Are mRNA Vaccines Safe and Effective? Hear it from the Source

A Conversation About Faith, Science and mRNA Vaccines

The debate around mRNA vaccines has flared up again in the public square.

Yet the basic facts remain unchanged: these shots were built on decades of careful research, validated by layers of testing, and have protected millions of lives. Few stories make that clearer than Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett-Helaire’s, whose work at the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center was pivotal in developing the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.

I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Corbett-Helaire, along with her former mentor and colleague at the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, at the BioLogos conference in April 2024. (We’ve since made the interview available online in both audio and video formats.)

I’ve interviewed many scientists over the last few years, but this felt different. Our topic was one of profound importance, and my guests had, quite literally, helped save millions of lives.

And yet, there we were, not in a research lab or federal hearing room, but in an almost churchy setting, singing worship songs and talking science and faith to a live audience filled with believers.

This was more than just a conversation. It was a moment of witness. In a culture where misinformation still casts long shadows over the incredible achievements of medical science—today, these shadows fall on mRNA vaccines—I believe this story bears revisiting.

There she came to realize that “for every fact in the textbook, someone had to discover it” in a lab like the one in which she was working. That spark set her on a path to a Ph.D. in immunology and then to the National Institutes of Health.

What makes her story even more compelling for Christian audiences is her deep faith. Kizzmekia grew up attending a small Baptist church near her grandmother’s house. Church was family. Faith was love. And that upbringing continues to shape her worldview and her work. 

She spoke openly about God’s timing in her scientific work and how she found spiritual renewal during the exhausting days of the pandemic. During the vaccine’s development, her faith gave her “a whole ’nother level of confidence,” because prayer was as much a part of the process as any lab notebook or microscope.

When the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 was posted online on Friday, January 10, her team was ready. Over that same weekend they designed a vaccine using a cutting-edge technology: messenger RNA.

For those still unsure about what an mRNA vaccine is, it helps to start with an understanding of  how vaccines work. Traditionally, vaccines have used a weakened or inactivated form of a virus to teach the immune system how to fight it—these are called ‘live attenuated’ or ‘inactivated’ vaccines. 

Another common approach is to use just a piece of the virus, often a protein from its surface, to trigger the immune response. This method avoids using the whole virus but requires growing large amounts of protein in factories, which takes lots of time.

mRNA vaccines take a different path. Instead of injecting the virus or its parts directly, they deliver a set of instructions—messenger RNA—that tells your body’s own cells how to make a harmless piece of the virus, such as the spike protein found on the surface of the coronavirus.

Your immune system sees that protein, learns to recognize it, and builds defenses (antibodies and T-cells) that are ready to destroy the real virus if it ever shows up. All our vaccinated bodies become the protein factory.

And no, this doesn’t alter your DNA or stay in your system—it’s more like a temporary blueprint that gets discarded after the job is done.

This technology had been in development for over twenty years at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moderna, the company Kizzmekia worked with, had primarily been researching its use for cancer therapies. But when the pandemic hit, it proved to be the fastest, safest way to produce COVID antibodies.

“Most people just needed to hear from the source,” she told us. “They wanted to ask the questions. They wanted someone to listen.”

Her presence and testimony has helped bridge the gap between science and faith for many people. Kizzmekia is not a nameless scientist in a lab coat—she is a fellow Christian, a neighbor, someone who can look people in the eye and say, “This vaccine is safe. And it’s here because we loved you enough to spend years preparing for this moment.”

Dr. Collins said, “Welcome and celebrate the fact that science is, after all, a gift, that we are talking about God’s world as well as God’s Word, and the scientists may have something really helpful to contribute to those conversations. I’ve talked to people at this meeting who are part of churches where science is just embraced and the scientists feel they can be themselves and they can completely talk about what they’re working on and it’s all good and it’s positive. But it’s not that way everywhere.”

Dr. Corbett-Helaire answered with, “The biggest thing I think the church can do for me and the type of work that I do is to aid in the communication. Open the doors to scientists when there is science or health communication that needs to get out. In the same way that you have your church announcements, include those things. Helping the members of your congregation prioritize their health in a way that is evidence-driven is really, really, really important.”

To that end, here are some quick evidence-driven things Christians should remember and communicate about mRNA vaccines:

1. They were not rushed from scratch. Researchers had explored mRNA delivery and coronavirus spikes for two decades before COVID-19. The 2020 timeline was possible because the groundwork was already laid.
2. They were studied thoroughly. Hundreds of animal experiments, multi-phase human trials, and ongoing global data add up to an unprecedented safety record.
3. The side effects are minor.  Side effects that have been systematically collected and analyzed are significantly less frequent than the manifestations of disease the vaccines prevent. For example, though about 1 in 10,000 younger males developed a heart inflammation called myocarditis, which was virtually always reversible.
   
4. Vaccines embody loving our neighbors. When everyone is vaccinated, it especially protects the vulnerable among us—infants, the elderly, the immune-compromised. Jesus said in Matthew 25 that when we care for such people, we are caring for Jesus himself.