The COVID-19 vaccine development is a very clever vaccine development. It is neither a live-attenuated virus (Sabin polio vaccine) nor a dead virus vaccine (Salk polio vaccine, the annual flu vaccine). The sequence of the coronavirus virus was mapped out and that part of the sequence that codes for the “corona” of the coronavirus, its protein spike, its surface signature, which we call an antigen, is used to assemble messenger RNA. That messenger RNA is then injected into a person—with Moderna and Pfizer it is in a carrier, with J&J it is attached to a harmless virus—that once injected is taken-up by certain dendritic lymphocyte white blood cells. Once inside the cell, the injected messenger RNA finds its way to the cytoplasm machinery that codes for proteins and sort of hijacks it. There the vaccine messenger RNA codes for the protein spike, the antigen of the coronavirus capsid. Those proteins spikes then leave the cell where, as they’re roaming in the blood circulation, “other” lymphocyte white blood cells recognize the foreign protein spike and launch an immune reaction. That immune reaction is the production of antibodies and lymphocytes, both of which have memory.
This is not a shield like “raise the shields” from Star Trek. Once successfully immunized with COVID-19 vaccine, the virus can still enter a person. It is just that it fails to launch an infection, it fails to enter certain cells it would like to target. Why? Because the immune system is primed, it has the antibodies with memory and lymphocytes with memory that attack the virus like a rabid dog. It is unclear the correct word to describe a vaccinated person with the virus (or bacteria) within their system but unable to launch an infection.
John Bershof, MD
John Bershof, MD is a plastic surgeon who has been in private practice for over 25 years. He is the author of numerous medical articles as well as the first textbook of medicine for mobile phones, entitled skynetMD 2005-2015. An essay entitled Gin & Tonics, Clerics, and Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?, which was extracted from one of his future as yet published books was featured in The Antioch Review.
While working on the medical textbook skynetMD for mobile phones, Dr. Bershof, perhaps not too surprisingly became more interested in the backstories of medical history, like who was Lou Gehrig, what is Lou Gehrig's disease, what was his lifetime batting average for the New York Yankees—.340, nineteenth overall—and who invented baseball anyway. Questions such as these piqued Bershof's interest. Having read At Home 2010 by Bill Bryson, his engrossing narrative journeys room-by-room through his Victorian English countryside home, a former rectory, where each room is a chapter about domesticity, about home. It occurred to Dr. Bershof that in similar vein he could take the reader disease-by-disease as jumping off points into human history, science, medicine—his canvas blank, no subject not within reach—and learn a little medicine along the journey.
The ability of a book that is heavily fortified with science and history to connect with a general readership can be challenging; Dr. Bershof through storytelling, humor, jumping off points and personal anecdotes, accomplishes it, written in a language fleeced of the jargon that normally accompanies such narratives. The first two books, The First History of Man published in 2020 and The Second History of Man published in 2021 are available in print, ebook and audio. The Third History of Man is in final stages of editing to be published in 2022, with more volumes to come after that.
Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.