> mRNA vaccines tell our cells to make a piece of the “spike protein” that is found on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Since only part of the protein is made, it does not harm the vaccine recipient, but it is antigenic and thus stimulates the immune system to make antibodies.
The CDC is obfuscating, or probably lying, depending on your definition. The spike produced from transfected cells is absolutely the whole thing, with two proline insertions, that's it. All the other sequence changes are just optimizations, they don't change the result.
> BNT162b2 is a lipid nanoparticle–formulated, nucleoside-modified RNA vaccine that encodes a prefusion stabilized, membrane-anchored SARS-CoV-2 full-length spike protein.
> The two mRNA vaccines in current widespread application (BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna) (Table 1) are technologically very similar. They contain codon-optimized sequences for efficient expression of the full-length S protein and use the authentic signal sequence for its biosynthesis44,45,46,47 (Fig. 1b).
> The unifying feature of all current adenovirus-vaccine vectors is the replacement of one of the early adenoviral genes (E1) for the full-length SARS-Cov-2 S gene in the adenoviral DNA (Fig. 4a) and the additional deletion of E3
From this post:
> To date, many approved SARS–CoV–2 vaccines, such as mRNA vaccines and adenovirus–COVID–19 vaccines, have been developed based on the full–length spike protein
If the mRNA and adenovirus vector vaccines weren't expressing the full-length spike, this research would be pointless in the context of the vaccines and the researchers wouldn't raise their findings as a possible efficacy and safety issue for the vaccines.
> mRNA vaccines tell our cells to make a piece of the “spike protein” that is found on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Since only part of the protein is made, it does not harm the vaccine recipient, but it is antigenic and thus stimulates the immune system to make antibodies.