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From the newsroom of the Washington Post

Washington Post is Colby

Hi Stephanie McCreement from the Washington Post

This is Post Reports. I'm Martine Powers

It's Tuesday July 7th

Today a new hope for a COVID vaccine where small business loans actually went and the unique challenges facing historically black colleges

Vaccines can work in all different ways

The goal of a vaccine is to basically expose your immune system to something that looks like the virus so that it learns to recognize it if in fact you're exposed to the real virus

But that can happen in so many different ways and what's happened with COVID-19 is that this has

brought out every single technology that people been working on to try and defeat it

And the one that's kind of at the front of the race right now is a class of vaccines called RNA vaccines

I'm Carolyn Johnson and I'm a science reporter at the post

So to start out with what actually is RNA because in my head it's like

Something that is similar to DNA, but it's not exactly DNA. What part of your body is that?

Yeah, so in cells there is DNA, which is what people are kind of familiar with like the blueprint of a human being all your genes and everything like that

But RNA performs this really crucial function of

Turning the DNA into proteins. So it kind of like

Turns that blueprint into something useful

So in a normal cell, you know, that's what RNA does, but what

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