Saudi Arabia opens registration for mRNA Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine - The National News

Who are The National News?
The National News (formerly thenational.ae) is a prominent English-language daily newspaper based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Relaunched as a multi-platform digital and print organization, it provides comprehensive coverage of local, regional, and international news, spanning politics, business, culture, and lifestyle.

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What is Saudi Arabia?
Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is a country in Western Asia constituting the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula. With a land area of approximately 2,150,000 km2 (830,000 sq mi), Saudi Arabia is geographically the largest sovereign state in the Middle East, the 2nd largest in the Arab world (after Algeria), the 5th largest in Asia, and the 12th largest in the world. Saudi Arabia is bordered by Jordan and Iraq to the north, Kuwait to the northeast, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates to the east, Oman to the southeast and Yemen to the south; most of its terrain consists of arid desert, lowland and mountains. As of October 2018, the Saudi economy was the largest in the Middle East and the 18th largest in the world. Saudi Arabia also enjoys one of the world's youngest populations; 50% of its 33.4 million people are under 25 years old.

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What is Coronavirus?
Coronaviruses are a group of viruses that cause diseases in mammals and birds. In humans, coronaviruses cause respiratory tract infections that are typically mild, such as the common cold, though rarer forms such as SARS, MERS, and COVID-19 can be lethal. Symptoms vary in other species: in chickens, they cause an upper respiratory tract disease, while in cows and pigs they cause diarrhea. There are yet to be vaccines or antiviral drugs to prevent or treat human coronavirus infections.

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What is Vaccine?
A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious disease. A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins, or one of its surface proteins. The agent stimulates the body's immune system to recognize the agent as a threat, destroy it, and to further recognize and destroy any of the microorganisms associated with that agent that it may encounter in the future. The administration of vaccines is called vaccination. Vaccination is the most effective method of preventing infectious diseases; widespread immunity due to vaccination is largely responsible for the worldwide eradication of smallpox and the restriction of diseases such as polio, measles, and tetanus from much of the world.

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What is mRNA?
mRNA or messenger RNA, in molecular biology is a single-stranded molecule of RNA that corresponds to the genetic sequence of a gene, and is read by a ribosome in the process of synthesizing a protein. During transcription, RNA polymerase makes a copy of a gene from the DNA to mRNA as needed. This process is slightly different in eukaryotes and prokaryotes, including that prokaryotic RNA polymerase associates with DNA-processing enzymes during transcription so that processing can proceed during transcription. As in DNA, genetic information in mRNA is contained in the sequence of nucleotides, which are arranged into codons consisting of three base pairs each. Each codon codes for a specific amino acid, except the stop codons, which terminate protein synthesis. The translation of codons into amino acids requires two other types of RNA: transfer RNA, which recognizes the codon and provides the corresponding amino acid, and ribosomal RNA (rRNA), the central component of the ribosome's protein-manufacturing machinery.

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