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The key to developing the COVID-19 vaccine is something called "messenger RNA," which is a substance the body uses to, in essence, tell DNA what to do.

Broadly speaking, the vaccine is a certain kind of mRNA which tells the body to act like it is infected with the COVID-19 virus even though it is not. It thus produces antibodies for the virus and if the virus shows up later the antibodies necessary to give it a mitochondrial smackdown are already present. The minor side effects some people report from the vaccination -- soreness, tiredness and such -- come from the immune system ramping up, not from a very mild case of COVID. Neither live weakened virus or dead virus are ever injected into people with the vaccine.

One of the cool potential fallouts from the research that led to this vaccine was the way that mRNA could then be used to create other vaccines for things that go wrong in the body we currently don't have a way to fight. This week the company BioNTech and researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany announced what might be one of the first of these new series of vaccines -- targeting multiple sclerosis. MS, in which the myelin sheaths of nerve cells deteriorate and progressively damage the nerves themselves, is a disease without a cure. Physical therapy and some drug treatments slow or lessen its effects, but people diagnosed with it generally live five to ten years less than people without it. There is no cure...yet.

Tests in mice have shown the new vaccine prevents the development of the disease if the genetic conditions that lead to it are present. It also has halted MS in its early stages and reversed some of the loss of motor muscle control that had already happened. Could another scourge of humanity be next on the list for mRNA to promise relief from?

I mean medically, of course. The solution to that other scourge of humanity is the ballot box, but the problem is the frequent need for booster doses when the promised solution turns out to be a half-baked idea from an unbaked brain.