How Vaccines Work

Our immune systems are wonderful and complicated things. They fight off invaders, they let us know when they are struggling, and they keep us healthy - most of the time. Sometimes, though, our immune systems need help recognizing who the invaders are. For instance, some people have immune systems that are paranoid and see invaders everywhere they look - even when there are none. This is what happens when someone develops an autoimmune disorder. The immune system starts attacking healthy cells and organs, so in these cases the immune system needs help to chill, by lowering the immune system and slowing or preventing further damage. 

With cancer cells, the immune system does not always recognize these cells as threats, and we have yet to develop a method for the immune system to see them as the invaders they are without destroying all types of cells, so it needs help (from medication and radiation treatment) to kill those invaders. 

Vaccines work by helping the immune system recognize who the invaders really are. 

Here are a few resources to watch or look through for a more scientific understanding of how vaccines work and, in the two videos, how the Covid-19 vaccines work: 

How Vaccines Work (Article)

Vaccines 101  (Video)

Explaining mRNA vaccines  (Video)

For a very quick summary - there are several types of vaccines that each help the immune system recognize a specific invader that our immune systems are having difficulty with. Our immune systems do the work, but the vaccines are there to help the immune system identify the culprit and to fight off the infection more quickly. Then, these vaccines leave memory cells so that the invaders can be identified in future infections. This is called immunity. 

Teaching our immune systems to identify foreign invaders quickly is crucial. The longer it takes for the immune system to act, the more the virus can multiply and wreak havoc on our systems. 

Herd immunity occurs when a large portion of the population develops this immunity, whether from vaccines or previous infection. 

"Herd immunity occurs when a large portion of a community (the herd) becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. As a result, the whole community becomes protected — not just those who are immune." - from the Mayo Clinic website. 

Here is where the biggest problem lies in what we are seeing now. 

Vaccines are teaching the immune system to recognize a specific virus, protein, or portion of a virus (depending on the type of vaccine). But, the longer it takes for us to be equipped with the information to fight the cells and adapt to this threat through herd immunity, the more time the virus has to adapt. So the virus evolves and changes, making immunity from vaccines AND from previous infection less effective, because the portion of the virus our immune systems have been taught to identify has now changed and may no longer be recognizable. 

For example - if a group of ten people are exposed to a virus, and 9 of those people have developed immunity to that virus, it can still enter the bodies of all 10 people, but 9 of those people will have immune systems equipped to fight that virus. That means that fewer virus cells survive. That makes serious infection and effects are reduced, and spread of that infection is reduced. So even if the one person without immunity catches that virus, the majority of the herd is equipped to handle the virus and it may not spread enough through the group to evolve. 

However, if only 2 people in the group have developed immunity, that gives the virus time to spread to the other 8, quickly and without being detected, giving the virus time to evolve and change to a virus that may no longer be detected by the 2 who had developed immunity to the earlier version of the virus. 

This is why we need immunity ourselves AND immunity of those around us. 

These vaccines are working exactly as intended. They may not prevent infection, but they reduce the number of viral cells and minimize the implications and damage. 

With enough people reaching immunity, the goal is that the virus will die off and be eradicated, thus, hopefully, rendering the vaccines unnecessary in the future. 

The longer it takes to reach herd immunity, the more variants we will see and have to start from scratch with developing the immune system's ability to recognize the virus.