How Vaccinations Work

Keywords

Vaccine, treatment, preventative, symptoms, culture, virus, strains, research, injection, oral, herd immunity.

Introduction

A vaccination is not a cure. I'm just going to point that out now. If you have a vaccine for a disease, it does not mean you will not get said disease if it is going around where you live at the time.

That being said, a vaccine is a type of preventative to help relieve you of the majority of symptoms that you could have from contracting a viral pathogen.

How Vaccinations Works

For this instance, we are looking at influenza. Each year, people go to the doctor for a vaccine jab. This injection is made up of the strain that the WHO identifies as the most likely to spread in the upcoming season (that being winter). The idea of the flu vaccine is to make you fight it off, but because there are different strains (much the same with other pathogens such as COVID), they have to pick the ones that are most numerous in cases.

Research is undertaken to provide a culture of the flu virus and create a basis with which to fight it off. Fragments from the virus will have been put together with the rest of the vaccine. When you get the injection, it will have undergone rigorous testing to make sure this will work effectively.

So, what does our body do with this injected material? When the vaccine is injected, it triggers the immune system to create antibodies. This then enables the body to fight off any of the infections in the vaccine, because the antibodies will have been created and remembered in genetic code for future resistance.

Interesting fact: we often assume a vaccine will be given through injection. But this is not the case, as around 40% of them can be given orally, or even through the nasal passages.

Different Strains

So, you've gone to the doctor, had your flu vaccine that has the prepared culture for certain strains in it, but what happens if another strain enters your body?

Well, unfortunately, the vaccine won't help. If the antibodies in your immune system have not been able to recognise it, then they kind of ignore the other strain. So, you can still catch the flu, albeit a different type. Remember, a vaccine is supposed to be to help prevent your symptoms of a certain type. It won't cover all the bases.

This also is the case with other vaccines. If you have a vaccine for COVID, for example, it may help against the base version of the disease, but it might not help against other strains.

Herd Immunity

There is a term called "herd immunity", and this simply means that if at least 50% of the population are vaccinated against a pathogen, then it is up to the rest of the population to gain immunity through lack of transmission. The lower the transmission of an infecting pathogen, the higher the possibility of it going away. Sometimes, this method doesn't always work, but it can help reduce the amount of the infection from spreading.