What you need to know about COVID-19 vaccines
COVID-19 vaccination remains a popular subject, appearing to be at the top of everyone’s mind.
Questions regarding the safety of the produced vaccines are quickly being answered by medical professionals.
Frequently asked questions about the vaccine can be read here:
If COVID-19 vaccines contain the live virus that cause COVID-19 can it make you sick with COVID-19?
No, in the United States there is no vaccine currently developed that contains the live virus that causes COVID-19. This means that you can't get sick from it. Live vaccines “are so similar to the natural infection that they help prevent, they create a strong and long-lasting immune response. Just 1 or 2 doses of most live vaccines can give you a lifetime of protection against a germ and the disease it causes,” according to Vaccines.gov.
There is more than one type of vaccine in development.
Currently, there are two vaccines that are authorized and recommend to use and prevent COVID-19: Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.
Upon entering your body, the vaccines teach your immune system how to recognize and fight the virus that causes COVID-19, and sometimes this process might cause a fever, but according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) these symptoms are normal.
If you already had COVID-19 and recover, should you still get the vaccination?
Yes, re-infection with COVID-19 is possible due to severe health risks associated with the virus. There is not enough information currently available to say if or for how long people are protected from getting COVID-19 after they have had it, this is called natural immunity. Early evidence suggests natural immunity from COVID-19 may not last very long.
Some might say that researchers rushed the development of the COVID-19 vaccine, so it’s not as effective and safe. This information is false.
The process of inventing the COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna was created with a method that has been in development for years, so the companies could start the vaccine development early in the pandemic.
In the process of testing the vaccine, developers did not skip any testing step but conducted some of the steps on an overlapping schedule to gather data faster.
Some types of COVID-19 vaccines were created using messenger RNA (mRNA), which allows a faster approach than the traditional way that vaccines are made.
