Now that the New Year is finally here, we are all planning and hoping towards a better experience. (God please o!) Sadly, despite all our optimism or lack of it, Corona Virus is still outside. But at least, the bright side is that scientists have teamed up and created a vaccine to fight the virus. This should be good news, right? Yet, many are not convinced about the vaccine because of all the conspiracy theories surrounding it.
I’m not a medical professional or a vaccine expert o, but at least as a user, I have been invested enough to follow the science and think through the facts presented. This is what I learned.
There are three types approved for use so far (as at the time of this writing). These are the Pfizer vaccine, the Moderna Vaccine and Oxford-AstraZeneca (in the UK only.
According to doctors and scientists, the Covid-19 vaccine will help our bodies build immunity against the corona virus. Many of them have also described the vaccine as a modern-day medical genius because of how it is designed to work.
It took me reading a number of medical journals and watching doctors describe how the vaccine works in videos for me to understand it. I’ll try to break it down.
First of all, do you guys remember what the virus looks like? That round ugly thing with green spikes around it.
Ehen
So, scientists studied the corona virus carefully and instead of using a weakened virus to create a vaccine (like they did in measles and smallpox vaccine) they took a part of it called the mRNA (messenger RNA) to create the corona virus vaccine. When the mRNA enters our bodies, the cells in our bodies will turn it into a protein called spike protein (remember corona virus has spike around it, abi?)
Ok, so once our bodies start producing this spike protein, your immune system is going to be like, excuse me what are you doing here? Your immune system will then fight off this spike protein (the corona virus has the spike protein) and then, your immune system will save how it fought off this spike protein (like how we save things on hard drives). So, if you get infected with the virus again, your immune system will be like “you again?” Then it will fight it off.
Doctors have said that it is when your body is fighting off the virus after you get the vaccine that makes some people to have headache, or fatigue.
Please, this is a very watered-down version of how the vaccine works. For more information, you can read this article, this article and watch this video and this video.
So now that you know how the vaccine works, when Nigeria acquires the vaccine will you take it? If not, why?
Let us know your answer in the comment section!