Vaccines

Vaccines are among the greatest discoveries of science, ever. If you want to know their details and how the modern ones work, from a guy whose only “religion” is science, read on.

Vaccines’ Background: A Little History

The average longevity of Americans has nearly doubled in the last century and a half, from about forty years after the Civil War, to nearly eighty today. A steady decrease in childhood mortality was the primary cause of the rise. When children die in droves at single-digit ages in years, let alone months, they really lower the average!

Children did die far too often during the nineteenth century. Childhood deaths were so common that families, on average, had many more children then than we do today, in part to compensate for the real risk of early death.

Once deaths of children from disease hit families at the highest levels of society. Abraham Lincoln lost a son to typhoid fever while in the White House, sending his sensitive wife into a depression. Charles Darwin lost three of his ten children before the age of eleven.

And therein lies the tale. Modern medicine attributes the near-doubling of longevity primarily to two scientific discoveries: antibiotics and vaccines. It’s hard to know, or even to study, which is more important. Antibiotics cure diseases in progress. Vaccines prevent diseases from starting. Even with modern science and computerized data, it’s hard to know who would have gotten a disease but didn’t—let alone whether they would have survived.

But we do have some hints. The estimated global death toll from the 1918-1919 influenza, sometimes called the “Spanish flu,” was 50 million. That’s about the same level of carnage in all of World War II, the most deadly war in human history. But the war took six years to kill that many, while the flu took about two years.

Today, the annual global toll from influenza is less than one-twentieth of Spanish flu’s average toll. The estimated annual toll from flu worldwide is 290,000 to 650,000 deaths. The only plausible explanation is vaccines, because viruses like flu don’t respond to antibiotics and there is no “cure” for flu. So if you want to up your odds of surviving the next bout of flu (which mutates constantly) by at least twenty times, get vaccinated.

A Little Biology

We like to think of our bodies as “ours.” We see them as separate and distinct from our environment, like a castle in the forest. But that’s an illusion. Our bodies are part and parcel of our environment and constantly exchanging matter with it—gases, liquids and solids. We exchange gases by breathing twelve to twenty times per minute. We intake solids and liquids by eating and drinking. Our orifices—nose, mouth, eyes, ears and those below the waist—can and do exchange matter. We are much more like busy airports than castles.

This constant exchange of matter allows pathogens—bacteria, viruses and the occasional amoeba—to enter our bodies. Our most vulnerable spot is our nasal pathways and lungs. (Remember those twelve to twenty breaths per minute.) Our second most vulnerable spot is our mouths and stomachs, which let us imbibe all sorts of dangerous microbes that piggy-back on food and drink.

But for our immune systems, we would be sitting ducks for disease. These are incredibly complex systems of specialized tissues, cells and barriers that ward off, identify, and kill or immobilize invaders. All of them are “on duty” and at work during every second of our lives.

Non-biologists need to know five things about our immune systems. First, identifying dangerous invaders and distinguishing them from parts of our own bodies is not easy. Both invaders and our own bodies are made of the same stuff: complex molecules of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and a few other elements. There are no signs on the invaders proclaiming, “I’m a bad guy. Come get me!” Distinguishing them from our own bodies, let alone harmless matter and derivatives of food, requires our immune systems to “learn” at the molecular level.

Second, this “learning” to recognize invaders doesn’t even start until after we are born. Babies in the womb are protected in part by their mother’s own, well-developed immune system, and in part by the placenta, which passes oxygen to the fetus and removes carbon dioxide from it without ever letting the mother’s blood touch it. Babies don’t even start to develop the ability to identify, let alone neutralize, microbial invaders until well after birth.

Third, a baby’s immune system takes months and years to develop to anything like the strength of an adult’s. That’s why vaccine schedules all start months and even years after birth. They reflect careful study of the particular pathogen and how babies’ immune systems mature and respond to the pathogen and the vaccine. Each vaccine schedule reflects how and when the immune system “learns” to recognize and fight the invader, and how long it takes.

Fourth, because their immune systems are immature and developing, babies have far greater susceptibility to invader-borne disease than adults. They depend on their mothers and other adults around them being “clean” of contagious diseases, in part by being vaccinated themselves. That’s one reason why premature babies are kept in those little plastic safe spaces called “incubators.”

Fifth, some invaders work by attacking and disabling our immune systems themselves. They maim and kill by destroying our very defenses against pathogens at the molecular level. HIV/AIDS is one of those diseases.

Another such disease is measles. Not only is it one of the most contagious airborne diseases known to science. It also “works” by destroying our immune systems, including our immune “memory” of other diseases, encountered earlier in life. As a result, adults who get measles lose much of their ability to recognize and fight off other diseases; their post-infection immune systems resemble a child’s and have to be rebuilt from the ground up, whether by fighting off infection or by remedial vaccination.

How Vaccines Work

With this background, we can explore how vaccines work. They put things in our bodies that react like the invader but can’t cause a disease. In that way, they teach our immune systems to recognize and fight the invader when and if it comes for real and in force. The process of “teaching” is mostly automatic: our immune systems take a few days to two weeks after each jab to reach full protective force against a particular invader.

The first vaccines were very far from today’s “designer vaccines.” They used dead or inactivated versions of the very same pathogens—bacteria or viruses—that caused the disease. In the case of smallpox, early vaccines used germs from a related disease of cows called “cowpox,” which didn’t do much harm in humans but did teach our immune systems to develop defenses against smallpox.

Early vaccines had several disadvantages. Sometimes the process to kill or disable the pathogen didn’t work, or worked only partially, so the vaccine infected the patient or caused a “halfway” malady better than the disease but worse than the usually mild vaccine reaction. Sometimes inactivating the pathogen involved dangerous chemicals like thimerosol, a mercury-containing agent with serious side-effects in some patients, which no one uses today. Other inactivating agents, although harmless to most people, sometimes caused allergies or serious side effects in some patients.

Today’s mRNA “designer” vaccines outdo these early vaccines as a modern stealth jet fighter outdoes the Wright Brothers’ biplane. They are not based on killing or inactivating the target pathogen, or anything else. Instead, they are designed at the molecular level, from the ground up.

The Covid mRNA vaccines developed separately by Moderna and Pfizer are the first working examples of this technology. There is no way, even in theory, that they can cause the disease they’re designed to prevent.

Why? Unlike earlier vaccine technology, they contain no part of the reproductive apparatus of the Covid virus. They contain none of the virus’ “molecular machinery” that lets it “take over” our cells’ reproductive machinery and produce copies of itself.

All they contain is copies of the so-called “spike” protein that resides on the surface of the Covid virus and allows it to attach itself to the surface of our cells. These copies of the spike protein teach our immune systems to recognize the Covid virus and fend it off.

Actually, the vaccines contain mRNA (short for “messenger RNA”) that instructs our own cells to produce copies of the spike protein, to which our immune systems react. Like all mRNA, this mRNA can only affect the behavior it cells it actually reaches physically, i.e., those close to the vaccine injection site. Unlike DNA, it can’t affect the progeny of cells or determine their inherited characteristics because it’s not part of cells’ reproductive apparatus. So it can’t change the characteristics of cells outside the injection site, other than indirectly, through the normal operation of our immune systems. Failure to understand this nuance and the crucial distinction between mRNA and DNA is undoubtedly responsible for some hesitancy, on the part of the uninformed, to take mRNA vaccines.

Consider an analogy. Suppose a burglar sneaks around your neighborhood climbing roofs and lowering a drone robot down chimneys to ransack living rooms. He carries with him: (1) a rope with a grappling hook to get on your roof, (2) a crowbar to pry off the spark arrestor on the chimney, and (3) a drone to do the dirty work. The mRNA vaccines allow your immune system to spot and arrest anyone carrying a rope and grappling hook. They contain no part of the crowbar or the drone, and they don’t directly affect the burglar’s (or anyone else’s) inheritable characteristics. So, even if they somehow go awry and produce a lot of ropes with grappling hooks, they can’t consummate a burglary.

The importance and value of the scientific advances underlying the mRNA vaccines are difficult to overstate. They include the discovery of DNA in 1962, the ability to “decode” DNA using so-called “genetic sequencers” and the ability to reconstruct arbitrary segments of DNA by means of chemical synthesizers. Each of these discoveries involved Nobel-Prize-winning science.

None of it created the “big bang” of a nuclear weapon. But together these discoveries give us the power to see and understand the molecular basis of all life, including pathogens, and bend it to our will on a molecular level.

The development of mRNA vaccines for Covid at “Warp Speed” was, of course, just political razzle-dazzle. Scientists had been working on mRNA vaccine technology for nearly a decade, as part of basic biological science. The ability to design vaccines to suit, with none of a pathogen’s self-propagating apparatus, was an early and obvious goal of microbiological science.

Now that it has come to fruition, we can develop new vaccines for new pathogens in mere months after first isolating them. The year-or-more delay in getting them into people’s arms is more a function of the slow and cautious testing-and-approval process, designed for earlier and now increasingly obsolete technology. It’s not the product of any deficiency or lag in microbiological science.

Vaccines Today

Ironies in human history abound. Just when microbiological science has reached the “Holy Grail” of vaccines designed to suit at the molecular level, a wave of public skepticism is rising to heights not seen since the invention of vaccines centuries ago. The best way to illustrate its pernicious effect on individuals like you and me is to describe my interaction with my own doc this week.

Part of my goal in seeing him was to get accurate information about vaccines. Specifically, I wanted to get four vaccines, for: (1) Covid (I had had nine, the last in October), (2) flu (also the last in October), (3) measles (now spreading in TX and in NM, where I spend some time), and (4) H5N1 (the “bird flu” that may now be making a jump from livestock to us).

What my doc told me was sobering and a bit disappointing. Covid vaccines are now on a semi-annual cycle, even though tests say immune strength starts fading after four months, the more so in people my age. So I can get my next jab only in April. Flu is on an annual cycle, so my next flu vaccine will be next October. I thought I’d actually had measles in the mid-fifties, before vaccines were available, but they can test me for measles antibodies and vaccinate me if my antibody titers are low. Finally, there’s no vaccine yet for H5N1, and none in process.

While answering my questions, my doc was working on his computer terminal, outside my line of sight. He was, he later told me, drawing answers from the website of our federal CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

We talked a bit about the current wave of federal closures, shut-downs and firings. He explained that some of his colleagues had already taken the trouble of downloading the entire CDC website—hundreds of pages. They feared that its encyclopedic information on diseases, research results, research in progress, and advice for physicians and patients might be lost to casual users, including doctors, in the spasm of haphazard government downsizing now under way. I asked him what he and his colleagues would do if the CDC website shut down, and he had no answer.

Every one of us, as a patient and information consumer, should try to answer that question. Where will we go for accurate information on the current state of medical research and development, including vaccines? Where will our primary-care doctors and specialists go?

Of course these questions apply to every health issue. But people my age (nearing 80) are the primary consumers of medical information and services involving diagnostic labs, X-rays, CAT scans, MRIs and other ways of seeing in detail what is going wrong as our bodies break down with age. Younger families, especially those with children, will be right in the bullseye of change in the development and supply of vaccines, as evolution creates more and stronger pathogens and societal decay—not to mention deliberate destruction—reduces the number, kind and availability of vaccines, and information about them.

Presumably the private sector will move to fill the gap as traditional public-sector institutions are downsized, sidelined or just plain closed. But the private sector is likely to be more expensive and secretive than government.

So if I were a father with young kids, I’d be eager to seek and find competent replacements, public or private, to fill the gap. Bacteria and viruses won’t stop their evolution for changes in politics, and the need for effective, new vaccines will only grow.

If you know anyone suffering vaccine hesitancy, especally couples expecting kids or raising toddlers, please send them a link. It could save lives and a lot of unnecessary suffering.

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