seems to be the biggest concern of individual (what's in the vaccine) It's just instructions.
So, there’s all this information about vaccines and creating immunity, but they only work if you allow them to. Yes, you. It has been estimated that 94% of the population needs to be immune to measles in order for the chain of transmission to be broken.(5) This is called the threshold proportion (for measles). This number is estimated to be about 70% for the Covid virus.(5) Immunity proportions that meet or exceed thresholds for diseases create herd immunity which help to decrease the spread of disease. Immunity is achieved by vaccines and infection itself. Roughly 76 million individuals globally have contracted the virus counting for about 10% of the global population.(6,7) So now you’re probably wondering why you’d consider getting the vaccine if you’ve already had the virus. A quick note, natural immunity varies from person to person and scientists are still trying to figure out how long coronavirus antibodies last.(8) Now, there is no set time on immunity for the vaccine either but vaccines can give you stronger immunity and possibly for a longer lasting time.(8)
On an end note, just because you belong to the population that has the highest survival rate, get the vaccine. If you’ve already gotten the virus, get the vaccine. If you haven’t gotten the virus, get the vaccine. If you are willing and able, get the vaccine. There has been so much skepticism in the creation of this vaccine. We DO know what’s in the vaccine. We DO know that it will give you some sort of immunity and we do know that it will return us to normalcy. It was a miracle that this vaccine was created in the amount of time that it was, and I don't understand how that's an argument of why not to get the vaccine. Scientists dedicated months and months of research, resources and trials into creating this vaccine. This is what people go to college for, medical school for. This is their job to create these vaccines and study them, and how don't you trust them? How can anyone trust anyone then?
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