Sun 12 Sep 2021 18:05
Why it is a good idea to get the Covid19 vaccine?
While I understand becoming short of patience with vaccine refusal, I don't think that most people who refuse COVID19 vaccination are idiots. Vaccination and viruses can be complicated to understand. There are a lot of misinformed posts and videos on the Internet. If you don't know enough about how viruses and vaccines work, both in general and for COVID19, how would you know what to believe? When my father died of COVID19 last summer, one of the ways I dealt with the loss was through understanding better how COVID19 works and what can be done to fight it. My hope here is that by explaining the benefits of vaccination in simple terms, I can maybe help others avoid COVID19. I hope you will find it helpful. If not, there are other sites that address this same question: maybe you will like those better?
It all comes out of how viruses work. Viruses are not alive themselves, but they use the bodies of living creatures (like us) to spread. They find their way into the cells of our body, then take over those cells to produce more copies of themselves. This is the only way viruses spread: they can't reproduce on their own. For COVID19, you may have heard of the "spike protein". This is the spiky part on the outside of the COVID19 virus that makes it look like a spiky ball. It's why it's called a "coronavirus", it looks a little like the spikes on a crown: "corona" is crown in Latin. This protein helps the viruses get inside the body's cells. Then, when inside, the viruses take over the cell to make and release more viruses. Those viruses invade other cells, and those start making more viruses too. Things can get out of hand very quickly, a bit like a forest fire spreading in a dry forest.
Happily, our body has a defence system against viruses (the "immune system"). When those defences recognize an invading virus, it takes as many viruses as possible out of action, keeping them from invading more cells. If the defences can keep up, the viruses won't spread spread very far, and our body will have fought off the infection. If the defences can't keep up, the infection spreads.
But our body's immune system needs to know, first, that something it sees is a virus, before it can act. Immune systems learn from exposure and time. If the body is exposed to enough viruses over time, the immune system can learn how to recognize the virus, and start fighting back. When someone gets sick from a viral infection like COVID19, they get sick because the virus is spreading faster than the immune system can fight it off. Because the immune system needs time to learn how to recognize the virus, while it is learning, the virus is spreading, faster and faster. Sadly, this can cause significant damage, depending on how far ahead the virus gets. This is what happened to my father last summer when he caught COVID19. At first, It spread much faster than his body could fight it, because his immune system had to first learn how. As COVID19 spread, it caused damage to his organ systems, including his heart. When his body's defences finally learned how to fight off COVID19, the damage it had already done to his heart was too great for him to stay alive. Sadly, he passed away shortly after.
If the body survives, its immune system can remember viruses that it has learned to recognize. When it is exposed later to the same virus, it recognizes it right away, and fights it off quickly before it can spread. This is why if you have successfully recovered from a viral disease, you are less likely to get it later. This is the basis of vaccination. Vaccination trains the body's immune system to recognize a virus quickly, so that it will be able to muster a strong defence against it right away, without giving the virus much chance to spread.
The way COVID19 vaccinations work is that they train the body's immune system to recognize the spike protein on the outside of a COVID19 virus. It doesn't inject the spike protein itself, but rather it injects something that instructs the body's cells to temporarily produce a bit of spike protein for training. Your body's defences learns from this to recognize anything with the spike protein (such as a COVID19 virus) as an invader. If later it is exposed to COVID19 virus, the body's defences will be primed and ready to get rid of it before it can spread very far.
Unfortunately, the body's defences against viruses aren't perfect. In the case of COVID19, a single exposure to the spike protein does train the body to recognize it, but not always quickly and thoroughly enough. Like us, when we're learning a new skill, our immune systems learn better with multiple lessons. That is why most COVID19 vaccinations require two shots: the immune system learns better with two lessons than one, and in some cases three (a booster) rather than two. This is also why people who have had COVID19 should still get vaccinated: a successful recovery from a COVID19 infection does provide some protection, but additional lessons for the body's defences will still help if exposed to the virus again. This is also the reason why vaccinations are not perfect. They train the body's immune system to recognize and eliminate the virus, but if the body is exposed to too much virus too quickly, the viruses can still spread faster than the immune system can eliminate it. This is why a few people who are fully vaccinated do get sick from COVID19, though not usually as seriously as people who were not vaccinated. This doesn't mean that the vaccine "doesn't work", it just means that even trained immune systems can sometimes be overwhelmed by a virus.
Because vaccinations train the immune system to recognize and fight off a virus, after a vaccination, we sometimes feel a bit sick: some of the symptoms we experience when we are sick are caused by the body's defences: e.g. fever, aches, fatigue,and feeling unwell. In the case of a vaccination, though, this is not long-term, because a vaccination, unlike a virus, does not reproduce and spread, and so its effects will wear off quickly.
Vaccinations can sometimes cause side effects that are more serious. This is why they are tested carefully before approval. In the case of the major COVID19 vaccines, there are some very rare side effects that are serious: certain COVID19 vaccines cause very rare but quite serious blood clots, and certain others cause very rare heart inflammation. These side-effects don't happen very often in people who receive the vaccine: they are much less likely than the probability of the average person being hit by lightning in their lifetime.
The fact is, the vaccine is much less dangerous than the disease. A COVID19 infection can cause very serious health effects, and many of those effects are not rare. While most people who catch COVID19 recover at home, more than one in twenty require hospitalization to stay alive. Of those, on the order of one in ten die. Moreover, many who recover from COVID19 suffer long-term health effects ranging from difficulty breathing, to fatigue, pain, and memory, concentration and sleep problems. Organ damage to the heart, lungs and brain is also possible. COVID19 is spreading around the world and most people will eventually be exposed to it. It is better to get the vaccine first, so that you are less likely to be harmed by the disease later.
There are claims on the Internet that COVID19 vaccines are much more dangerous than what I've written here. Many of these claims are misunderstandings. Millions of people have received COVID19 vaccines. A few who have had health problems after receiving the vaccine have reported their health problems as a possible "side effect" of the virus. In the US, there is a vaccine reporting system called VAERS where people can report bad health events that happened to them after receiving a vaccine: this lets scientists investigate whether the vaccine might have caused the problem. If the vaccine is causing a particular health problem, that problem would happen more often to people who receive the vaccine than to those who do not. But for most of the health problems reported to VAERS, they are not happening more often to vaccinated people, they happen at roughly the same rate as they happen to anyone, and so the vaccine cannot be responsible. It appears that COVID19 vaccines cause very few serious health problems, and those are very rare. The evidence for this is that millions of people around the world have received COVID19 vaccines and almost nobody has gotten seriously sick from them. The COVID19 disease itself is much more dangerous, which is why hospitals are full of people suffering from the disease, not the vaccine.
Even so, wouldn't it be better to avoid both the vaccine and the disease? Yes, it would be, if you could be assured of never being exposed to COVID19. But that is not so easy. COVID19 spreads very easily: it spreads through tiny moisture droplets in exhaled breath that float in the air like smoke from a cigarette, so if you are indoors with someone who is exhaling COVID19 virus, and there is poor air circulation, you will inhale some. The longer you are there, the more COVID19 virus you will inhale. Not everyone who gets COVID19 feels very sick right away: some feel fine, at least for a while, and many who feel sick don't feel so sick that they stay home. They will spread the virus whereever they go, simply by exhaling. You may be in a room with an infected person who has no idea that they are spreading COVID19. This is why masks are so helpful, because the mask over the nose and mouth of an infected person reduces the amount of COVID19 viruses they breathe out, and the mask over the nose and mouth of other people in the room reduces the amount of COVID19 virus they might breathe in. It's also a reason why indoor fresh air circulation is so important, and why COVID19 is so much more of a danger indoors than outdoors. COVID19 is very contagious, especially the new "delta" variant which is the dominant variant circulating today: on average, a sick person will spread it to six or more others. It's only a little less transmissible than chickenpox, but a lot more transmissible than flu. It's quite possible that we will all be exposed to it eventually.
An even more important reason to be vaccinated is to reduce the spread of COVID19 to others. Remember that the only way for a virus to reproduce is in the body of an infected person. If most people make their bodies inhospitable to the virus by getting vaccinated, then the virus will find very few opportunities to spread. It's like fire trying to spread in a very wet forest: only the dry sticks will burn, and the fewer dry sticks there are, the less likely the fire will find more sticks to spread to, and the more likely it will burn out. So by getting vaccinated, we protect not only ourselves, but everyone around us, especially those who, for medical reasons, can't be vaccinated, or who have immune systems that don't work well. If not enough of us get vaccinated, the number of COVID19 cases will overwhelm the hospitals. Most of those who need hospital care for their COVID19 infections will die instead. Also, many people who need hospital care for other serious illnesses won't be able to get the care they need, and they will die too.
So please be brave: if you can, get vaccinated. Yes, the effects of the vaccine may be unpleasant for a few days as the body learns how to fight the virus. But the vaccine will not harm you like the disease will, and it will train the body's immune system to fight it. My father got COVID19 too early, last summer, before COVID19 vaccines were available. If they had been available then, he might still be alive today. They're available now. Please get vaccinated if you can. If enough people around the world get vaccinated against COVID19, we may eventually be able to eliminate this disease altogether, and that would be a thing worth doing.
