Why mRNA vaccines won’t change your genetic material

Of all the Covid-19 vaccine candidates making their way through the regulatory pipeline, the two from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are some of the most exciting. In addition to having reported efficacies of 90% of more, these vaccines are the first of their kind. Rather than using a killed or weakened viruses or snippets of viral proteins, these vaccines use messenger RNA, or mRNA for short. Vaccines based on genetic material may give you pause. But mRNA vaccines, which have been in the works for nearly three decades, never touch our DNA, and as a result can’t interfere with human genes. Instead, they just borrow some of our cellular tools before harmlessly breaking down. “Injecting RNA into a person doesn’t do anything to the DNA of a human cell,” Jeffrey Almond, a microbiologist at the University of Oxford, told the BBC. It’s true that our DNA is a precious resource. Every single one...