I recently touched on our amazingly army-like immune system. But we were left with some questions. What if the immune system has never ‘seen’ an invader before? Can it fight it off in time? The answer is…maybe.
Think about the length of time it takes you to get over a cold. That’s because your specific immune system (that part that recognizes enemies instead of shooting indiscriminately) takes seven to ten days to get going. Some germs can kill you in less time than that, so answering the above question: maybe not. That’s when the army needs to be trained in advance.
Advance Training
Enter vaccines. Vaccines are like showing the army a photograph of the enemy. Or like allowing an attack dog to sniff a criminal’s article of clothing. Or like letting the army fight and kill the criminal’s weaker sibling. Or like allowing the army to handle the criminal’s deceased body or body part. Yuck! I’m stopping before the analogy gets even weirder. Anyway, you get the idea.
There are many types of vaccines. Some are made of killed, weakened, or related invaders (measles, mumps, smallpox). Some are made of an inactivated toxin or toxoid (tetanus). Some are pieces of virus (Hepatitis B or HPV). And some are just instructions for making a piece of virus (COVID).
The goal of all vaccines is to educate the immune system so that when it encounters the real enemy, it is primed and ready for the kill.
Will the Training Kill You?
Note that some vaccines expose you to something capable of causing an infection. Seem like a bad plan? The good news is that the germ in the vaccine is either attenuated (weakened, e.g., the previous polio shot) or a nonlethal relative of the disease-causing germ (e.g., cowpox instead of smallpox). Since the virus is weakened or not specific to people, you won’t succumb to the illness if your immune system is healthy. The benefit of this kind of vaccine is that the immunity tends to last for life. You only need to be vaccinated against measles, mumps, and smallpox once.
The other vaccine types cannot and do not cause infection. They can’t grow inside you any more than your arm can play the piano without being attached to your body, your leg walk unless it’s attached to your hip, or a dead man can, well, do anything. This type of vaccine is safe for those with compromised immune systems. The drawback is that the immunity is not as robust. Our immune system isn’t stupid—it knows the difference between a living and a partial or dead invader!
mRNA Vaccines
Let’s consider a specific example: the mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 that cause so much concern. mRNA is what cells use to pass on instructions for making things—usually, it is the blueprint for creating a specific machine inside a cell. Since our cells don’t want to make the same machine continuously (it would be a waste of energy and would soon clog up the works), blueprints are made of “thin paper.” That is, the cell destroys them very quickly.
The mRNA in a COVID-19 vaccine is a blueprint for the piece of the COVID-19 virus that acts as a key (see my prior article). Just like all other mRNAs, it’s destroyed very soon after use. So, the cell makes a few “keys” and then stops because it no longer has the blueprint. The immune system “sees” the COVID-19 keys on the cell’s surface, assumes the cell is infected, goes crazy making antibodies and the like, and kills the cell.
Yeah, but Boosters
“Hang on,” I hear you saying, “The news reports said that COVID changed so much that it can evade the original vaccine-generated immunity. That’s why we need a yearly booster.” Think about it. If the “key” shape had changed so much that the immune system could no longer recognize it, would a booster with the same vaccine work? Nope. It’s never as simple as they tell you—because it’s very hard to explain without background understanding.
Boosters encourage the immune system to generate more antibodies—which can mop up the virus before it infects. But it’s expensive for the immune system army to continually make antibodies, so it stops after a matter of weeks. After three months, the antibodies, which are only meant for active ongoing battles, are gone. And that’s where the memory cells come into play. (See my previous article.)
Some Viruses are Slow; Some are Fast
Usually, that’s enough. For example, after the measles virus gains access to a person, it sets up shop in the cells and hijacks them to make more measles. But it’s a patient virus and is quite happy for the process from hijacking to making virus to take a couple of weeks. We call that the incubation period. During that time, the immune system of someone who has been vaccinated has tons of time to mount a response—and the person never gets sick.
COVID isn’t as kind—it’s a harsh taskmaster, kind of like the bosses at Amazon. It insists that new viruses be ready to go in three days! So, before the immune system even knows it, millions of newly formed COVID-19 viruses have infected new cells. It’s a race to see if the virus army or the immune system wins. It’s hardly surprising that the people in which the warfare is happening become sick. However, on the whole, vaccinated people recover simply because, within ten days of infection, the entire immune army is active.
Take Home Messages
Vaccines are not usually dangerous. The attenuated or related vaccines can cause infection in people with a serious immune deficiency, but the others cannot. EVER.
Any vaccine can cause an immune response—that’s their purpose. So, you may feel yucky, have some pain at the injection site, and maybe even have a slight fever. That’s your immune system getting educated. That’s good!
Vaccines are NOT like drugs. They do not bind to all kinds of cells and unexpectedly affect the body. Vaccines do not interact with our systems. Subunit and mRNA vaccines do not contain live virus and are safe. None of the vaccines contain tracking chips.
Medical Exemptions
I’m sure you know that it is pretty easy to get a medical exemption. Physicians have no desire to quarrel with their patients, as was shown with the current measles outbreak. But is getting an exemption wise?
Being allergic to one of the ingredients in a vaccine may be a reason for a medical exemption. With the COVID-19 vaccine, this is very, very rare, as we’ve seen with the millions of doses that have been administered. Less than 1% of highly allergic people have a severe reaction, about 5/1,000,000 total doses. In that study, everyone survived because even an anaphylactic reaction can be reversed.
Some people are concerned about vaccines sometimes causing other problems, like blood-clotting issues with the COVID-19 vaccine. Here, an elephant comes lumbering in. In some people, one class of the millions of different types of antibodies formed, each of which recognize a different part of the elephant, thinks that blood vessels kind of look like elephant toes. So, the toe antibodies bind to the blood vessel. Not good. Also very rare. According to the BMJ, this happens to 66/10,000,000 vaccinated people.
This blood clotting disorder can also be caused by getting infected by COVID-19—in fact, it happens much more frequently. About 12,612/10,000,000 infected people experience this problem. This is because, to the immune system, an infection is like having a vaccine every hour or more often for two weeks. Phew! Any mistakes in elephant recognition are hugely magnified.
Okay, but what about autism? There’s no evidence that the MMR vaccine causes autism. None. I may address this more thoroughly if you like, but it results from unscrupulous people making money on your fears.
Well, what about Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS)? According to the CDC, having an mRNA vaccine is safe if you’ve had GBS. After all, viral diseases cause GBS. If you’re not vaccinated and out in the world, the chance of getting GBS from being sick is higher than the chance with a vaccine. If you’re prepared to remain in hiding for life, that’s different.
This leaves us with a simple conclusion—there are few valid medical reasons not to be vaccinated, but there are many reasons one should be. Vaccination won’t prevent illness since vaccines don’t construct an anti-viral force field around us, but being vaccinated does, in most cases, prevent hospitalization and death. Go get those shots!