From the Editor: Are you taking the shot?

By BILL DECKER
bdecker@daily-review.com
We use the phrase to mean we’re going for it, maybe that we’re taking a gamble.
We’re taking the shot.
We reported Wednesday that Ochsner St. Mary staffers most at risk for exposure to COVID-19 have begun receiving injections of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine. Since then, a second vaccine developed by Moderna has received emergency use authorization.
At some point by the spring, we’ll all be asked to get vaccinated against the coronavirus. We’re told that if we comply in sufficient numbers, we can beat COVID-19.
No more masks. No more school closures. We’ll be able to go to restaurants and bars — inside restaurants and bars — without worry so much about social distancing.
The general public will probably have to wait a few months before supplies will be sufficient for widespread use. Even then, to judge by social media posts, many of us will be unwilling to get the shots, mostly for fear that the vaccine was rushed into production without adequate testing and safeguards.
Who can blame them? The research, development, testing and approval process for new drugs in the United States is notoriously long and clunky. Now we’re being encouraged to get injections of vaccines that didn’t exist when the coronavirus pandemic emerged less than a year ago.
But health care experts, public and private, insist that the vaccines are safe. They cite a couple of reasons.
One comes from both the Terrebonne General Medical Center news release about the first injections there and from a Zoom conference conducted last week by Ochsner Health System administrators and physicians.
They assure us that the speedy approval process for the new vaccines didn’t depend on cutting corners.
Instead, they said, steps in the trial process that are normally performed in sequence were performed simultaneously. That’s what happens when Uncle Sam decides that money is no object.
The other factor is the previous research into the technology that makes the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines possible: the manipulation of mes-senger RNA.
RNA is part of your genetic makeup that, among other things, tells your body how and when to produce proteins.
That’s important because the coronavirus is made up of viral cells surrounded by spikey pieces of protein. The spikes glom on to cells in your body and take over the genetic apparatus there to manufacture copies of itself.
Vaccines based on messenger RNA provide your body with little snippets of code that tell cells in your body to create the spikes but not the rest of the virus. Then the protein recipe disappears.
So your body builds immunity against the spikes without actually coming into contact with the virus itself.
The idea of using mRNA to turn human bodies into their own vaccine factories has been around for at least 30 years, according to a 2018 article in Chemical and Engineering News magazine. Moderna in particular has invested hundreds of millions into developing the technique.
So, when COVID-19 came along, there was a template to use in creating the new vaccine.
So far, we’re being told that the only side effects are a bit pain where the needle goes in, plus some mild fever and fatigue. Isolated cases of more serious reactions have been reported.
For now, at least, the new vaccines look like the best shot for putting the pandemic behind us.
Bill Decker is managing editor The Daily Review.