An executive at the German pharmaceutical company Bayer referred to mRNA vaccines used against COVID-19 as an example of innovation in biotech at the World Health Summit 2021. But a website post takes the executive’s words out of context to falsely claim he said the vaccines are gene therapy.
More than 200 million people in the U.S. have been vaccinated against COVID-19 using messenger RNA vaccines, or mRNA, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has explained that the vaccines cannot alter a person’s DNA.
The mRNA vaccines work by instructing the recipient’s cells on how to make spike proteins, prompting the body to generate an immune response that protects against the virus that causes COVID-19. The messenger RNA — the “m” in mRNA stands for messenger — cannot enter the nucleus of a cell, where DNA is located, and it doesn’t have the enzymes that would let it communicate with or integrate into DNA, Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, explained in a video posted shortly after the vaccines became available.
“It is not possible for messenger RNA to alter DNA,” he said. “The chance of that happening is not small, it’s zero.”
Health departments in several other countries — including the U.K., Canada and Australia — have also explained that mRNA vaccines do not change a person’s DNA. We’ve also written about the false claim that the vaccines are “gene therapy” that can change DNA, ...
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