While the campaign of vaccination against the Covid-19 starts slowly in France, one of our readers, Padpanic wrote to us and asks us: Does RNA Vaccine Cause Genetic Modification?
. Ouest-France answers you.
First of all, it should be remembered that the vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech laboratories uses the messenger RNA technique you are talking about, just like the Moderna laboratory vaccine, the latter not yet on the European market.
Develop antibodies
The principle of vaccination is to inject an attenuated or inactivated form of an infectious agent or some of its components in the body to prepare it for subsequent contact with a virus
, explains the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) in an article Are mRNA vaccines capable of altering our genome, really?
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The immune system thus develops immune cells which memorize
this agent and are able to recognize it if the patient is re-exposed to it. The objective is to trigger an immune reaction to avoid possible contamination in the future.
, says Inserm.
In the case of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the principle is a little different “Even if the basic idea is also to confront the immune system with a” lure “to push it to develop antibodies against the virus”.
Read also: Coronavirus. The different strategies of vaccines against the disease
Produce the infectious agent
The principle this time consists in producing the fragments of infectious agent directly by the cells of the vaccinated patient. For this, it is not the virus in its attenuated form that is injected but only DNA or RNA molecules encoding proteins of the pathogen.
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The cells of the vaccinated person located at the injection site (mainly muscle cells and cells of the immune system) are then able to manufacture said proteins themselves, chosen upstream for their ability to trigger a significant immune response. and protective
, details Inserm.
The Covid-19 Spike protein is then produced directly in the cytoplasm of the cells of the vaccinated person and not in the nucleus of the cell.
To answer you, Padpanic, in short, no the vaccine does not cause genetic modification. The RNA injected via the vaccine has no risk of transforming our genome or of being transmitted to our offspring since, as mentioned above, it does not enter the nucleus of cells. However, it is in this cell nucleus that our genetic material is located.
, says Inserm.
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