Fake News follows vaccine's arrival

A few days after the first batch of 40,000 doses of the vaccine against  Covid-19 arrived in Panama, Fake News about the biological were clogging social networks. Two of them are that the messenger RNA vaccine intervenes directly in the genetic material of the person who receives it or that it is made with cells from aborted fetuses.

Ivonne Torres Atencio, Director of Pharmacology at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Panama, provides scientific answers as to why each of these statements is false and says that the best antidote to misinformation is information based on evidence.

Her academic profile shows that she is a Graduate in Pharmacy, at  the University of Panama. and

Master in Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, from the University of Panama.

Ph.D. in Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​in Spain.

Member of the American Association for the Advance of Science (AAAS).

Messenger RNA vaccines intervene directly in a person’s genetic material.

False. They do not intervene. The genetic material of people is contained in what is known as the nucleus of cells, and is made up of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), which is a double strand. Messenger RNA is a single strand, with a specific number of elements that act in the cytoplasm of cells, in structures known as ribosomes, where the code of that message is read that allows it to produce a protein especially directed towards the virus, not the genes.

 These vaccines against Covid-19 are not very effective, since they developed very quickly.

False. The effectiveness of vaccines is related to their ability to prevent infection and serious events, and this does not depend on how quickly they are produced, but on how it trains our body to recognize and destroy the virus.

A nurse passed out just after getting vaccinated against Covid-19 in the United States.

It wasn’t because of the vaccine. The nurse, who goes by the name Tiffany Pontes Dover, is a nursing manager at CHI Memorial Hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States, and was among the first people to receive the vaccine from pharmaceutical duo Pfizer-BioNTech. Minutes after receiving it, she fainted, after recovering from the blackout, he explained that this commonly happens when he feels some kind of pain, and there was no major consequence.

 Covid-19 vaccines contain cells from aborted fetuses.

 It’s false. Messenger RNA vaccines do not use human cells, much less fetuses. The sequence required is a copy of the virus, in this case, SARS-CoV-2, whose genomic sequence was described in January 2020, and the part of the genome that synthesizes one of the proteins that bind to cells is taken. of people and is known as protein “S” or spicule. The process is completely synthetic, and has been the product of more than 30 years of research, and over time, it has been modernized and optimized.