My grandmother didn’t want to get vaccinated with ‘strange new mRNA stuff’. I explained it with a sketch & cooking analogy. She’s now been vaccinated with the BionTech vaccine. I thought this might be useful for others who know vaccine skeptics, too.

Imagine you have a ginormous cook book in your living room. It contains all recipes you know. Unfortunately, it is too big to carry around and move into the kitchen. Thus, every time you want to cook something you need to write a copy of the recipe on a piece for paper and carry it into the kitchen where you have all the ingredients to make the dish. Now you can cook whatever recipe you decided to copy.. in our case milk soup (my grandmothers choice.. I don’t know why you would pick that out of all the delicious foods out there.. it’s like being able to make every protein there is but you waste your time on collagen).

Similarly, the nucleus in every one of our cells contains the DNA, that has all the recipes to make very protein our cells need. To make those proteins the cell makes a copy of the instruction for the protein it wants to make and sends it to the cytoplasm.. the place where proteins are made. This copy is called messenger RNA or mRNA. This mRNA is now used as manual or recipe to make a protein.. let’s say collagen.

Now envision you are standing in your kitchen and someone slides a recipe copy under the door. This recipe could be for a rice curry. You can now cook this dish using the same ingredients and equipment you had at home anyway but this recipe copy won’t be part of your living room cookbook. It will just be a copy that eventually tears, get wet or won’t be usable for other reasons, so you can only make the curry dish as long as you have that copy.