COVID-19: WHAT EVERY HEALTH CARE PROVIDER MUST KNOW

COVID-19 Vaccines - Part 1

Sindhya Rajeev, MD
Jennifer Newberry, MD

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

At the end of this lecture, the learner will be able to:

1. Know what the different vaccines are and how they work in the body
2. Understand how we know that these vaccines are safe
3. Describe how well the vaccines work

LECTURE OVERVIEW
I. Types of vaccines & how they work

II. Vaccine Safety

III. Vaccine Effectiveness

I. Types of COVID-19 Vaccines & How They Work:

A. There are two types of COVID-19 vaccines: mRNA vaccines and viral vector vaccines

B. The mRNA vaccine tells your body how to make a particular, unique piece of the virus.
In this case, the unique and harmless piece is SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein. When your
body receives these instructions, your cells translate the vaccine to make copies of this
spike protein. The immune system will recognize the spike protein as a stranger in your
body, and in response will prepare antibodies that in the future will detect and destroy
cells that have SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins.

II. Vaccine Safety:

A. COVID-19 vaccines are safe because it only teaches your body how to recognize the real
COVID-19 virus, and no safety steps were skipped in its development.
 B. Early COVID-19 vaccine trials included over 40,000 people and participants were
diverse in gender and included different races

C. It is not possible to get COVID-19 from the vaccine. The vaccine cannot change our
DNA. We have been researching and working on mRNA vaccine technology for over a
decade.

III. Vaccine Effectiveness:

A. WHO standards require that for any vaccine to be considered successful it must have at
least 50% efficacy.

B. All the approved vaccines were more than 70% effective.

C. Despite the new variants and slightly lower overall efficacy in trials, all the vaccines
significantly reduce the risk of serious complications such as hospitalization and
death.