COVID-19 and mRNA vaccines

Okay, I wanted to take some time to explain how the mRNA vaccines work. I'm not a biologist, but perhaps that's a good thing, as I have studied enough of the science to understand how they work, and I believe I can explain it in very plain English.

First of all, it's worth dispelling some rumors that were common in the early days of the vaccines, and I still hear occasionally today. The vaccines do not have any affect on a person's DNA; your DNA is stored in the center of your body's cells, and there is nothing in the vaccines that actually enters into the cells.

The vaccines are essentially made of mRNA, which is something that naturally occurs in the human body. When your cells need to build a protein for some reason, your body produces mRNA to tell your cells to do so. The mRNA is essentially a chemical blueprint explaining how to build that particular protein.

What scientists have done in the case of COVID-19 is they have used the body's method of using mRNA to get the body to build a special protein that is called the "spike protein". While the technology of pretty much every previous vaccine was to inject the body with some weakened form of the virus you were supposed to be getting protection from, these new vaccines have mRNA blueprints of the "spike protein", which mimics the form of the actual virus. In both cases, your immune system reacts as though it is infected, and fights off the infection, but has the advantage of not actually fighting a live, dangerous virus.

Unlike what many people have either outright said or merely implied, this process *is* creating a form of natural immunity. Your immune system is learning what it's like to have an infection so that if it gets another infection (this time a "real" one) it has the tools to fight it in the form of antibodies. Contrary to what most people think, vaccines were never about stopping you from getting infected; they were about teaching your immune system to deal with an infection effectively.

Now yes, there is a downside in the case of COVID-19, and it's similar to the problem with the flu vaccine. No vaccine is 100% effective, but in the case of some diseases, the effectiveness is actually quite a ways off from 100%. The flu is a disease that frequently mutates, and will tend to come back different every flu season. So if you get a flu vaccine, it actually is a vaccine against two or three variants of the flu virus that scientists are expecting to be going around. Like the flu, the COVID virus has done a lot of mutating, and there are a lot of variants. The COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are only designed to help your immune system fight off the variants that existed at the time the vaccine was developed, so, yes, a vaccinated person can get COVID.

The good part of this, and a big part of the reason doctors are suggesting getting the vaccine even if you've been infected, is that while the vaccine won't stop you from getting infected, it still has been shown to help you fight the virus so that your infection is less severe than it likely would have been without the vaccine.

As for what happens in your body when you actually get the vaccine, the mRNA in the vaccine goes to your cells and without entering them, it delivers the message to build the spike protein. Having delivered the message, it naturally breaks up and dissolves like every mRNA in your body. When the spike protein is built, your immune system reacts, knowing immediately that this protein is not one that belongs. It figures out how to break it down and eat it, which is exactly what it will do to the virus if it encounters it later. So within about 48 hours or so, there is nothing left from the vaccine but the knowledge of how to fight the virus.

Homosexuality and the Bible

(This is a concise version of an argument I put together last year that I may flesh out further because my blog posts always need to be incredibly verbose.)

Christians commonly will cite 1Corinthians 6:9 and 1Timothy 1:10 as verses that call out homosexuality as a sin. However, both verses in the original Greek use the word "αρσενοκοιται", which is a word found nowhere else in 1st century Greek literature, because Paul made it up. The truth is, nobody really knows what it means, so people have had to guess. 

Modern English is a relatively young language, really dating back to the publication of the King James Bible and Shakespeare's works. There are lots of older languages that had the Bible before that, most notably, German. In German Bibles, "αρσενοκοιται" is translated into "Knabenschänder", a word which we do know the meaning of; it's "boy molester". 

Now of course some scholars will make the claim that Paul's "αρσενοκοιται" is a neologism that comes from the Greek version of Leviticus 20:13, which in the KJV reads "If a man also lie with mankind," or in Greek, the phrase ends with "ἄρσενος κοίτην". However, there's a problem with this translation as well. This command comes in the middle of a list of defined sexual sins, mostly reading "If a man lie with..." In the original Hebrew, each and every one of those instances of "man" is the same Hebrew word, "אִישׁ", so one might expect that verse 13 would read: if an "אִישׁ" lie with an "אִישׁ"; but it doesn't. It reads: if an "אִישׁ" lie with a "זָכָר". Why use a different word here, unless you mean a different concept? "זָכָר" is translated into a number of different English words, but one of them is "child". Indeed, looking at the German again, they translate it "Knaben" or "boy". 

Throughout the Bible there are a lot of sexual sins listed, and almost every one comes with an explanation of why it's a sin. Why is homosexuality a sin? I don't know, but if all the verses that are claimed to be about homosexuality are actually about paedophilia, is any explanation needed?