https://healthfeedback.org/claimrev...cial-media-rna-vaccines-do-not-alter-our-dna/
FULL CLAIM: “Bill Gates explains that the COVID vaccine will use experimental technology and permanently alter your DNA”; “RNA vaccines would carry the danger of triggering autoimmune reactions, meaning the body basically goes to war against itself”
SUMMARY
A claim that RNA vaccine technology, which is being used to develop a COVID-19 vaccine candidate, will “permanently alter your DNA” was published in an article by Waking Times in May 2020, forming the basis for many viral posts on social media. The claim has received more than 200,000 views at the time of this review’s publication. Although the original article has since been corrected following PolitiFact’s
fact-check, the posts which reshared the article’s content have not been corrected and continue to propagate this claim (see example
here).
Scientists who examined the claim’s scientific credibility told Health Feedback that the claim is inaccurate and
results from a fundamental misunderstanding of how RNA vaccines work and how nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) interact with the human body.
Robert Carnahan, associate professor at Vanderbilt University and associate director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center, explained that while “RNA vaccines represent a new innovation, they are based on longstanding foundational scientific principles.” RNA serves as the recipe or blueprint that instructs cells to make a particular protein. After it has served its purpose, “cells in the body have innate mechanisms of degrading this RNA and not allowing it to persist,” he said. Therefore, any RNA injected from a vaccine can't persist long enough to cause autoimmune disorders, which are chronic diseases. A 2017 study published by
Science Advances estimated that RNA used as protein blueprints (messenger RNA or mRNA) generally lasted for a mere two minutes in yeast cells[1]. Another study in mice found that mRNA decayed after about three days post-injection[2].
Carnahan also pointed out that RNA is chemically different from DNA, making it virtually impossible for RNA to directly integrate into DNA to change a person’s genome.
While concerns over the safety profile of the potential vaccines are natural, given the accelerated vaccine development timeline imposed by the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sanjay Mishra, a staff scientist and project coordinator at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, explained that RNA vaccines are considered to be extremely safe based on past research[3,4]. “Safety studies have concluded that there is little concern for integration of DNA into genomes. mRNA vaccines are even safer and advantageous because RNA itself cannot integrate into genomic DNA without the presence of a retrovirus element, such as reverse transcriptase and integrase,” he said.
In fact, we can recognize that the fear of foreign DNA or RNA integrating into and changing our own genome is unfounded, when we remember that we come into daily contact with a large amount of DNA and RNA in the environment that is not our own. For example, we ingest DNA and RNA through our food. Our body hosts many microorganisms, like bacteria and fungi, which colonize different tissues and organs, such as our skin and digestive tract. Furthermore, in people who have received blood transfusions or organ transplants, scientists have not observed the DNA of the donor integrating into the recipient’s DNA and altering it.