No, COVID-19 vaccines won’t alter your DNA and control you

Two companies have announced promising early results from their coronavirus vaccine trials, cheering some Americans as COVID-19 cases surge. 

Other Americans wary of vaccines have spread misinformation about what will happen to those who inoculate themselves against the disease. One recent Instagram post that has been widely shared claims that vaccines "will alter the DNA with a RNA Coding that will remove parts of your DNA and replace it with GENETIC CODING (TECHNOLOGY)."

According to the post, that will then "disable the ability of spirituality and cause people to HAVE to cooperate with the New World Order/One World Order."

This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) 

Moderna and Pfizer — the companies that announced promising preliminary vaccine results — are indeed developing what are known as mRNA vaccines. 

However, there is no evidence that the vaccines would remove any part of your genomic DNA and replace it with any other DNA. 

Converting RNA into DNA isn’t possible outside of a special enzyme contained on some viruses, and COVID-19 isn’t one of them, said Brent Stockwell, a professor at Columbia University who studies cell and molecular biology. 

"So there is no obvious mechanism by which a person’s DNA could be altered by an mRNA vaccine," he said. "The DNA of people who take mRNA vaccines is unaffected." 

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The m in mRNA stands for messenger, and the mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 involve injecting genetic material into cells that produce coronavirus proteins that then trigger an immune response, teaching the body how to fight off a real COVID-19 infection, said Mark Lynas, a fellow at Cornell Alliance with Science at Cornell University. They don’t affect DNA at all. 

This is the first time this type of vaccine has reached this point in the process of readying vaccines for general use, Lynas said, and because these vaccines involve injecting genetic material in human cell as opposed to traditional vaccines, which involve injecting an inactivated or weakened virus directly into the body, they could be easier to adjust as this coronavirus mutates.

As for whether these vaccines can affect someone’s spirituality, or control the behaviors of people who get them, "that’s in the realm of science fiction," Lynas said. 

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