By Steve Brawner, © 2020 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

When Trey Oguin has the chance to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, he’ll take it. Why is he so confident? Because he helped develop it.

The 36-year-old Wynne native and Ph.D. is a lab manager at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute in North Carolina. His lab studied the effects on mice of the preclinical vaccine developed by Pfizer.

The company says it’s 95% effective. Oguin said it worked “marvelously.”

“Of every therapy that we have tested here, it was far and away the best,” he told me.

The vaccine was developed in less than a year because the red tape was cut, money was no object, and because researchers built on knowledge gained in previous disease outbreaks.

Typical vaccines use a dead or weakened virus to teach the body to develop an immune response. This vaccine, and another developed by Moderna expected to be approved Dec. 17, are messenger-RNA vaccines.

RNA is the genetic information that cells use to manufacture proteins. The vaccine contains the code that produces the spiky external protein on the COVID-19 coronavirus. A few of your cells will produce that protein, which will cause your body to mount an immune response, from which it will learn.

This technique hasn’t been used in previous commercial vaccines, but it’s been studied in previous outbreaks of other coronaviruses, including the SARS epidemic of 2003 and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome virus, which appeared in 2012.

Oguin, who spoke for himself and not for Duke, said this technology is potentially safer than traditional vaccines “by quite a bit.” He said researchers are getting better at this.

If this vaccine causes the body to attack its own cells, then what would make it stop? What about people with autoimmune issues? Could it make us all zombies, like in the movie “I Am Legend”?

Oguin said the m-RNA is designed to enter the cells only through a fat bubble in the vaccine, so only a small number of cells at the injection site will be infected. The m-RNA is very specifically coded, so even people with autoimmune issues will recognize it as a virus and not their own bodies. Yes, when hundreds of million people are vaccinated, some will have an issue. But if there were going to be widespread side effects, they would have appeared by now in the testing. The m-RNA cannot replicate itself, so it will degrade in a couple of days. In other words, no zombies.

Many people will be skeptical for various reasons. Oguin said he believes he will be eligible in that first wave, “and I will take it.” So will his wife and son when they can.

“At the moment, it is essentially our only shot at returning to any sense of normalcy or whatever the new normal is going to be,” he said. “We don’t have medicines for this virus that work.”

He said vaccines in general are “our only shot to live the way we live.” Without them, “we would essentially never not be in a pandemic.” Infectious diseases kill many people around the world, but not so much in America until COVID. Here, we die of heart disease and cancer “because we survive all the other infectious disease insults that are thrown at us.”

Oguin said better science communicators are needed to explain how this vaccine works and why it was produced so quickly. He said this is a time when everyone will have to become an immunologist, but we should be listening to people who know what they are talking about.

He is a good science communicator. I wish I had more space. Let’s end with this quote.

“To be frank with you, nature is always trying to throw a pandemic at us. That is the essence of a virus. A virus that kills everybody is no good to itself because it runs out of hosts. A virus that can make 99% of people sick but only 1% die, that’s a perfect virus. …

“It’s done it’s job. It’s gone around the world. It’s not killing everybody. It’s killing a lot of people, but like on its scorecard, it’s won the game. Now it’s time for us to use our brains and our technology and each other to win the next battle.”

Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com. Follow him on Twitter at @stevebrawner.