https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/israeli-experts-analyze-if-mrna-covid-vaccines-be-dangerous-in-long-term-678171
Israeli experts analyze mRNA COVID vaccines long-term effects
Experts believe there will be no long-term side effects to the mRNA vaccines.
As thousands of Israelis rush back to their health funds in search of a third COVID-19 vaccine shot and a Green Pass from isolation after traveling abroad, others are asking if another injection of messenger RNA is safe.
The American Food and Drug Administration provided full approval of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine last week, but noted in its press release that “information is not yet available about potential long-term health outcomes.”
However, Tal Brosh, head of the Infectious Disease Unit at Samson Assuta Ashdod University Hospital, told The Jerusalem Post that while he cannot claim to know what is going to happen in 10 years, “there is no true reason to think there are any significant long-term effects” of the vaccine.
He explained that there is no other vaccine that was evaluated for a decade before approval and that there is not an example of another vaccine – although no other vaccine is an mRNA vaccine – that has been linked to any significant long-term effects.
“There is no evidence of something happening unless it happened in the first two hours, two weeks or two months,” said Michal Linial, a professor of biological chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “We do not know of any other examples in which the immune system decided to suddenly react to a vaccine that was given 15 years prior.”
THERE ARE also few examples of people being nervous about taking a booster shot of an already approved vaccine.
If a person were to get cut by rusted metal and go to a doctor, the health professional would probably tell that individual to get a tetanus booster shot. It is unlikely this person would ask the doctor if the booster was safe or if it could prevent her from getting pregnant or him from making babies.
“This is the same thing,” Linial said. “I can understand in the beginning that this was a breakthrough and people were shocked, like it is some kind of satellite to the Moon and they don’t want to be the first on the satellite. But now we know: This is nothing like that.”
Rather, more than two billion people worldwide have been inoculated against COVID-19 with more than five billion doses. Around 210 million Pfizer mRNA doses have been distributed in America, for example. In Israel, more than 8.5 million doses have been administered.
While traditional vaccines generally put a weakened or inactivated germ into our bodies, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mRNA vaccines “teach our cells how to make a protein – or even just a piece of a protein – that triggers an immune response inside our bodies. That immune response, which produces antibodies, is what protects us from getting infected if the real virus enters our bodies.”
Brosh said that this does not mean that the vaccine changes people’s genetic code. Rather, he said the mRNA is more like a USB device that is inserted into a computer: It does not impact the hard drive of the computer but runs a certain program.
“Messenger RNA is a very fragile molecule, meaning it can be destroyed very easily,” Linial explained. “If you put mRNA on the table, for example, in a minute there will not be any mRNA left. This is as opposed to DNA, which is as stable as you get.”
She said that this fragility is true of the mRNA of any living thing, whether it belongs to a plant, bacteria, virus or human.
WHILE THE Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are based on new technologies, they are asking our bodies to do something they do every day: cells synthesizing protein.
Moderna and Pfizer are simply delivering a specific mRNA sequence to our cells. Once the mRNA is in the cell, human biology takes over. Ribosomes read the code and build the protein, and the cells express the protein in the body.
This is one of the main reasons to believe there will be no long-term consequences to the vaccine, said Prof. Eyal Leshem, director of Sheba Medical Center’s Center for Travel Medicine and Tropical Diseases.
While the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are the first mRNA ones to ever be brought to market for human patients, Linial said she believes the reason that no mRNA vaccine has been developed until now is because there was just no need to move this fast on a vaccine until COVID-19 came along.