Sucrose: A sugar to help keep the vaccine solution stabilized.Sodium acetate: A salt for maintaining pH balance.Acetic acid: If the tromethamines are the base, then acetic acid is - you guessed it - the acid that also helps maintain the vaccine’s pH balance.Tromethamine hydrochloride needs to be mixed with tromethamine in order for the combination to reach the right pH of between 7 and 9. Tromethamine hydrochloride: See above.Tromethamine: Similar to the salts in the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, tromethamine is a type of alkaline buffer that, along with tromethamine hydrochloride, helps maintain the pH balance of the vaccine dose.Lipids (SM-102, polyethylene glycol 2000 dimyristoyl glycerol, cholesterol, and 1,2-distearoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine ): Moderna’s lipid nanoparticles effectively work in the same fashion as Pfizer-BioNTech’s, however Moderna has opted for a different mix of synthetic lipids.Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA): Moderna’s synthetic mRNA have the same therapeutic function as Pfizer-BioNTech’s, with both vaccines targeting coronavirus spike proteins in order to train the body to produce an immune response.Sucrose: A type of sugar, sucrose is added to vaccines in order to keep them stable.Dibasic sodium phosphate dihydrate: Another type of salt.Monobasic potassium phosphate: Another type of salt.Potassium chloride: A type of salt, potassium chloride is used to maintain the pH balance of the vaccine.Lipids ((4-hydroxybutyl)azanediyl)bis(hexane-6,1-diyl)bis(2-hexyldecanoate), 2 -N,N-ditetradecylacetamide, 1,2-Distearoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine, and cholesterol),: According to the journal Nature, lipids, a class of fatty acids which when combined together with other lipids to form lipid nanoparticles (thus all the long hard-to-pronounce chemical-y sounding names), act like little delivery vehicles into your body for nucleic acids like mRNA, helping to make the vaccine more effective.And the role of that mRNA is to provide instructions, i.e., the recipe, for our cells to produce copies of a specific coronavirus protein that triggers our immune system to train itself to fight back if the real virus ever shows up - all while the mRNA itself remains perfectly harmless. In the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, viral mRNA, as opposed to live virus or inactivated virus, is its main active ingredient. Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA): If DNA is the recipe book cells within all living organisms use to reproduce themselves, then mRNA is like a copy of the recipe used to actually start cooking.Pfizer-BioNTech COVID Vaccine Ingredients Still, as we all wait for our turn to get our two shots according to our different state and local governments’ phased approach, it’s perfectly natural to wonder, “What are the COVID vaccine ingredients?”, and “Are they safe to take?” Well, we took a look at both Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s publicly available ingredients list in order to find out what everything is in the order they’re listed, and here’s what we found. Since news in December that government officials and developers had successfully shepherded the two vaccines through FDA authorization, it’s been all-hands-on-deck around the country (including right here at Forward) to get both vaccines off their respective production lines and into people’s arms.

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