Anti-Vaxxer wage campaigns in opposition to COVID-19 photographs

Separate fact from fiction

After millions of people have received the vaccines – including more than 3 million who have completed the full two-dose regimen – experts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can really find out real, rare side effects from the vaccine against accidental illnesses and deaths, Offit said.

“There will always be these temporal associations, and all you have to do is calm down and wait for the CDC to say, ‘You know something, there is a rare side effect here.’ Because they search. They search every day, “said Offit.

Aside from rare cases of anaphylactic shock, which occur within minutes of receiving the injection, no other dangerous side effects have occurred in the millions of doses that have been administered, experts say.

The other type of anti-vaccine rumor, the “big lie,” involves highly specific conspiracy theories about safety and side effects.

Dr. Jill Foster, director of pediatric infectious diseases and immunology at the University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis, said, “It’s almost like the more absurd they make it, the better, because when you can really get someone to do it, the better to believe something that is. ” totally absurd, then look how powerful you are. “

One of the most common big lie rumors concerns the messenger RNA (mRNA) in the two COVID-19 vaccines, which somehow rewrite your personal DNA, as Offit and Foster discovered.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines deliver mRNA into your cells, causing them to produce replicas of the “spike protein” that the coronavirus uses to bind and infect cells. The immune system recognizes these proteins as foreign and responds to them by essentially teaching the body how to fight off a future actual COVID-19 infection.

The idea that mRNA could rewrite your DNA is “absolutely impossible,” Offit said.

Human cells already contain hundreds of thousands of messenger RNA copies that are used as blueprints for making vital substances, Offit said.

In order to be able to rewrite DNA, the mRNA from the vaccine would first have to get into the cell nucleus, which is not possible, explained Offit. Even if it succeeded, the mRNA would need certain enzymes to translate into DNA and then integrate into your personal genetics, and those enzymes are not present in the vaccine.