The first vaccines against COVID-19 began to be injected into people’s arms in December of 2020, less than a year after the pandemic began. It’s a staggering, unprecedented achievement that will undoubtedly save millions of lives. Today we have not one, but three, effective vaccines against COVID-19.
Understandably, questions about what’s in the vaccines, what side effects exist, and more abound. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is your best resource for information about the vaccines, here’s a quick primer on the various options and how they work.
What’s in the COVID-19 vaccine?
Traditional vaccines give our bodies an actual virus (or a piece of it), often in a weakened or dead form. This lets our bodies learn to recognize this particular threat and produce specialized defenses against it. But mRNA vaccines, like those made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna are different. Instead of giving our bodies a piece of a virus, mRNA vaccines teach us to make it ourselves.
