White House correspondent Emerald Robinson for the conservative news network Newsmax recently tweeted that Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine contains luciferase “so you can be monitored” and wrote: “Read the latest book of the New Testament to see how this ends. . . ” This claim, which was later deleted , was repeating the claims that “Moderna vaccine contains ‘Luciferin’ in 66.6 solution. You cannot make it up” spread on Facebook a while ago.
Useful tools for early prototyping of drugs and vaccines when luciferase and luciferin are used together. However, both of these are not found in the COVID vaccines that are safely administered to more than half of the world’s population.
Luciferase is an enzyme that causes the organic compound luciferin to emit light, and this light release is the reason for the names luciferase and luciferin. Derived from these names, the Latin word lucifer means light-bearer. Lucifer can also mean “morning star” and, incidentally, is the fallen archangel’s pre-demon name in the Christian tradition.
The light-release reaction of luciferase and luciferin is what makes fireflies glow. Luciferases are also found naturally in many other glowing organisms, including some jellyfish species, fungi, bacteria, and various marine organisms.
While these glowing organisms have been admired and studied since antiquity, Raphaël Dubois in the late 19th century is credited with being the first to describe (and name) luciferase and luciferin and determine their relative roles in the light-emitting reaction.
Pure luciferase was first successfully collected from fireflies in the 1940s. Osamu Shimomura was the first to successfully isolate pure lucifer from a small sea crustacean called Cyrpina, or “marine fireflies,” as he defines it, in 1955. Shimomura would later win the 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of another light-emitting marker, called the green fluorescent protein, naturally found in certain jellyfish species.
It took decades to identify the genetic blueprints for making luciferase. The identification of genes containing instructions for making luciferases, and a growing repertoire of light-emitting markers, sparked many discoveries that determined how different biological processes work and where they occur, such as illuminating a particular location where a particular gene is turned on.
All current COVID-19 vaccines use spike protein found outside of the coronavirus to train the recipient’s immune system to recognize and destroy anything that looks the same. Moderna and Pfizer vaccines do this by giving messenger RNA (mRNA) instructions to produce spike protein, and human cells are used as spike protein factories. Thus, if a person becomes infected with the real coronavirus in the future, the immune system is ready to deal with it.
However, mRNA is not injected directly into the body. It needs to be packaged in a lipid coating.
Early tests of how effective lipid (Moderna, Pfizer) delivery systems are at getting into cells were performed by adding instructions to make luciferase as part of the mRNA payload. If the vaccine delivery systems were successful in transmitting the luciferase instructions, a glowing reaction would occur when luciferin was added.
Such tests have proven very useful in early animal studies to find out how effective these delivery systems are and where they are going. But they are only used to optimize vaccine formulations and are never used in humans.
In 2020, groups at the University of Texas, the University of South Florida, and elsewhere used luciferase and luciferin to create rapid laboratory-based methods for diagnosing COVID, screening and testing the efficacy of antibodies from different COVID patients, as well as antiviral drugs and vaccines.
For these tests, instructions for making luciferase have been added to viruses that resemble coronavirus. If luciferin was then added and the luciferase-containing virus had successfully infected the cells, the activity could be seen by light scattering from the infected cells.
If blood is drawn from a patient with antibodies to COVID through vaccination or infection, these antibodies in the blood prevent luciferase-containing viruses from infecting cells and light should not be produced. Such lab-based tests were among some of the methods used in early assessments of how effective the Moderna COVID vaccine is in mice, the Pfizer vaccine in humans, and the AstraZeneca vaccine in hamsters. Similarly, the antiviral effects of drugs such as remdesivir were also evaluated with this method. None of these tests involved injecting humans with luciferase or luciferin.
The content of every COVID vaccine is publicly available. And in short, none of the Moderna, Pfizer, Janssen and AstraZeneca COVID vaccines contain luciferase or luciferin!
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