mRNA in real time

Everyone should be disturbed by the destruction of medical research infrastructure at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Firings and funding interruptions at the NIH are reducing research on hundreds, if not thousands of medical issues such as cancer treatment. This is an attack on the health of American citizens.

When it comes to mRNA vaccine efficacy, our family has real time experience.

My husband Ed has an immune deficiency condition for which he has been studied at the NIH. His immune deficiency is that his body does not make immunoglobulins (IGGs), which our bodies produce to fight infectious disease — viral, bacterial, etc. Every week he self-administers subcutaneous injections of IGGs. These are from plasma collected from the public (whether you donated or sold your plasma — thank you everybody!) IGGs stay in a recipient’s system for several weeks, each dose overlapping with the previous ones. Because Ed “cloud sources” IGG from people exposed to a wide range of disease, and thus has a wide range of IGG in his system, most days he has a better immune system than you or I do. Until a novel virus shows up.

Enter COVID.

We muddled along with everyone else, while the scientists developed vaccines to address the virus. There were many years of lab work already invested in the mRNA vaccines, so the speed at which they appeared…