COMMENT | Of nucleic acids and pandemics

COMMENT | In the depths of the last movement control order, one particularly bright piece of reading was the public document released by the Jawatankuasa Khas Jaminan Akses Bekalan Vaksin COVID-19 (JKJAV).

It helpfully communicated the government’s vaccination strategy, including participation in the Covax plan, and listed out the battery of vaccines available to the populace:

• Attenuated (nyahaktif) vaccines: Produced by Sinovac
• Viral vector vaccines: Produced by Sputnik V, AstraZeneca and CanSinoBio
• mRNA vaccine: Produced by Pfizer

The Pfizer vaccine appears to be the most eagerly anticipated and its efficacy has been backed by solid research. It uses a new strategy: a messenger RNA (mRNA) sequence encoding the spike protein of Covid-19.

This is the first time that a working mRNA vaccine has been approved for clinical use, after many years of development and microscopic technical challenges.

The JKJAV programme attempts to explain how it works: 'Jujukan mRNA yang dimasukkan ke dalam sel individu bagi menghasilkan protein virus yang spesifik [...]' (p. 12). It’s a simple statement but once you dive into the technical aspects, a fascinating picture of the life sciences emerges.

To some degree, we are most familiar with deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a biochemical first discovered in 1869, although its actual role in genetics was long a mystery. In the nineteenth century, a ...