Vaccines: What they are, how they work, and why they are important

Pertussis, aka whooping cough, is a pretty nasty illness. Most healthy adults will survive it - with a trip to the doctor or even a short stay in the hospital, so it's no picnic. However, babies, small children, old folks, or people with weak immune systems don't always survive getting whooping cough. It's scary and kills people sometimes. You might be thinking "OMG! How can I protect myself and my loved ones from such a scourge?!" and you are in luck! Through the marvels of modern medicine and SCIENCE we have a way to combat this and MANY other nasty illnesses! Vaccines! Hooray! 

A quick primer on how vaccines work:

Viruses in the body and very similar to viruses in a computer - they're little bits of DNA in a package, that's it, no nervous system, no food/waste system, no reproductive systems, and they go around invading cells so that they can use that cell's DNA decoder (Free with every box of Wheaties!) to make copies. This process usually kills the host cell. 

Our bodies make antibodies against viruses. Antibodies are a kind of tag, they attach to the offending foreign matter and let the white blood cells know what to attack. Each new bug that infects you gets its own personalized antibody. Some diseases are caused by one virus and require one antibody, and some diseases like the Flu present symptoms that appear the same but are the result of all sorts of different strains of virus and therefore require a ton of different antibodies. 

But you may be asking, "How do our bodies get to be so smart and make those awesome antibodies?" and THAT is where vaccines come in. In order to create an antibody, the body has to first be exposed to the virus. Exposure means that you catch the virus and then either get sick or not - a healthy adult immune system can catch and tag many viruses before we even notice. Vaccines do us a solid by exposing us to the virus in an incapacitated form so that our bodies get a chance to make an antibody without the risk of illness. That way when you get exposed to the full strength virus, your body is ready to fight and doesn't need to waste time figuring out what this new invader is, if it is dangerous, and how to tag it. 

THIS IS AWESOME. VACCINES SAVE LIVES. 

So.... What's all the fuss about? Well, many years ago one scientist, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, decided to commit fraud. He published a paper that showed a link between the MMR vaccine (that's Measels, Mumps, and Rubella - all three super nasty) and austism which he based on falsified data (CNN Report). Scientific fraud blows many chunks for many reasons, but surely.... SURELY even if there were a link between a vaccine that SAVES LIVES and a disorder that kind of sucks but you can totally live a happy, successful, life with, SURELY parents would still get their kids vaccinated... right? 

Ummm... No. It turns out a comedian who is famous for bending over and making it look like his butt cheeks were talking and a pornstar turned video jockey had a kid with autism, and this former pornstar decided that clearly vaccines caused her son's autism. Despite every medical agency and MD ever saying that it was a bunch of malarkey, folks listened to Jenny McCarthy for reasons that make NO EFFING SENSE and stopped vaccinating their kids*. 

For now, many of those kids are protected FROM DYING by their peers who have parents who know how logic works, but the problem is, for vaccines to work we need something called herd immunity - remember how the bulk of Native American Indians got wiped out by European diseases like Small Pox? They died and the Europeans didn't because they did not have herd immunity to Small Pox (which the Europeans got without vaccines by being exposed to it in the general population and having just some of their kids die from the disease every year). So, in places where the threshold for herd immunity is not met, those without the vaccine are at risk. 

And here is what sucks EVEN MORE, not only are idiots and their children at increased risk (at least those idiots counter-intuitively tend to have money and access to good medical care) but lots of people who CANNOT get the vaccines are put at risk by their stupidity. Babies cannot get all of the vaccines at birth and thus live the first few years of their lives depending on herd immunity AKA everyone else getting the gorram vaccine. Older folks who may have gotten the vaccines but who have weakened immune systems depend on the rest of us to get vaccines. People with immune disorders such as AIDS, Crohn's, or Multiple Sclerosis depend on the rest of us to get vaccines. 

The World Health Organization estimates that 3 million people die from lack of access to vaccines every year, half of them children. That's a lot of people. Most of them live in places without infrastructure and where there is extreme poverty but more and more of them are living in Washington, Wisconsin, and Minnesota... say what you want about the United States, but we have a damn fine set of roads and Medicaid covers vaccines for children. No child should ever die or even get sick because they didn't get vaccinated or because a bunch of idiots didn't get vaccinated. 

*I am not even going to begin to discuss the intense disability hating intrinsic to their logic because I can't even go there without getting really really angry. I'm just going to say that yeah, having autism sucks more than not having autism for lots of people, but it's also perfectly OK. Lots of people have an autism spectrum disorder and are happy, lead normal lives, and are functioning members of society.