You encounter thousands of germs every day. While your immune system can fight most of them on its own, vaccines help it fight the disease-causing ones (pathogens) it can’t handle.
Vaccines familiarize your immune system — which makes antibodies to defend your body against harmful invaders — with a certain pathogen so that it will know what to do if you become infected with that pathogen in the future.
It’s important to note that vaccines don’t make you sick with the pathogen they’re designed to protect you from. Rather, they give your immune system a practice run at taking out a weaker, inactivated, or partial version of the pathogen.
There are several different ways that vaccines can achieve this triggering of the immune system. They contain either:
▪️A weakened (attenuated) form of a pathogen.
▪️An inactivated form of a pathogen.
▪️Certain parts of the pathogen, such as its proteins.
▪️A weakened toxin made by the pathogen.
Vaccines may also contain other ingredients such as adjuvants, which help boost your body’s immune response to the vaccine, and stabilizers, which keep the active ingredients working after the vaccine is made.
Most vaccines won’t prevent you from becoming infected with a certain pathogen. Rather, they allow your body to stop the infection before you get sick, or they prevent you from becoming seriously sick when you get infected.
This helps you, and it also helps those around you, including people in your community who can’t be vaccinated because of serious allergies or a medical condition that weakens their immune system. Pathogens can spread quickly from person to person. When a large number of people in a community are vaccinated, the pathogen can’t spread as easily.
{You can find all the sources I used by clicking here.}
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