The COVID-19 pandemic is the worse since the Spanish Influenza pandemic in 1918. There were not any vaccines available for this disease. In modern medicine, there are many vaccines for different diseases (e. g. measles, mumps, smallpox). For years vaccines use a dead virus of the disease to promote the body to develop antibodies which took years to develop. A new method was developed over the last two decades and uses mRNA. With the COVID-19 virus, this new technique was used to develop some of the current vaccines in less than a year.

In order to understand how this new mRNA works the student will write paper that compares and contrasts this new method (mRNA) to the older version of using a dead virus. This paper should be 3 to 4 pges in length, not including the title or reference pges, and must be detailed.