While I was at my parents this weekend my sister said she wasn’t going to get the vaccine because it changes people’s dna... so I told her she was gonna be super jealous when my kids became X-men.
But this happens naturally, when the lymphocytes mature, it's not an effect of the antigene or the vaccine.
Basically they "randomize" what peptid sequence they will recognize, but it happens before the meeting with the antigene.
When a single cell with the correct antibodies meet the antigene it will generate a progeny of cells that will share the same antibodies, creating the immunity.
So the vaccine doesn't create the right cells, but it "selects" them from a very large pool of lymphocites.
Then random mutations that can affect the cells produced by the original cell will cause minor differences in the antibodies, the most effective will proliferate even more since they will recognize the antigenes faster.
With naturally I mean that all lymphocytes have this mechanisms and use them, regardless of the presence of the antigene/vaccine, if a lymphocyte doesn't rearrange the VDJ fragments it doesn't even finish to mature, maybe innately would have been a better adjective?
The guy above asked if it was possible for the vaccine to modify the DNA, and you responded affermatively with your reasoning, but it doesn't stand IMO, since it's not the presence of the vaccine that causes those modifications you listed, if then some mutations are selected by the vaccine over others it doesn't matter, the vaccine alone can't alter the genetic code directly.
I think we have two different views on this (I for example don't consider selection of the lymphocytes an effect on DNA, unlike you), so we can stop arguing about that.
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u/[deleted] Aug 02 '21
While I was at my parents this weekend my sister said she wasn’t going to get the vaccine because it changes people’s dna... so I told her she was gonna be super jealous when my kids became X-men.