“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Did your parents say this? In any case, they probably taught you to look both ways before crossing a road, and uncountable other habits that prevent harm before real damage is done. As adults, we know accidents happen, and we safeguard children by teaching prevention.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Did your parents say this? In any case, they probably taught you to look both ways before crossing a road, and uncountable other habits that prevent harm before real damage is done. As adults, we know accidents happen, and we safeguard children by teaching prevention.
In the year 2025, however, another old saying comes to mind: “Health is not valued till sickness comes.”
As a student nurse, my mother treated a patient with tetanus (lockjaw). Even today, the painful muscle spasms and muscle rigidity caused by this bacterial infection kill 1 in 10 patients. In the 1950’s, it was a death sentence. Helplessly watching this patient’s slow and agonizing death influenced my mother’s parenting. With six kids running around a farm, dirty wounds were frequent. But for each suspicious cut, we were bundled off to the pediatrician for a tetanus booster.
Since introducing a safe and effective vaccine in the 1940’s, tetanus cases declined by more than 95 percent.
Today, few if anyone experiences tetanus, whooping cough (pertussis), or diptheria. Few parents if any have experienced the horror of watching a child die or become paralyzed by polio infection. NONE of us has experienced the ancient scourge called smallpox, which killed a third of those infected. Vaccination now protects against more than 20 diseases. Infant mortality across the globe has declined by half since 1974.
But “health is not valued till sickness comes.” We lack firsthand knowledge of the diseases our ancestors feared. Without fear of disease consequences, fear of vaccination itself has become widespread. Fear was further stoked by fraudulent studies.
So how do vaccines work? Quite simply, by giving our immune system a heads-up that a foreign entity has invaded our body. A healthy immune system first detects and then fights off infectious diseases. Most importantly, the immune system remembers what pathogens it previously waged battle against. Consequently, the body quickly fights off that pathogen later. A good vaccine exposes the immune system to just part of the virus – only enough to trigger recognition of the invader and develop that defensive memory. Ideally, vaccination causes a short skirmish, but not the fullblown disease with potentially lifealtering or -threatening consequences.
Traditional vaccines use a weakened or inactivated pathogen grown in a lab. For example, the flu vaccine is often produced in eggs. A major disadvantage is that extensive time is needed to confirm that the altered pathogen effectively raises the immune response but doesn’t cause disease. Potential sensitivities to the production media, for example egg allergies, are another disadvantage. Finally, the lengthy time to develop a new vaccine is a real problem with viruses that change their appearance frequently such as those that cause flu and Covid-19.
As biologists in a school with strong research programs combatting infectious disease, my colleagues and I were delighted when the RNA platform used to create the Covid-19 vaccine proved to be a winner. This versatile technology had been developing for several decades and was in exactly the right place to prove itself when ample funding became available. Messenger RNA (mRNA), a natural molecule present in all living cells, is an intermediary between our DNA (the instructions that define who we are) and the proteins that form our cellular machinery. Unlike the protein chemistry that underlies traditional vaccines, RNA chemistry is straight-forward. Designing RNA vaccines is quicker. RNA vaccines provide cells with instructions to make a protein found on the surface of a virus. The immune system then learns to recognize the viral protein without exposure to live virus. Although the vaccine RNA breaks down, the immune memory remains to protect against severe disease.
Most excitingly, the RNA platform has many potential benefits: a new strategy to combat diseases that previously resisted vaccination efforts, an alternative to problematic media such as eggs, and even new cancer treatments. I am fortunate to have witnessed many incredible discoveries like RNA technology in my long biology career. But my children and I are even luckier to live in an age where we don’t fear dozens of lethal illnesses.