Moderna’s Secret Adjuvant
Adjuvants are what makes vaccines work inside the body, or signal the immune system. Typically adjuvants are the little bomb that explodes and alerts your body that a pathogenic invader has entered. It’s necessary when using a dead or inactivated bacteria or virus, which isn’t capable of infecting our cells.
Traditional adjuvants include aluminum salts, such as aluminum hydroxide, aluminum phosphate, and aluminum potassium sulfate.
Despite being used since the 1920s, they’ve never done proper safety studies using the double blind method. Aluminum adjuvants were actually grandfathered in as generally recognized as safe (GRAS) in the 1970s. Yep, injections of aluminum into newborns was ‘grandfathered in as GRAS’.
There are some other adjuvants too:
- Gardasil (HPV) has amorphous aluminum hydroxyphosphate sulfate (AAHS)
- Cervarix (HPV) has Monophosphoryl lipid A (MPL) + aluminum salt
- Fluad (influenza vaccine) has oil in water emulsion composed of squalene (yikes!)
- Shingrix (Shingles) has Monophosphoryl lipid A (MPL) and QS-21, a natural compound extracted from the Chilean soapbark tree, combined in a liposomal formulation
- Heplisav-B (hep b) uses a Cytosine phosphoguanine (CpG), a synthetic form of DNA that mimics bacterial and viral genetic material.
What Makes the mRNA Vaccines Work?
Both Moderna and Pfizer’s COVID-19 mRNA vaccines don’t have an “adjuvant.” So how do they work?
A friend of mine spoke to someone who knows more about this, and asked him what the “immunostimulatory” signal was… because since their vaccine does not contain any “adjuvants” per se, what causes the immune system to respond? Obviously the spike protein is not going to initiate the response.
So apparently, if you read the patents for Moderna (like the one here), the mRNA that Moderna encodes for is not just the spike protein.
The Moderna mRNA encodes for two things: the COVID spike protein AND bacterial flagellin.
If you recall, aluminum adjuvants cause DAMP (Damage Associated Molecular Patterns) by causing damage to cells.
The other immunostimulatory signal that can instantiate an immune response is PAMP (Pathogen Associated Molecular Pattern). PAMPs are conserved patterns that the immune system inherently knows is dangerous.
So, at least with Moderna’s vaccine, you know that cells are not just producing COVID spike proteins, but they’re also producing PAMPs as well, in the form of bacterial flagellin. which is a potent PAMP.
I don’t have any information on Pfizer’s mRNA, so I’m not entirely sure what the immunostimulatory signal is… but hopefully that will give you some food for thought.
What the Heck Is Flagellin?
Flagellin is a protein found in bacteria such as Salmonella, which use it in their tails, or flagella, to propel themselves around. Sometimes it’s made by detaching the tails from bacteria – though more recently it’s become common to grow it in genetically modified cells.
Flagellin isn’t licensed for use in human vaccines, but if the vaccine merely contains the instructions, and you technically are making the flagellin, I guess they can get around that detail!
