Stuff You Should Know - How mRNA Vaccines Work

Episode Date: November 2, 2021

The two mRNA Covid vaccines are the first vaccines to come out of a new field of immunology and represent such an amazing leap forward that they are taking us into a new era of medicine. Learn all about them so you can set your uncle straight. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Brian over there. Jerry is persona non grata. And that's Stuff You Should Know, of course.

Just the usual. Yeah, that's so Stuff You Should Know. Stuff You Should Know regular. So can I say a couple of things here? Oh, a preamble from Charles. Let's hear it. So we're going to be talking today about the COVID vaccines, specifically M and R. I'm sorry. Oh boy, this is going to be a long episode. mRNA vaccines, aka Mr. Na, how I like to call him. Hadn't picked up on that before. Now I can't unsee it. Well, that's because the M is little. Yeah. Yeah, but still now I see it very clearly. The Mr. Na vaccine. And just quickly, I wanted to say that Josh put this together from whole cloth

from about 80,000 sources. And you did a great job. This is a complicated thing that you did work your wonders on and you're really good at this. Is that what you wanted to say? I wanted to say that. And also our hopes here are that you can understand this. And then we're kind of preaching to the choir a bit with our listenership. Not fully. There's plenty of people. There's a lot of varying opinions among stuff you should know listeners. Absolutely. But I think when it comes to vaccine hesitancy, I think most of our listeners are on board. And our hope is that you can understand this a little bit before Thanksgiving with your weird uncle. So maybe you can say, hey, you know,

I know how these things work. And it's not something to be feared. It's something to be like to stand up from this turkey and this table and like applaud with full, no reservation and full like what in the world has science done. It's amazing. Yeah, it really is. Because it is. It's unbelievable that science has figured this stuff out and they did it that quickly. I know. And that accurately. I know it is. It's a triumph of modern science for sure. One of the biggest. And we're gonna, you know, it's impossible to talk about the mRNA vaccines without talking about how it differs from traditional vaccines. And it is a huge step forward in vaccine research and vaccine production. Like it's the future of vaccines. It's amazing what's

just happened. But that's not to throw any shade whatsoever on traditional vaccines, which we still need, which we still use. We love oral vaccines. Yes. Without which, there would probably be a great many of us who would not be here either because we hadn't survived, our parents hadn't survived, our grandparents hadn't survived some disease that a vaccine was developed to combat. That's right. So hats off to traditional vaccines, but mRNA vaccines are pretty astounding in what science has managed to come up with. Yeah. So we hope to clear up some myths about what the COVID vaccines are and are not. And hopefully by the end of this, you will agree that it's literally when like,

there are some serious Nobel prizes coming in the future toward these people. For sure. At the very least, we hope that you hear this episode and are able to go, huh, so that's what's in me. Yeah, exactly. Well, it's not any more. We'll learn that too. That's true, Chuck. Nice foreshadowing. So it is really, it's really hard to kind of overstate just how big of a breakthrough it was for for mRNA vaccines and that they do kind of represent like this new path forward. But to kind of understand how the whole thing works and what makes it so magnificent as far as medical breakthroughs go, you kind of have to first understand what mRNA actually is and what it does. Don't you agree? Yeah. I mean, all this stuff is really new. I mean, the quickest version of the

history is that this stuff was identified in a messenger RNA is what we're talking about. Yes. Identified in the 1960s. And then in 1984, the very first strand of mRNA, I'm going to say MNRA so many times. You know, that M stuff. And Mr. Na, the first strand of Mr. Na was artificially produced in a lab in 1984, which in terms of science is not that long ago. And since then, they have made leaps and bounds to the point where they now can and did produce a COVID vaccine on a computer. Yeah. I mean, that's basically what they're doing these days is, is they're saying, oh, I want, I want a vaccine that produces this little viral protein. I know the genomic code of this little

viral protein. So I'm going to tap that in, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, and then press enter basically. And the computer sets off some desktop machines that produce that exact version of mRNA. That is a really, really simplified version of what's going on. But in a nutshell, it's basically where we've arrived now. And like you were saying, that's in the last 35 years that we first, very first time we ever synthesize mRNA. And as easy as it sounds now, Chuck, there were a lot of obstacles between 1985 and 2020, when the very first mRNA vaccines ever in the history of humanity came out just in time for the COVID pandemic. Yeah. I mean, there were a couple of big hurdles to actually turn that like original miracle into, oh boy, I was about to get so religious,

into fish to feed the masses. Wow. I would have gone with water into wine. Okay. Hey, that was a good one too. Yeah. A couple of them being, and we're going to get more into this, you know, as we go along. But they learned how to, you know, mRNA is really fragile. So they learned how to protect it by putting it in these little tiny fat capsules called lipid nanoparticles. And so now they've got a little sort of a little vehicle to travel in that helps them get into a cell. And then, and I know we've talked about cytokine storms before when the human body has a really overblown reaction, an overblown immune response to the point where it can actually kill somebody. Yeah. And those cytokine storms just kept

smacking down mRNA research over and over again, because even when they finally did manage to come up with a way to keep the fragile mRNA from falling apart in the body, the body would be like, what is this? Get this out of here. I'm going to just overblow so hard against this weird foreign invader that I'm going to threaten to kill my human, which is not at all what you want. And they finally figured out that if you use some different nucleotides in place of other nucleotides, which are the building blocks of life, when you're building this mRNA, and then you really purify it, you get like no slop whatsoever, you have a chance of making something that is, that appears natural enough to fool nature. That's right. And we're able to really clean

that stuff up because it's not a live virus. Yes. It's not a living thing. And we'll get more into that. And that's another big way how it differs from other vaccines. But it's not a live virus, so you can just dump a bunch of bleach on it, basically. Essentially. We'll say in a nutshell. But yes, it cuts down on any type of contamination that you might get. Yeah. And we have to thank for all of this, really, the human genome project. Because if not for that, which started in the 1990s, thanks to the US government's funding of that, we wouldn't have had any of these breakthroughs to begin with, as far as reading the genetic code. Yes. It was a huge investment. And it really has paid off in multiple ways. And just one of them

is mRNA vaccines. The whole thing that is just, to me, just amazing and astounding, and just confirms that we are living in some sort of simulation, that the breakthroughs that push this research for mRNA vaccines from basically a pipe dream that we had no idea how we were ever going to get there, to, okay, we're ready to actually create mRNA vaccines just in time for this pandemic that's coming along. They all just kind of came together, in part because people were already working on coronavirus vaccines. And what's really cool about mRNA vaccines is you can plug and play different stuff. Thanks to the human genome project, we've learned to kind of read the genetic codes of stuff and to write it and produce it.

And because of that, because we can do that on computers now, you can say, I've got a template for a coronavirus. Let me get specific with it and make it a SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Now that we've got the genetic code, we can deploy a vaccine against it. And that's how they were able to do it so quickly. That's right. And they estimate that as of July this year in 2021, that vaccine has saved almost 280,000 lives and prevented about 1.5 million hospitalizations when hospitals are overrun. And that's a really important thing. I'm going to lobby for an early ad break here so we can just get cooking and go uninterrupted and unmolested until the second ad break. Does that sound good? Yeah. A lobbying approved. Okay. We'll be right

back everyone and tell you how all this stuff works right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot,

sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately,

I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, so we should talk about, like I was saying, what mRNA does. Thank you for swooping in and reminding me that, oh yeah, this article that you wrote, you got the history part first. Let's start there. That makes a lot of sense. Is he skipping that? No, he's not skipping that. My vision is blurry. I'm so interested in this. Okay. So we're talking about mRNA. And mRNA is short for messenger RNA. And messenger RNA basically is a blueprint. It translates, it copies a little strip of the blueprint that's encoded in your entire genome and your DNA. And it takes that little bit, usually which codes for like a protein or a peptide, which are really important things that our body uses to do everything from contracting your muscles to making you feel hungry, like

basically everything comes down to a protein or a peptide. And the instructions for building each of those proteins and peptides are encoded in our DNA. And it's messenger RNA that goes to the DNA, says, okay, we need some more of this protein. I'm here to make a copy. May I please make a copy? Here are some flowers. They said, if I brought you some flowers, you'd be cooler with this. And the DNA says, proceed. And the mRNA goes beep boop boop boop boop boop. And produces itself as a copy and leaves the nucleus. This is really important. mRNA goes to the DNA, makes a copy, and then leaves the nucleus. And from that point on, the mRNA is all about the cytoplasm. Right. So I kind of like the, and I've expanded upon the wonderful metaphor you have

of like a building site. And I think we failed to mention that the amino acids in the body is what's really carrying out the work. Right. We're like making your eyes blue, let's say. Yeah. Well, the amino acids, they're the building blocks of proteins and peptides. If you arrange a certain set of amino acids in a certain way, you've got a polypeptide and you've got a protein. Right. So, MNRA in this case, if we're talking about, this is like a job site. Did I say NRA again?

You said MNRA. Men raw. Well, that's, the NRA is just so like embedded in our, that's just so sad. I haven't said NRA once. I know. It sounds like it's you, you're going nuts. Yes. So M RNA, just like Black Angus. Oh yeah. That one got a good reaction too. That was good. So MNRA, oh geez, M RNA in this case would be like the architect

showing up with a blueprint. Mm-hmm. Wearing some like sensible like chinos, but work boots, but they're really expensive work boots. You can tell them there's not a scuff on them. Okay. And so it heads over to the work site, which is the cytoplasm of the cell outside the nucleus, right? Mm-hmm. And then I think in this case, the ribosomes would be the contractor sort of. Yes. Because the contractor maybe translates these blueprints into, I guess, marching orders for the little workers that are the amino acids.

Yeah. The ribosome clears his sandwich off of like the, the drafting table and spreads out the MRNA blueprints is okay. Let me see what we got here. Wipes his mouth, some crumbs away from his mouth and gets to work, taking that blueprint, taking that messenger RNA and translating it into those amino acids that get constructed in just a certain way to produce a protein. And the MRNA says, do it again. Do it again. Do it again. Let's keep going. I'm feeling good. Let's keep this going for a little while. That's right. For a little while. And it just happens, you know, a certain number of times. It's not specific. It varies, but it's limited. And then that MRNA starts to break down. Nice going, Chuck.

You said MRNA. I know. I'm really concentrating on that. And then it's carried away from the cell and eventually out of the body through the lymph nodes and it's disposed of. So like all jobs, eventually the contractor will disappear on you. Right. Well, no, that was the architect that got used up and spit out. Well, the architect disappears earlier, I guess. Sure. I guess so. But you always want the architect to come back, sort of. Yes. Well, the architect's going to come back. You'll get another architect. There's always more MRNA. The body is always happy to produce more MRNA with sending out blueprints and instructions to go make this protein right now. Man, I really screwed up. I thought the contractor

disappeared. How perfect would that have been? It would have been pretty great. And you still got the joke in. It was just wrong in this case. It was a wrong joke. Scientifically. But the thing about MRNA vaccines is that researchers have figured out how to use this natural process to help us vaccinate ourselves against diseases. And they do that because we've reached a point where we can, rather than having the MRNA produced in the nucleus of the cell and going out into the cytoplasm, vaccine researchers produce the MRNA outside of the body and then inject it into the body. And then it goes into the cytoplasm from outside of the cell. And then from that point on, everything else follows the exact same process.

That is where we're at right now. And that is where you can start to feel your head opening up like a blooming onion and out back. Yeah. And I mean, that in and of itself is remarkable that is that they said, you know what, this stuff can actually go into a cell even though and we'll get a little bit more into this, even though it's like, can be up to 10,000 times too big to permeate that cell. We'll figure that part out. Right. And they did. That's courtesy of the little fatty lipids. That's the vehicle that allows that to happen. But just the notion that they thought, like, I wonder if we can get this stuff to go from the outside in.

Yeah, was remarkable. It really is. And it was just this contribution from hundreds of researchers just building on one another's work. And that finally led to the point where it's like, it went from, wow, this is a really cool idea to, okay, we're actually preventing deaths in a pandemic thanks to these things now. Right. And, you know, there are a couple of ways to, a few ways that you can immunize a person like literal techniques using mRNA. And it turns out that we got, I don't know if it's lucky or just, you know, divine intervention. Simulation type stuff. It turns out that the one that we that works really well, and that we're using for the COVID vaccine turned out to be sort of the cheapest and the easiest

one, which means in vivo within the living. So in other words, you just get it injected into your arm as opposed to like in vitro. That's the other way, which is takes a lot longer. It's really complicated, a lot more expensive. And they figured out, hey, we can just do this with a shot in the arm. Yeah. And then it's a conventional mRNA as opposed to something called self-amplifying that we're not going to sort of get into now, but it's a conventional in vivo shot that goes into your arm. Yeah. It's the most straightforward it could possibly be at this point in our mRNA vaccine technology, which like you said is rather lucky. Yeah. It didn't have to be that way. It could have been the most expensive and the most difficult and time consuming. Yeah.

And we'd be in a much different spot right now. Yes, for sure. So to kind of explain how mRNA vaccines do their thing, it helps to kind of view it as like a metaphor for like a training session. Like when you are vaccinated against something, your immune system is being trained to fight an invader, but it's like a training session that uses like blank rounds. So it's much safer than say like, capturing one of those enemies, pushing them onto the field and giving everybody live ammunition. Things can get messy in that sense. It's like a military training session. I guess so. Sure. Okay. Yeah. All right. I was thinking more SWAT team, but sure. So, you know, we mentioned a couple of times those lipid nanoparticles that encase the mRNA,

and that these things are anywhere from a thousand to 10,000 times too large for what normally could pass through the cell's membrane. But that lipid coating basically opens that gate and says, you know what? They're with me. You love me. I'm a little slippery fat cell. Right. And just coming along inside the cell with me and I'll shut the door behind us. Yeah, which is really something because, you know, if any of the what are called toll-like receptors in the cell, which are always looking out for something out of the norm, notice like mRNA, what are you doing out here? You should be in there. What's going on? Everybody, hey, come quick. You've got a big problem and you would not be able to actually successfully

vaccinate somebody because you'd set off the alarm too early. There's something called interferon that it actually does interfere with mRNA from being transcribed. That's a great name. It's a perfect name. So if it caught mRNA out, the interferon would come and prevent the mRNA from ever being transcribed into the viral protein. That's a big one, that that lipid coating helps protect. So say now we've got the mRNA showing up in the cytoplasm. Again, coming from outside the cell, but now it's in the cytoplasm. Everything's cool. Everything's normal and things can kind of proceed from there. That's right. And it shows up with those blueprints rolled up under their arm.

It's got the little work orders from the big boss and it says, all right, ribosomes, you're about to get a lot of work thrown your way. Are you going to be okay with that? You got to create all these different proteins that we're coded for. And in this case, we want to stop a pandemic. So it's coded for this virus and we've got just a tiny little bit of this virus's body. And don't worry, you're not going to get this person sick or anything because my friend Josh Clark taught me. He made another metaphor of like a piano player. Traditionally, if you want to play the piano, you're going to use at least an arm and probably one of your ears, traditionally. But you really want both those arms and both those ears.

Yes. And a body to go along with it, like just an ear and an arm can't play the piano. So just a little bit of this virus isn't going to make you sick. No, exactly. Or to let you spread it to someone else. That's a big one. And that's what the mRNA shows up coded for. It's a little piece of the virus that you want to immunize the person against. And it says, hey, everybody, let's start making this, huh? Hey, everyone. Hey, we're here. Come make this viral protein, which is called the antigen. And so the body starts doing that because it has, it didn't know the mRNA was outside of the cell or was ever created in a lab. And so it starts transcribing that mRNA and the viral proteins

start getting made. And the whole point to all of this, if you want like a really good immune response, Chuck, you want to trigger both of the two immune systems that humans have. You've got the innate system and you have the adapted system. Adaptive systems? Yes, you got two because you're a vertebrate. And if you can trigger them both to a large degree, but not so big a degree that you end up with a cytokine storm that can accidentally kill you, you've got a good immunization going. That's right. And we've talked about with great wonder and marvel about the human body's immune system before. But as a refresher, we do have two of them. We have the innate,

which is the first line of defense. This is like Sergeant Slaughter. Foreign invaders come in and Sergeant Slaughter just wants to kill. Kill, kill, kill everything that comes in his little scope. And that's the innate system. Just neutralize everything the second it sees it. Be on the lookout for everything. And if it looks weird, kill it. And that's like if you get a skin on your knee or a cut on your arm or something. And it's mild that inflammation around the cut is that innate system. And if it's mild enough and it doesn't get complicated or anything, that may be all you need for something like that. Sergeant Slaughter is all you need. That's all you need. But in this case, and with anything a little more sophisticated, you're going to want to engage that adaptive system

as well. Yeah, which if the innate system is is activated on high enough alert, it's going to basically go tell the adaptive system like, hey, this is something more than just a cut on the knee. Like we really need to pay attention to this. And the adaptive system is made up of specialized white blood cells. And they basically are trained to take a look at this weird new foreign invader, which are called non-self materials, basically anything that isn't part of you that comes from outside of your body. It's called non-self. And so they look, I think so too. I see maybe Phil Collins final album. Non-self material. Yeah. But then it'd just be the cover album. Which is good. It's a great name for standards, you know. Okay. So they look at this non-self material

and they say, okay, we got to remember that. So they basically learn it, learn to recognize it, catalog it, and then figure out how to produce antibodies that specifically attack this virus or this antigen, the little bit of the virus that can be infectious. And then it remembers it. And so the next time that antigen or that virus comes into your body, your body is ready because the innate system triggered the adaptive system, which memorized and cataloged antibodies to fight. They used to fight that virus. Yes. And it works great. And it works fast. There was a study that found that the antibody producing cells can produce 10,000 antibodies per hour. No, no, no. Per minute. No, no. 10,000 antibodies per second. So like it literally just wants to flood

that site with reinforcements basically to kill all this stuff in a very smart strategic and pinpointed way. Yeah. So you've got your innate system, your adaptive system. You want to set them both off. And so we're going back into the cell and by now in this whole time that we've been talking, the cell that took up that mRNA that was injected into you in the vaccine has been making that viral protein, that antigen over and over again. It's like, I like this. I don't know what to do with that. I'm just going to start wearing it on the surface of my cell. And the cell doesn't know any different. It thinks that everything's going hunky-dory, but it looks good on me. Luckily, exactly. But luckily, we have some kinds of immune cells. Those are innate immune cells

who are on the lookout for anything weird. They're total fascists. They don't truck any kind of non-conformity or anything out of the norm. And they look at this new, say, muscle cell because that's what you get your vaccine injected into, wearing all these weird viral proteins and say, come with me. And they overwhelm that poor cell. They take them out back and basically disassemble them. I love that. It makes you wonder, all these cells are just doing the same thing, but some of them go, wait a minute. You are very suspicious and you're coming with me and I'm going to introduce you to my friend, the adaptive system. Do they know which cells or is it just a random thing? What do you mean they know what cells? You know, the cells that go that are more suspicious.

But I guess what they're saying is like, stop expressing yourself. All right. Is that what you meant? Sort of. I just find it interesting that some of them are just doing their thing. And then some of them, I mean, they're the same kinds of cells. No, no, no. They're different kinds of cells. Oh, okay. They are different. The cells that are suspicious, those are your innate immune cells. They're constantly on lookout for something weird. And when they find something weird, they just kill it. All right. And all the other cells are just. Yeah. They're just sitting there like, not me. Don't look at me. I'm normal. I'm normal. I've got, I've got no weird proteins on my surface.

Okay. That makes sense now. Okay. So then those cells that take the poor muscle cell that's been creating this viral protein and thinks it looks pretty snazzy and is now being disassembled, they take some of those viral proteins to the adaptive immune system. And that's where they say, Hey guys, look at this. We don't know what this is, but we think it's a problem. So you might want to remember it and create some antibodies that you can deploy against it if we ever see it again later. And at that point, after all of that happens, you are vaccinated against that. Yeah. And you know, here's the thing that some other myths that people think that this thing will live inside your body and who knows what's going to happen in 10 years.

In 10 years, we'll all have horns growing out of our heads because of this. That's not what happens. MRA, RNA leaves you. It's very fragile, like we mentioned. And different studies have shown different results, but somewhere in the neighborhood of a few days to a couple of weeks is basically as long as that mRNA is going to survive before it degrades and then leaves your body through the lymph system. Yeah. Under normal circumstances, it's just a few days, but they figured out how to make it a little stronger because you want it in there a little longer because the more that your muscle cells are producing this viral protein, the more of an innate response and then hence, the more of an adaptive response you're going to get. But no matter what they do,

the mRNA is going to go away. It's going to follow all the normal processes for exiting the body. Those cells that produce that viral protein are going to be destroyed. And then those viral proteins are going to be taken up and taken to the lymph nodes where they're shown to those T and B cells that produce the antibodies against them. All of that is a totally normal process, and that is the point of vaccination because during this process, maybe your innate immune response makes you feel like you got the flu for a few hours or half of a day, or maybe your arm hurts really bad. That's that innate response, but you're not going to get sick. You're not actually going to have COVID because it's that live training with blanks to train your immune system

how to recognize it. So that when SARS-CoV-2 virus comes along and says, oh, I'll see what's going on here, it goes, oh my God, oh no, somehow this thing, this body's already been trained to attack me and now I'm dead and gone and I can't possibly infect this person. That is the point. And that's what's been done with mRNA vaccines. Yeah. And I was about to describe this last part as another miracle in this, but I think we're degrading the hard work and research to describe it as a miracle. Sure. It is hard work and research is what led to this stuff. So I guess we'll call it a breakthrough. One of the other biggest breakthroughs is that they had to find the what you call the Goldilocks zone, that perfect amount. So this thing would work perfectly. So we talked about the cytokine

storms. You don't want that. You don't want to overblow it and do too much. So you had to dial it back a little bit, but it can't be so weak that it doesn't even notice the antigen to begin with. It's got to notice so it designs those antibodies. So you have to find the Goldilocks zone in there. And then there's this last bit of the fact that there's basically an early warning system in the body that prevents mRNA from being translated if it thinks like it's not built well. If it's misfolded or something, it can really wreck the body system. So it's on the lookout for that stuff. And it has to get past that early warning system in order to make all this work anyway. And they did it. They did all of those things. Yeah. It's pretty amazing. They made something

that's natural enough to full nature for all intents and purposes. Your body is like, oh, I made this mRNA. Cool. Let's listen to, let's start translating it, which is astounding. And then everything just kind of follows that process just perfectly. And it really is like, hats off to those people who made this stuff. Hats off. And I think let's take a break. Okay. I think we did a pretty good job there. Yeah, I think so too. And we're going to talk about how they make this stuff right after this. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do,

you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app,

Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second-hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on

this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. I love how you put this so much in this article. I'm going to read it verbatim. To put in a nutshell that's so oversimplified, it's basically wrong. Engineers spell out the genetic code they want the mRNA to carry. They add the ingredients, they press enter, and the computer tells the lab equipment what chemical reactions to carry out and for how long.

I mean, that's kind of it. In a nutshell. And the simplest, if you really need to tell your weird uncle at Thanksgiving how it works, you may just want to start there and see what his reaction is. He goes, they press enter. That's my greatest fear. Right. Haven't you ever seen war games? Right. But to start at the beginning though, you have to understand what the genetic code of this virus you're trying to fight. And again, thank you Human Genome Project for pushing that along. And once you have the genetic code and you study the virus, you can figure out what its Achilles heel is. And in the case of the COVID vaccines, the two, one from Moderna and then one from BioNTech and Pfizer, can't forget to mention BioNTech. Basically, they're the ones

who actually came up with the template for this vaccine and Pfizer was like, hey, let's partner. So it's wrong to just call it the Pfizer vaccine. And by the way, just announced today that they approved Mix and Match. I heard that too, which is awesome. I mean, everybody loves variety. It's a spice of life. Well, I'm still gonna, I got the Moderna to begin with. I'm gonna get the Moderna booster. I like variety, but I'm just gonna keep it in the family. No, that's my plan too. I like the Moderna as well. And by the way, this is so new and Moderna is such a new company. I think they were organized in 2010. The COVID vaccine that they make is the only product that they sell. Yeah. That's how new all of this stuff is. It's crazy. But for the coronavirus vaccines,

the COVID vaccines, Chuck, they figured out that the spike protein, the S protein is what it's called, that that is the virus's Achilles heel. It's the thing that gives the coronavirus that spiky appearance. Yeah, that crown. Yeah. And that is the thing that it uses to fuse to a cell's membrane and then basically coax it to open up so that it can spill its viral contents in there and make more more viruses. So it's the weakest point of the virus and that's what they figured out how to target. But to understand that, you have to know what the genome is so that you can go in and say, here's the part of the genetic code of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that makes that spike protein. Let's take this, plug it into a different, like a string of mRNA and then we'll have that mRNA

that produces that spike protein and we can use that in a vaccine and that's what they've done. It almost seems like a Greek myth or something with a crown because I remember when we talked about the coronavirus and that fancy crown and like, look at my fancy crown and it turns out as that fancy crown is what's going to drag it down. Yeah, hubris and vanity. That's what it is. We're playing a lot of human emotions. It flew too close to the sun. That's right. So they identify that little crown, like you said, as the Achilles heel and they got that little bit of code and then the rest of this is, and this is sort of another one of the big breakthroughs, I'm not going to call it a miracle, is that they again, they figured out how to do this all

outside of the human body because they got a hold of plasmid, plasmid, not plasma, PLASMID, plasma DNA, usually from E. coli, but don't let that freak you out. It turns out it's really helpful in this case and this acts as like a template. It's like the working DNA that they used to figure all this stuff out. It's standing in for the human's own DNA and it's in the, it's on that work site. It's in that cytoplasm and it's like almost extra bonus DNA that's outside the nucleus and so they're using that to stand in for our own DNA so we could figure, you know, we could figure out how to make this stuff work together. Yeah, it's almost like if you were looking at a piano keyboard and the piano keyboard was

plasma DNA and say it coded for luminescence or something like that. If you went along and took out some of the keys and put in different keys, then now that it's coded for an entirely different kind of protein, in this case the antigen that you want, that spike protein, but the point is it's like a structure. I keep using the piano metaphor in different thrilling ways and I'm really happy with that, but it's the backbone. It's the thing that you use to hold the original code because remember MRNA likes to go to DNA to make a copy of that little code, that string of G's and T's and C's and A's. That's how it's made and that's how it happens in the body. That's how they do it in the lab too and to start, that means you have to have DNA, okay?

Right, but here's the thing. You can't just create that template and then that's it. No. Like Bing Bang Boom Bon Jovi. You got to transcribe that into the MRNA and I think in the 1980s at Brookhaven National Lab is where they developed this really ingenious technique that used bacteriophages, which are these viral parasites that, and this is where the E. coli kind of comes back in, that infect bacteria like E. coli and they have a really, really efficient RNA transcription engine. They said, well, let's just use that because it's already really good at that. Yeah, which is pretty cool. Here's the other thing too. If you're like, oh my God, E. coli, plasmid DNA, bacteriophages that are viral parasites, they're using this together. It's like

Frankenstein stuff. Keep in mind, they're not harvesting like wild E. coli or wild bacteriophages. They're building those things from scratch in the lab and they're getting to the point, if they're not already there, where they're like, oh, we only need this part of the plasmid DNA, which again, by the way, does not create E. coli. It creates an extra bit of something or we only need this part of the bacteriophage and so they just make those parts that they need or increasingly just order them from lab supply companies online. That's the point that we're at now because again, these are all non-living things that you can sterilize and they're in some cases not just parts of non-living things like a plasmid DNA or a bacteriophage.

Yeah. I mean, it's amazing. They put this, the plasmid DNA template, they take the bacteriophage and they put it in a big soup kettle on the stove. They add a little chemical go juice that says, all right, get started and then the bacteriophage says, wait a minute, I know what I'm good at. I'm great at that transcription and so I'm going to just start transcribing right now and I'm going to transcribe that code in the plasma DNA and I'm going to produce a ton of mRNA strands. Like a lot. It doesn't sound like a lot, but if you have an average production run, you're going to get about two grams of mRNA per liter. That's like seven to 10 coffee beans, average size coffee beans. Yeah, and that's in a few days and you might think like,

I thought he said a lot, a couple of grams isn't a lot. These vaccines use, I think, respectively Moderna and Pfizer use 130 micrograms per dose. That two grams ends up producing anywhere from 200,000 to 600,000 actual vaccine doses. Yeah, and also don't forget, we're talking about mRNA, which exists on the nano scale and you're producing 10 coffee beans worth of that stuff in three days. We're talking small. Yes, very small. They've got tons of mRNA each time they run one of these batches and then they take that mRNA that comes out and they purify it. They get rid of any leftover nucleic materials from that transcription process, clean up the slop, like I was saying, and then they surround it with a lipid nanoparticle.

That packet of fats is going to help it get into the cell and protect it on its wild journey through the body and then they mix it with a few other things. Usually a few kinds of salts often to mimic the pH of the body so that it's accepted a lot more easily. For sugar? They use sugar to stabilize the whole thing and that's about it. And not even about it, that's it. There's some fats, there's the mRNA, salt and sugar, and then that's what you have in your vaccine, whether it's the BioNTech Pfizer or the Moderna one. That's right. And if weird uncle says, yeah, but what else is really in there, say that's it, the salt and the sugar and what I just told you about, dum-dum. And he'll say, hopefully,

well, that makes me hungry now. That's the gravy. Sounds delicious. Can you score some in my mouth? He's like, there's no butter in that? Yeah, there's lipid nanoparticles. So we're going to finish up talking a little bit about what differentiates this from traditional vaccines. The biggest thing is that it's, like we said before, it's built from scratch in a lab outside the human body. And that's very different. And it's non-living, like we said. And other vaccines are called viral vector vaccines. And they either use, like if you get a flu shot or something, you're talking about either a dead virus or a live one that's been weakened or proteins from a live virus. And it takes a long time to produce these. It's not like this thing went

at light speed, but not in an unsafe way in a truly astounding, applaudable way. Yeah. No, I was reading about the emergency use authorization process. And the FDA did not mess around. They definitely did double time to try to get these things out the door because they needed to, but they did not cut corners on safety from anything I saw. It was a really safe process. But it was still really fast, not because the FDA cut corners, but because mRNA vaccines are able to be created really, really fast. And so I think BioNTech Pfizer had emergency use approval within 11 months, 11 months of developing the vaccine. The second fastest a vaccine had ever been developed before prior to mRNA vaccines is four years. Yeah. I want to say a little bit

something else about that. Cause I think that's a big reason for vaccine hesitancy is the speed at which it was approved. And like there's no way they knew what was going on. I read a lot about this over and not even for this, just like over the past year and how that process usually works is it's related to funding. Like you're funded a certain amount of money as a company to get approval for studies and stuff like that. And you get funded that certain amount and you can only work within that amount of money. So your study is only going to be of a certain sample size. And they're pretty big. And then you also have to take a certain place in line with this vaccine. They had a sample size out of the gate that was humongous because the entire

world wasn't getting infected with this stuff or not getting infected, but you know, tons and tons of people were getting infected. The entire world was on watch and on guard. And so you had no problems with sample size. You had no problem with funding and you had no problem with waiting in line because they said, all right, you're immediately at the front of the line. Right. So it didn't get approved because they just wanted to speed it through there really quickly. It got approved because it jumped the line. It had tons of money behind it. And it had a ton of people in the getting, you know, thankfully volunteering to get jabbed early on for the test. Which produced a ton of data that these things are saying. Like more data than usual. Yeah. Yeah. Because they have more

participants than usual. That was everything I saw as well too. So frustrating though because they actually got more data than they usually get. They just got it a lot faster. And there's people still think that, you know, there's just not enough information because it didn't take as long. Yeah. It is very frustrating because people are like, I'm wary of that because it was so fast. And it was so fast because it is one of the biggest advances in the history of medicine that's happening before our very eyes. But rather than just being like, oh my God, what an amazing time to be alive. What an amazing accomplishment humanity did. A significant portion of people were like, no, I don't trust it. They're trying to kill me or catalog me or Bill Gates wants to

keep tabs on on me because Bill Gates cares what I'm doing. Yeah. We've met Bill Gates. You guys a couple of times. He doesn't care what you're doing. I hate to break it to you. He does not care what you're doing. And you know, we mentioned before that we, it's almost like we were waiting for this. Like we had the mRNA vaccine sort of technology figured out to a certain degree. And we were just waiting for the Chinese government and the researchers to release that genetic code. Yes. And once they did, they were like, all right, here it is. It's open source in January 2020. And everyone's like, great. That's all we needed. And we are ready to rock and roll. And I think, did you say it was 25 days later that they produced their first successful

batch? Yep. And then 39 days after that, the first phase of human trials were underway, which I mean, that's just so fast. But to kind of go back to that point too, Chuck, because I think a lot of people are also suspicious about that. Like why were they just waiting for this pandemic? It's pretty suspicious. There were people who, well, at BioNTech and Moderna who already had like these templates ready. They were working on mRNA vaccines in a number of different fields. And then there were other groups who were specifically working on coronavirus vaccines because we've dealt with coronaviruses before, MERS, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, SARS, the original SARS. Those are both coronaviruses. Both of them share their spike protein with

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. That's a coronavirus as well. They all have the spike protein. So they had spike protein templates. So like you said, when Chinese researchers posted the genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, people were like, cool, let's take that, plug it in and see what happens and it worked. That's why it was so fast. We can't say plug and play enough. I mean, that's literally the situation because in the future, they might be able to solve things like HIV and rabies and maybe even certain kinds of cancer. It's a technology that can be applied to a bunch of things and they were just ready to go for this. Yeah, the cancer one, I mean, that's just amazing. That's trickiest. Yes, but they're getting to the point where

they can say, okay, you've got cancer, come in. We're going to take a sample of your tumor. We're going to study it. We're going to figure out what its genome is. We're going to create a tailor-made vaccine to train your body to fight that cancer and we're going to vaccinate you against your own personal cancer. We're a few years away from being able to do that kind of thing. And then when that happens, if we can do it, we will have beaten cancer. That's the next thing that mRNA vaccines are about to do. It's amazing. It's a reason to applaud science. I know you have a little bit more that I didn't fully understand and thankfully, you're going to tell people about it. Well, the other... I mean, one of the other things, if I'm not mistaken, that it seems like vaccine

hesitant people are worried about is that mRNA vaccines are going to embed themselves in your DNA and alter it. And that's actually the opposite of what mRNA vaccines do because like we said, they come from outside of the cell and they do their work in the cytoplasm. They don't go anywhere near your nucleus or interact with your DNA. They don't need to. They've already got what they would have needed from the DNA in that the mRNA sense shows up with the blueprints ready to be translated into the proteins, right? They can't get into the nucleus, right? No. I mean, as far as anybody knows, they can't or they don't. There's no reason for them to. There's no reason they should. And then even if they did, that doesn't mean that they would be transcribed into your DNA, right?

The actual wild SARS-CoV-2 virus doesn't even do that. A lot of viruses actually go in, take their RNA, reverse transcribe it into your DNA and then get your DNA to produce more viruses. That's how a lot of viruses infect you. But the SARS-CoV-2 virus is not like that. It's called a positive sense RNA virus where it shows up in much the same way that the vaccine shows up with ready-to-go mRNA. The SARS-CoV-2 virus shows up and says, here's some RNA. Just start making more of myself. And it has nothing to do with the DNA in the nucleus. It just works in the cytoplasm as well. So there's no reason to think or believe and there's no evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus embeds itself in your DNA. And I hate to say this, but even if it did, at least 8% of your DNA human being

is made up of ancient viruses DNA that has been injected into humanity over the eons. And as much as 48% of your DNA is actually old viral DNA that's just junk DNA now. So it doesn't do that. It doesn't insert itself into your DNA. Even if it does, basically you would be good at making ears of coronaviruses for a while. Right. That's it. I love it. So there you go. That's mRNA vaccines. Nice work. Nice work to you too, man. Thank you for doing this one. This is a great one. Of course. And if you want to know more about mRNA vaccines, then just start researching. There's plenty of stuff out there to explain this even further. And since I said just start researching, that means of course it's time for listener mail. This is a quick one. I'm going

to call this about the church of the subgenius is a follow up. Good morning, fellas. I've been listening to your podcast for several years. Some of my favorites include how soap works and how sloths work. I'm listening to the tale of the church of the subgenius episode as I type and I often Google the topic you're enlightening us with. And when I searched for Bob Dobbs, a recent Twitter post from Bob Dobbs said this earthlings of earth, you will be punished for the 1970s. That is all. Hashtag subgenius, hashtag stark fist, hashtag Tuesday motivations. And Chris from Arlington, Texas says hysterical. I love your podcast. My wife and I have great conversations about your episodes all the time. And again, that is Chris from Arlington, Texas.

Very nice. Thanks a lot, Chris. That was a nice little pick me up. And we love the 1970s. So screw you, subgenius. Agreed, Chuck. I'm glad somebody said it. Well, if you want to give us a pick me up like Chris, Chris, right? Chris, like Chris did, then you can send us an email to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band or each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.