I am Wesley Farr. I’m a lecturer in the Department of Public Health at the University of West Florida. I have over forty years of experience in medicine, tropical medicine and infectious diseases. It became very clear during all my work in infectious diseases, primary care medicine, tropical medicine, that the most effective way to prevent infections is to get vaccines against that. The current vaccines against COVID-19 are of two types. One type is a viral vector vaccine, and that’s what is used for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. That technology has been around since the 1970s, and it’s used for not only infections, but also gene therapy and other processes. The mRNA vaccines — and that’s Pfizer and Moderna vaccines — are utilizing new technology, and so COVID-19 is the first infection for which we’ve had an mRNA vaccine. Both types of vaccines deliver the genetic material for the spike protein of COVID-19. Our body immune system starts producing the spike protein, then our immune system recognizes the spike protein as a foreign substance and starts producing antibodies to it. And all three of the vaccines have shown to be very effective in preventing COVID-19 infections and also preventing severe illness in patients who receive the vaccine. The technology for the mRNA vaccine has been under development for several years, and so much progress has been made that when COVID-19 appeared, everything was ready to produce a good vaccine using the mRNA vaccine. When I think about mRNA and its production as a vaccine, I would suspect that it would be safer than other types of vaccine production, because we are not injecting a foreign protein into the body, and very few other substances are in that vaccine preparation. Once the mRNA gets into the body, our cells will make the spike protein from it. At that point, the mRNA disintegrates, and so it’s no longer present in the body. The vaccine trials show it was not only extremely effective — 95% in preventing infection and severe disease — but also very safe. There has been some concern about a myocarditis in young adults who receive the mRNA vaccines, but it’s a very mild illness that resolves on its own and hasn’t caused significant problems. I think young adults who chose not to get the vaccine based a lot of their decision on the fact that they were at much lower risk of severe disease, so their perceived risk and perceived severity was much lower than the older adults. But with the surge in infections due to Delta variant, I think they have enough evidence now to realize that they are at significant risk for infection with COVID, and they also run the risk of severe infection, too, even though they have a lower risk than the older adults. So by getting the vaccine, you’re not only protecting yourself, you’re protecting other people who may be more at risk for severe infections, and also younger children, younger than twelve, for whom the vaccine has not been approved. So now is the time to take the stand, do your part and get the vaccine, so you can say that #ArgosCrushCOVID.