Because when you explain COVID as an a**hole and vaccines as a blueprint (without the virus) and your body’s cells as incredible memory-keeping-warriors, then we might not be so afraid of it.
Global (23 December 2020) – Vaccines can be scary, especially with all the misinformation floating around social media from people who have spent lockdown on google and youtube but luckily one Doctor has taken to his social media to explain what a vaccine is, and how it actually works in a way that most of us can understand.
Vaccination has made an enormous contribution to global health. Two major infections, smallpox and rinderpest, have been eradicated. Global coverage of vaccination against many important infectious diseases of childhood has been enhanced dramatically since the creation of WHO’s Expanded Programme of Immunization in 1974 and of the Global Alliance for Vaccination and Immunization in 2000. Polio has almost been eradicated, and success in controlling measles makes this infection another potential target for eradication.
And yet, there are people who are very against vaccines in 2020 and continue to publicly spread misinformation about how they work – or their misinformed opinion on how they think they work. Luckily a Doctor from Saskatchewan in Canada shared a refreshing explanation of how vaccines actually work – in a way that most of us can understand – that is quickly going viral on social media.
Read it below.
The mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) are kind of brilliant at a science level.
I’ve had a few people in my real non-Twitter life ask me to explain how it works, so I’m going to try my best here in this thread while I’m waiting for a patient to show.
The first thing to know is how your immune system works. Basically, your immune cells attack anything foreign to your body. If it sees a protein or a virus or a bacteria or anything that it doesn’t recognize, it launches an attack. If it’s fighting off a virus, for example, it takes time to build up a full attack. It’s got to figure out what part of the virus to attack & ramp up production of what it needs to attack those parts. That can take a few days. Meanwhile, the virus is replicating and expanding.
Once it fights off the virus, though, it remembers it. You’ve got memory cells in your immune system, and if you run into that virus again, your memory cells say “I’ve seen this asshole before”. Your body uses its past experience to demolish the virus before it can make you sick.
So, with that in mind, we return to the vaccine.
Scientists looked at the COVID virus and saw a protein on the outside of the virus that looked like a good candidate to launch an immune attack against.
That protein, by the way, is an important one for the virus. It uses that protein to get into your cells. That protein makes the virus more infectious. In short, that protein makes the virus more of an asshole.
Now COVID has DNA in it that codes for all of its parts. So scientists looked at the entire DNA sequence of virus and found the sequence of DNA that is the blueprints for that protein. The asshole protein.
Side note: DNA is the blueprint to make things in a cell. Cells take the DNA and transcribe it into RNA. The RNA is the instructions that tell the cell what to make. mRNA (literally messenger-RNA) literally just gives instructions to the cell to make something.
So scientists took the blueprint for the asshole protein on COVID and made an mRNA version of it. Literally just the instructions on how to make that protein. These instructions “are” the vaccine.
Let me explain.
The vaccine contains no actual part of the virus.
It has only the instructions on how to make the asshole protein. So, you can’t get infected with COVID from the vaccine. You just get these instructions.
Your cells see these instructions and say “sure; I’ll make this”. So your cells make a bunch of the asshole protein. Your immune system sees this new protein you’re producing and immediately says “what… the fuck… is this?” And it starts attacking the protein. Remember it hasn’t seen this protein before. It takes a while to ramp up production. Then it launches an all-out war against the asshole protein. The fevers, chills, muscle soreness, etc. you might get as vaccine side effects is your body bombing the hell out of the asshole protein.
So you destroy the asshole protein (which in and of itself can’t infect you, it’s just a protein, not the virus). Now here’s the important part. Your memory cells ‘remember’ the asshole protein. They remember exactly how to destroy it. By the way, your body breaks down the mRNA instructions that you got with the vaccine pretty quickly too. That’s normal. You don’t need a bunch of instructions hanging around forever. Your body breaks those down and gets rid of them.
So you’ve broken down the mRNA instructions. You’ve destroyed asshole proteins. Everything from the vaccine is gone except for those memory cells who remember that protein very well.
So then, a COVID virus enters your body.
Your body has never seen the virus before. BUT it’s seen that protein that’s on the outside of the virus. Your memory cells say “you’ve got to be kidding me, THIS asshole again? Get the fuck out of here!”
Your body’s own ‘natural immune system’ quickly and efficiently launches an all-out war, using the template it has from when it destroyed the asshole protein last time. It destroys the virus before it can take hold, replicate, and make you sick.
Congratulations! Now, you’re immune to COVID! You’ve got the blueprints to defeat it as soon as it enters your body.
What if the virus mutates so it doesn’t produce the asshole protein any more?
Well, since it uses the asshole protein to get into your cells, if it mutates away from the asshole protein, it’ll probably also be less infectious. That’s what makes the vaccine low-key brilliant.
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