Stand Up for Science Explores mRNA Vaccine Development in the Latest 'Traces Thursday' Installment

The COVID-19 vaccines that arrived in under a year were built on 40 years of research and patience

WASHINGTON, DC, UNITED STATES, November 9, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Stand Up for Science has released the eleventh installment of its weekly “Traces Thursday” series exploring the long roads of scientific research that lead to groundbreaking medical discoveries. This week’s story, “COVID-19 and Sars-CoV-2” traces the foundations of mRNA vaccines, the breakthrough that helped bring the COVID-19 pandemic under control, and the decades of research that made it possible.

When the novel coronavirus emerged in late 2019, vaccines typically took years to develop and test. Most vaccines work by triggering the body’s immune response by delivering either an active virus—one that cannot replicate inside the body—or an attenuated virus, which can replicate but doesn’t cause significant illness. mRNA, on the other hand, operates on short-lived molecules called messenger RNA, which carry instructions to the cell’s protein-making machinery. Instead of injecting a virus or lab-made protein, an mRNA vaccine delivers the instructions to let the body’s own cells build a harmless piece of the virus to train the immune system. All that’s needed to deliver these instructions is the virus’s genetic sequence.

In the late 1980s, one biochemist was working on this idea, but mRNA is fragile and breaks down easily, as researchers had discovered in 1961. The concept of an mRNA vaccine remained under development into the 2000s, when researchers discovered how to modify the mRNA to avoid an unwanted non-specific immune system response to it. Several companies were working on developing mRNA vaccine technology when the COVID-19 virus emerged. Chinese scientists shared the virus’s genetic sequence early in the pandemic, which was enough to begin designing vaccines immediately without first growing the virus in the lab.

“In less than one year, while the COVID-19 pandemic was actively wreaking havoc on public health, researchers developed and tested the vaccine, which showed strong protection and few significant side effects—an extraordinary achievement. The mRNA vaccine prevented tens of millions of deaths and hundreds of millions of hospitalizations worldwide. A major advantage of mRNA vaccines is that they can be reprogrammed relatively easily to target new variants, so as new variants of COVID-19 emerged, so too did the vaccines to target them,” said Dr. Jeremy Berg, author of the Traces series and former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at NIH and former Editor-in-Chief of Science magazine, now a member of the Board of Advisors with Stand Up for Science.

The Traces story also clears up a common misconception surrounding mRNA vaccines—it is not “gene therapy,” or DNA modification. The mRNA never becomes part of a person’s DNA, and the viral machinery needed to do so is absent from the vaccines.

Amid ongoing debate over federal science funding, “Traces Thursday” underscores the importance of sustained investment in basic and biomedical research. The medical advances explored throughout the series all depend on research that unfolds over periods of time far longer than a single grant cycle or presidential administration.

Stand Up for Science will publish the next installment of “Traces Thursday” on the Science Fight Club Substack on Thursday.

Berg is available for comment.

Char Bowling
Stand Up for Science
media@standupforscience.net