Scientists have repeatedly refuted the claim that Covid-19 vaccines can alter a person's genome, but social media posts suggest DNA contamination in the injections could lead to harmful effects such as cancer. This is false; there is no evidence of significant amounts of genetic material in the shots and even if there were, experts say they could not alter cells.
The coronavirus pandemic brought global renown to the mRNA technology that underpins vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, and on Monday earned a Nobel Prize for two scientists who have been key to its development. Katalin Kariko of Hungary and Drew Weissman of the United States won the Nobel Medicine Prize for their work on "nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19".