Vaccination Does More Than Keeping Us Immune to Diseases

Actually, I was writing an entirely different post and it all deleted when I pressed control A and Spacebar. I tried to retrieve it but to no avail so I decided to change the topic of writing. We are all familiar with vaccines and at most, every child that can properly read should have witnessed or been told about the Covid-19 pandemic. Pandemics and vaccines are closely related as one is used in the case of another. Vaccines have become our resort in the case of a pandemic especially a viral one.

When we are vaccinated for a disease, it means we have a resistance against the particular strain of the pathogenic disease. When these pathogen gets into our system, our body identifies it because it has first been introduced to it or its protein thereby causing the immune system to fight against it before it gets settled in cells and start to reproduce. While vaccine keep us immune from diseases, that isn't its only job. A major job of vaccination is to end up protecting an entire group of people in a particular region thereby making it difficult for disease to spread because majority of the people are vaccinated.

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This concept is known as Herd immunity and there is a high chance you heard the word during the Covid-19 pandemic. Coined about a century ago in the early 20th century, it started from veterinarians who were using it as a word for real herds but we borrowed it and began to use it for human diseases where we protect a large number of people from a disease, thereby preventing it from spreading to others and causing a pandemic even if a person come in contact with the disease. When the word herd immunity is mentioned, it is used to describe Herd threshold where a percentage of people are needed in a population to be immune to a germ or disease to stop the transmission.

Talking about threshold, it differs from disease to disease. If a person contacts a disease, and no one is immune, the person will be able to give the disease to 4 people on an average and those 4 people another 4 each and so on. This is known as the basic reproduction of 4 (R₀ = 4). For the disease not to spread, you need the basic reproduction to be 1 or less than 1 and with this, the disease has a low probability of encountering someone it can infect leaving the whole group protected.

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Immunizing a lot of people in a particular area, prevents a chain reaction of infection protecting a whole population but to reach herd immunity, one needs to understand their threshold which has to do with how contagious they are. When it comes to measles which is super contagious, one infected person can infect 12 to 18 person and with this level of contagiousness, a 94% threshold is needed to keep the disease in check and the community safe. For diseases like Polio with R₀ = 7 where an infected person can infect 7 persons, the threshold to reach herd immunity is 85%. This is why when there is a case of mass vaccination, it looks like there is a goal to meet, that goal is the threshold.

As I write this post, vaccines prevent 2 to 3 million death yearly from diseases like Tetanus, Diphtheria, Measles, and Influenza, that would have taking the lives of people. Taking a vaccine doesn't guarantee immunity but when a vaccine is effective, it works in most people like the measles, Mumps, and Rubella that is effective in 97% or the population that receives it, and data says that Covid-19 is effective at about 90% of the population that uses it.

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In the real world, when a disease infects a susceptible person, they become diseased and either die or recover. With the help of vaccine, it is to trick the body to believe that the disease invaded the body, so when the real disease comes, the person will not be susceptible thereby putting them on the living count than having to find them dead. When vaccine is very effective and people receive them beyond the threshold limit, it can lead to the eradication of the disease such as in the case of Small pox (Human disease) and Rinderpest (animal disease).

When taking vaccines, one thing should be in our mind which is that we aren't taking it for ourselves only but for people around us as well. While we vaccinate ourselves, it is important to still maintain health guidelines and practice so we do not get another strain of the same disease which would usually take time to create another vaccine for the new strain.

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ahmedhayat 6 days ago

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themyscira 6 days ago

It is enough for me to be immunised with God's grace so that I have everything I need.
God is my doctor, everything else that is supposed to scare and panic me and has to be propagated 24/7 is the work of Satan.

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PS: if the word of God had been propagated in the same way as a pandemic and the injection needed to combat it... surely everyone would now believe in God.