Herd immunity is, it turns out, not incredibly easy to understand. It took me quite a bit of reading before I fully grasped it. But understanding herd immunity is essential to understanding why we vaccinate the way we do.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
When you vaccinate someone, or when you get infected, the microbe is presenting itself to the immune system in a way that the immune system recognizes the important elements of the microbe and makes an immune response, both an antibody response and a cellular response, to ultimately contain the microbe.
Imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community.
A vaccine introduces a small amount or a tempered version of the virus into the body - just enough to that the body is able to recognize it and deal with it when it encounters it again in the future.
There's a cultural expectation that everyone will be immunized, in part to protect the entire population. When people refuse that expectation, they're indulging in a certain kind of political or social immunity.
The immune system's goal is to protect the body against invaders either from without, such as microbes, or from within, such as cancers and different types of neoplastic transformation.
For just a few dollars a dose, vaccines save lives and help reduce poverty. Unlike medical treatment, they provide a lifetime of protection from deadly and debilitating disease. They are safe and effective. They cut healthcare and treatment costs, reduce the number of hospital visits, and ensure healthier children, families and communities.
If we think of the immune system as a machine, then we are far from even knowing all of its parts.
Vaccines are the tugboats of preventive health.
In some areas, immunity has been eroded so much that the child who's not vaccinated is now actually more vulnerable to the complications of infectious diseases.
Especially working in infectious disease, it's very interesting because these infectious diseases, these agents, they evolve over time. So it's very much an arms race and understanding how each changes to protect itself and to continue. And so it's very much this puzzle-solving but with this great urgency and importance in what you find.
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