this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
83 points (97.7% liked)
Asklemmy
44697 readers
987 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Umm, it's your immune system that detects the vaccine and responds to it by developing antibodies specific to the vaccine (and by extension to the actual disease). Just as it would when challenged in real life by the pathogen.
Vaccination basically gives your immune system a several day head start on producing antibodies.
Not entirely true. Vaccines induce the adaptive immune system, which is slow but precise. Getting sick for real induces the innate immune system, which is god awful and you should not be relying on it. S. pneumoniae causes pneumonia because the innate immune system goes overdrive and kills you before it kills the bacteria. COVID-19 induces cell-innate inflammasome activation and leads to a cytokine storm, which then leads to even more damage to the lungs as the immune cells come in. Both diseases have effective vaccines that do not do anything close to this.
Deadly diseases tend to be deadly not because of the microbe itself, but because the innate immune system overreacts and kills you in the process of fighting off the disease.
Getting vaccinated diminishes the role that the innate immune system plays when you get sick, since the B cells responsible for producing antibodies for the disease are already mature. Having available antibodies also allows the immune system to rely on the complement system, which allows it to detect and kill invading microbes way earlier than otherwise.
No.
Getting sick without already being immune leaves your body trying to speed-run anti-body development, while ALSO fighting the disease using more basic physiological responses.
And even with anti-bodies, you're not actually impervious. You can still get sick with diseases you're "immune" to, as even deployment of disease-specific anti-bodies is a complex biological process that can go wrong, come too late, or not be enough.
Given time, a person can develop "immunity" against a lot of stuff, but that still doesn't mean every cell in your body is then changed in a way where that pathogen just bounces off.
You see this most recently with Covid, as people who are vaccinated still get infections, but unlike with unvaccinated people, the body fights it off in a couple days, rather than a few weeks.
But it does still takes those couple days for the latent immunity to kick in, and for the body to deploy that defense.
Another person already commented on how different components of the immune system respond differently, and might even be what kills you faster than the disease.