Opinion essay: mRNA vaccines are an essential technology

The mystery disease started in early January 2019 with pins and needles in my fingers. A medical provider in my network chalked it up to too much keyboard use.

Over the next few weeks, the pain spread and intensified in my lower body, making walking more difficult. My mystery disease culminated in a moment when I tried to quicken my pace in a North High Street crosswalk and my legs responded, oh, hell no. I fell and couldn’t get up. Thankfully, a young woman nearby saw me struggling and pulled me upright and out of traffic.

Several different specialists couldn’t solve the mystery. As I went to appointments, I also fed every symptom to Google. I dove into disease studies on the websites for the National Institutes of Health and Journal of the American Medical Association, and kept a tab open to look up terms I didn’t understand. 

Eventually, I found a neurologist who confirmed my growing suspicion: I had an acute-onset autoimmune disorder. My antibodies went rogue and attacked the protective sheaths surrounding my nerves, called myelin. An extremely rare reaction to a recent flu vaccine – my first – was the only logical explanation.

Every vaccine, like most pharmaceuticals, carries a small risk of severe side effects. In cases like mine, there’s no consensus within the medical community on whether any vaccine is safe. Still, when Covid arose and vaccines became available, my neurologist suggested a variety using messenger RNA, or mRNA, might work for me – the kind produced by Pfizer and Moderna. 

In a mid-August interview, Daniel Binzel, a research assistant professor at Ohio State’s College of Pharmacy working in mRNA technology, said that traditional vaccines usually deploy a mutated form of live infection or a specific protein from that virus to train the body to develop antibodies. “Those are typically less effective and require more vaccine doses,” he said. 

mRNA vaccines work by “delivering mRNA to the body and then using the cell machinery to convert that RNA into proteins,” Binzel said. “That allows your immune system to … develop the antibodies just as it would on a traditional vaccine.” He added that mRNA vaccines can be produced more rapidly.

In those early months of Covid, I weighed the risks and scheduled an mRNA vaccine. The only side effect was a sore arm. It’s been the same for every mRNA shot I’ve received since. Through a combination of these, safety measures such as masking, the privilege of being able to work from home, and probably dumb luck, I’ve never developed a symptomatic case of Covid.

In an Aug. 5 press release, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would terminate about $500 million in research on more than 20 mRNA vaccines and would not initiate any new mRNA-based projects. According to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.” 

NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya followed Kennedy’s announcement with a different explanation. During an Aug. 9 appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Bhattacharya claimed the policy change was prompted by a lack of public trust in mRNA vaccines. “You can’t have a platform where such a large fraction of the population distrusts the platform, if you’re going to use it for vaccines, and expect it to work,’ he said.

In the wake of the announcement, experts across the spectrum have criticized the decision. Former Surgeon General Jerome Adams said the move to cancel funding for mRNA research would “cost lives,” and the conservative National Review published an editorial under the headline “Don’t Abandon mRNA.” “In the absence of these vaccines, America’s (and the world’s) experience in the pandemic would have been worse,” the magazine’s editors wrote.

The technology behind mRNA vaccines was first developed in the 1970s and the first mRNA vaccines were tested in labs in the 1990s. But the swell of disinformation that arose during the height of the Covid pandemic falsely painted mRNA vaccine tech as new, untested, and capable of permanently altering a recipient’s DNA. 

As Binzel explained, “It’s an overall astonishing fact that [around] 90 percent of our DNA actually has viral origins. Over time and through evolution, we’ve been infected with viruses, and they incorporate into our genome, and it’s who we are now. But the mRNA itself is completely incapable of changing your DNA. It’d be like trying to throw a rock up over Hoover Dam and changing the dam reservoir makeup itself.”

Binzel’s own field of study is focused on developing RNA nanoparticles for use in cancer treatment. Researchers hope to produce individualized mRNA vaccines that can basically reprogram the patient’s immune system to recognize mutated cells and target them before they grow into a full-blown tumor. Ohio State’s research has expanded into therapeutics for other disease models, as well. 

“I think there’s still work to be done in this field of how we can properly deliver the mRNA and get safer delivery overall,” Binzel acknowledged. “Which, obviously, you can’t do without research.”

Kennedy has walked back the cancellation of funds for RNA cancer therapies, but uncertainty still clouds the future of this promising field in the United States. And Kennedy has stood firm on the alleged dangers of mRNA vaccines against Covid, claiming without evidence that these vaccines cause the virus to mutate.

I’m one of only a relatively few people in the U.S. to have good reasons for vaccine skepticism, who can point to a specific example of what can go wrong. Yet even when I learned that a traditional vaccine was behind my disorder, it never occurred to me to suggest that others shouldn’t take advantage of them. 

I recognize that my experience could’ve been worse without good health coverage, but it’s impossible to look at the evolving history of vaccines and not see the overall positive impact. And according to a recent poll by KFF, the fraction of Americans who believe mRNA vaccines are unsafe is far outweighed by those who simply don’t know enough about them. 

As Binzel noted, mRNA technology is imperfect. But clearly, so are traditional vaccines. Also, unlike policymakers, doctors and researchers are required by ethical guidelines to do no intentional harm. And we’re imperfect beings. All you need for evidence is the decision by the Trump administration to place someone like Kennedy – a prominent vaccine denier who’s pushing mRNA fallacies and whose rhetoric has been linked to a measles outbreak – in the most powerful job in U.S. healthcare.

Jake Scott, an infectious disease physician and clinical associate professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, reviewed the information Kennedy provided to justify the halt in mRNA funding. He found that the document was assembled by outside authors and, according to its own title page, originated with contributions to Toxic Shot: Facing the Dangers of Covid “Vaccines,” a book authored in part by a Canadian immunologist who has been criticized for spreading misinformation about the Covid vaccine. And the lead compiler of the 181–page document wasn’t a disease or vaccine expert. It was a dentist.

Scott also stated that the HHS secretary misread the data. Most of the studies in the document involved laboratory experiments on the effects of the spike protein associated with Covid, not vaccines. As a result, “It doesn’t support ending mRNA vaccine development. It makes the case for expanding it.”

Melissa Starker is a freelance writer and film programmer, research nerd, and former PR & creative content manager for the Wexner Center for the Arts.