Security quote of the week

[mRNA vaccines]

> Then a good few more years. If it hadn't been for that, regulatory approval for the vaccines would have been *MUCH* harder, because these vaccines are all 90% well proven vaccine carrier, and 10% artificial active ingredient. Otherwise there'd have been much more risk - is the active ingredient going to stay dead, is it contaminated, is is is ...

This bears no resemblance to anything I know about mRNA vaccines, which are composed of a lipid coat (a somewhat unusual one, formulated for this purpose) and cunningly modified viral mRNA (only a small part of the SARS-CoV-2 genome), and nothing else. It's impossible for the active ingredient to not "stay dead", although -- as with viruses -- it's a bit hard to define mRNA as either dead or alive. (I prefer to think of viruses as things that are dead outside a cell and alive inside it). It's impossible for it to cause disease. It's definitely impossible for it to revert to being harmful and I've not heard of any regulatory concern over that (only over whether the mRNA protein product or its packaging is *itself* harmful, say, inducing allergic shock or interacting negatively with something else already in the body; a worry with every new medication of any kind).

Even if it's given to someone who's already infected with SARS-CoV-2, the most it'll do is add a tiny bit more spike protein to the huge amounts that the virus is already producing: there's no danger of recombination or anything making the thing dangerous, which is a *definite* risk with attenuated- or dead-virus formulations like some polio vaccines.

(Contamination is a problem, but not one that has anything to do with anything that Katalin Karikó did: she was involved with pseudouridination, which is a change to the *mRNA itself* and has nothing to do with contaminants.)