Many people first learned about mRNA vaccines during the coronavirus pandemic, when the companies Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna released their COVID-19 vaccines. The Pfizer-BioNTech shot was the ...

August is National Vaccine Immunization Awareness Month. Here's how vaccines work to boost protection and immunity.

Vaccines work by imitating an infection to teach the body how to recognize and defend itself from disease without experiencing the dangers of an actual infection, according to the CDC.

Messenger RNA vaccines, or mRNA, differ from traditional ones. Instead of growing a virus and weakening it to allow the body to engage its natural defenses, mRNA vaccines use pieces of genetic code to ...

How do mRNA vaccines work? mRNA vaccines teach the immune system to target specific proteins, often proteins found on a pathogen, like a virus. To do this, they use instructions carried in a ...

Belgian scientists have uncovered new details about how the immune system responds to vaccines. Dendritic cells, which are ...

The quest for a vaccine against HIV has been going on for about 40 years — almost as long as the virus that causes AIDS has ...

How do we know these vaccines are safe, especially in the long term? Hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. have gotten mRNA vaccines, and billions of doses have been administered worldwide.

The first mRNA vaccine for foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) was recently created in less than 18 months—but how do mRNA animal ...

The total ethylmercury in childhood vaccines that infants could have been exposed to fell below the FDA’s recommended safety limits for methylmercury: 0.4 microgram per kilogram of body weight ...

By Carlyn Zwarenstein Published July 12, 2025 12:40PM (EDT) (Grace Cary/Getty Images) Facebook X Reddit Email Vaccines work, actually. But that’s not all.

Furthermore, "after the body produces an immune response, it gets rid of all the vaccine ingredients just as it would get rid of any information that cells no longer need," she said.