Do you find nowadays that you ‘start a cold’ or go to bed feeling that ‘something is coming' on’ fully expecting a minor illness only to wake up with it gone? Can you remember the last time you went to bed with a bug? If not you are probably a member of Gen AZ.
‘Boomers’ plus Gens X, Y, Z and now A, are shorthand labels that conveniently divide the spread of population ages into chunks that facilitate ‘targeted messaging’. The letters replace terms such as ‘old’, ‘middle aged’, young, adolescent and child which enables ‘market targeting’ to sound a bit more academic than it is really.
This post is about a very different generation..Gen AZ. Gen AZ is anyone old enough to be vaccinated against Covid 19 in the early 2020s who received the adeno-virus vaccine delivery vector designed to produce the now famous ‘spike-protein’ which in turn primed the immune system in order to fight the then deadly Covid-19 virus
Sounds complicated? Yes indeed, it’s sufficiently esoteric to be utterly incomprehensible to non-biochemists. However incomprehensibility does not mean insignificant. Known colloquially as the ‘Oxford-vaccine’ and manufactured by Astra-Zenica only a relatively few people globally can lay claim to be GenAZ. Gen AZ has indeed received the ultimate in ‘targeted messaging’.
Back in the day, as they say, when Covid 19 was rampant and the race for mass, global vaccination was on, only three pharma companies understood the RNA recombinant technology and had the expertise to safely, in quantity, make an effective Covid 19 vaccine. These were Astra-Zenica, Pfizer and Moderna. Many companies around the globe could not do this. In Russia, China, India and Europe there were famous mega-pharma companies who simply could not master the technology.
Of the effective new vaccines there were two types. The so-called mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna and the Adeno-virus DNA vector made by Astra Zenica . Given the vast scale of the vaccination programmes both technologies proved to be remarkably safe as well as amazingly effective. However AZ vaccinations which dominated the initial program in the UK were soon superseded in subsequent immunization programs by either Pfzer or Moderna. For example in my own instance, as a boomer gen member in the UK, I got my first two early jabs from AZ. Subsequently I have had only Pfizer and Moderna. Friends in nearby Ireland, slightly late to the party, never got the AZ vaccination at all. AZ quietly disappeared following ‘bad reaction scares’ which in hindsight were not significant.
We, Gen AZ are different.
Some readers may remember trolling memes emanating from Russia at the beginning of the pandemic when the announcements that the vaccines were coming brought relief and hope to millions. Crudely put the vaccines, they said, would modify our DNA and turn us into apes or something. Vaccine fear was born ‘bigly’ as the USA president at the time may have said. Even though simian traits have been displayed by many of our leaders this prophecy has needless to say not come to pass. But the trolls were right in an important way.
After Astra Zenica bowed out leaving the field to Pfizer and Moderna they moved a development lab from their UK base to Ireland. Shortly after that, a paper from the Basedo lab at Trinity Dublin1, was published showing ‘non-target’ immunity from Gen AZ. In other words some generalized immunity to infection seemed to persist in those who had had AZ vaccine. Cue, end of trail.
Introducing attenuated and genetically modified ( ie it is engineered so that it can't reproduce) adenovirus DNA into a cell is wholly different to introducing mRNA. mRNA has a short shelf life before it is broken down and its components recycled. The fate of introduced DNA is far less certain.
Introduced DNA may be broken down in the cell, or it may not; it may persist as free epigenetic DNA, it may be incorporated into nuclear or mitochondrial DNA; it may be repaired; it may be transcribed fully or in part to make mRNA and thence proteins identical to to alike to the ‘spike protein’. So logically it is overwhelmingly likely that Gen AZ has modified DNA.
What does this mean? Firstly I think this is the first and last time the Adenovirus vector is used en-masse and secondly Gen AV is being followed very closely. What fate is in store for chimeric Gen AZers? We’ll see.
For a clear description of the methods of vaccine delivery into cells the article below from Nature is worth reading.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-021-00356-x
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