Today, I had a very long twitter conversation with an anti-vaxxer and I finally understand why they think your DNA gets 'changed' by the vaccines.

They've put 2 and 2 together, and made 5 (or should that be 5G?)

Short thread explaining where they've got it wrong

As anyone with school-level biology knows, when a virus attacks a cell it hijacks that cell to create copies of itself. That cell is then destroyed, and the copies of the virus go on to infect more cells, create more of itself and so on so forth

The actual process differs from vaccine to vaccine but essentially what happens with the vaccine is that a cleverly engineered, benign virus enters a cell and hijacks it to produce the spike protein of the coronavirus. The cell is then destroyed along with the virus

That spike protein is then picked up by your immune system, which works out how to fight it, so when the real coronavirus comes along your body nails it before it can get nasty

So, where are the anti-vaxxers getting confused?

When a cell is invaded by a virus - be it flu, a cold, the sars-cov-2, or the benign virus used in the vaccine - that cell is essentially reprogrammed to do something it wasn't originally built for. i.e. Replicate viruses (or spike protein).

They think this has changed your DNA

But it hasn't. A handful of cells being hijacked and then destroyed hasn't done anything to YOUR DNA. The cells your body create to replace the ones that have been destroyed are the same as they ever were, because YOUR DNA has not changed.

Their argument immediately falls down because if the vaccine hijacking a few cells to produce a spike protein is changing your DNA, then by that logic any virus that has ever infected you and hijacked a cell to replicate itself has also changed your DNA

It's just nonsense.

They also think that because the cell has been hijacked to produce spike protein, it must be sat there forever producing spike protein. That's not how it works. Just like when a virus hijacks a cell, the cell is ultimately destroyed.

Beware of twitter-based anti-vaxxers.