2425: mRNA Vaccine

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mRNA Vaccine

Title text: To ensure lasting immunity, doctors recommend destroying a second Death Star some time after the first.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a THERMAL EXHAUST PORT. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

This is another analogy to how mRNA vaccines tend to work; essentially creating an inactive analog of the virus to give the immune system knowledge of it so it's prepared to stave off the real thing

Here the constructors of the death star dying is only natural considering how often cell death occurs in the human body. Cells which do not die when they're meant to are known as cancer cells.

This is not the first such analogy to explain an aspect of vaccination

References to the Star Wars franchise are a recurring theme on xkcd.

Transcript

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(currently being edited by User:Zowayix; this notice is trying to avoid duplicate work. Posted at 10:40 PM UTC; feel free to ignore this message if more than half an hour old)

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Discussion

Well, RIP Cueball-on-Leia's-fake-Death-Star. bubblegum-talk|contribs 22:11, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Is the "Hairy" guy with a beard [1]? Or I guess it could just be a generic person. 172.69.34.148 23:13, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Bail Organa (Leias 'father')? This could be an alternate Ep4 in which various unseen prior events went smoother than unfolded in the sky-scrawled start. (i.e. What the vaccine did was somehow bypass the whole Rogue One job on Scarif, with a much earlier copy of data being obtained). Alderaan thus gets a heads-up? 172.69.55.104 01:12, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Dodonna was my first guess, before I scrolled down and saw 172.69.34.148's comment. In the films, Bail sent Leia to take the plans to the Rebellion (where Dodonna presented the battle plan to the pilots); he was didn't need them himself. --NotaBene (talk) 02:43, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Looks like Yavin (or similar generic base), on the ground, could be Alderaan (or many other planets) from space. Without the whole Tantive IV capture, neither place would actually be obvious initial targets for the Empire so it's a total guess where this lot of rebels are, perhaps where Leia always intended to go (and stay?) before first being captured. 141.101.105.98 03:22, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

I have a weird feeling when Princess Leia provided the Death Star plan to the beard guy, I think there's (jokingly) a misunderstanding - Princess Leia simply gives the beard guy the Death Star plan, without actually ordering to build one - But eventually they built a Death Star and triggered the earth's defense system, that's why the Death Star constructor team member is so confused.

Yeah I think it's a misunderstanding, not Leia ordering a target practice Death Star.

I definitely agree. Comic-wise, it makes no sense for a Leia who knew about the order to construct a Death Star to panic; the events of the metaphor only make sense if she wasn’t aware of it. Metaphorically, it’s not so bad either; the plans are the mRNA, and the delivery mechanism (Leia) isn’t specifically “trying” to produce viral Death Stars, it’s just passing along the information. 108.162.215.244 18:18, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

It works fine (Ponytail was about to give up, but Leia pressured her to continue learning a Death Star's ins and outs). bubblegum-talk|contribs 05:52, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

It's no misunderstanding. They are all just doing "their job", so to speak. Elektrizikekswerk (talk) 10:42, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Leia is the 'nanolipid' courier capsule in her first role, liasing with the cell (both senses!) and handing over to whoever (not actually sure the beard is Dodonna-enough, but meh...) represents the start of the cellular machinery that will be beneficially 'fooled' into creating the training matter (here, apparently, the full capsid, which strays as an analogy) by casually handing the instruction into the constructor bits along with all instructions normally handed outwards from the nucleus.

Then she is actually part of the cellular machinery (perhaps "more torpedos! more ships!" is normal nucleus-sourced building plans, or whatever is needed to increasingly bud initially naive antibodies/antigens)

By the end, probably we can say she is a Helper T-cell (Luke - or his voiced equivalent if he's been left unDroided at Uncle Lars's place because there was clearly no Escape Capsule event, etc - acted as Killer T-cell) reacting to the exhaust-port Antigen handwaviness. 172.69.54.92 12:37, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Personally I fall into the total misunderstanding camp, as there's no way for cells to remember the reason why they built something. But since there's dispute, I've edited it so that the article is silent on the issue of whether or not Leia knew it was a benign station. I guess it really depends on what Leia is in this analogy, but it seems like she's playing a few different roles.172.69.42.93 17:56, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Construction Crew B strikes me as a reference to the Golgafrincham "B" Ark from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, to justify the crew being treated as expendable. AnotherOnymous (talk) 14:47, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Anyone who thinks that immune cells can't think or directly communicate hasn't watched enough Star Trek. :-) BunsenH (talk) 06:05, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

It isn't scientifically correct to say the current vaccines are 100% effective against death (unless you are "rounding off" to 100, which is not how people will read it). To know that exact number, we would have to observe every single person now and in the future and note that no one ever dies after being vaccinated. This would need to include extremely thorough and precise testing for deaths that are most likely currently unrecognized as being due to COVID, since one missed case in a million changes your number. I think the current statistics would support "well over 99% effective in preventing death," perhaps over 99.9%. 172.69.42.134 23:04, 20 March 2021 (UTC)