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How Do Vaccines Actually Work?
#Vaccines aren’t miracle cures: they don’t make every individual immune to disease. But what matters is that they work on a population level.
The key to a successful vaccination program is immunizing enough people to develop so-called “herd immunity,” where most infected individuals can’t spread it to anyone else. This way, over time, fewer and fewer people get infected, ideally until the disease is wiped out entirely.
Diseases still pose a risk as long as there are some cases anywhere.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/video/decoded-how-do-vaccines-actually-work/?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1669589493
@quesoloAna It's an good article. (didn't watch the video). There is one key piece of information missing (not clearly stated): no vaccines make anyone "immune" from infection*, they make most people immune from 'disease' meaning symptoms from the infection. Vaccines don't prevent infections completely, they prevent major symptoms/complications, reduce viral load/infectiousness and therefore transmission. And together with population level herd immunity, their total effect is seen.
A lot of the COVID vaccine disinformation I saw had to do with people criticizing the vaccine for not preventing infection 'like all the other vaccines'. Which is crazy.
I think we need to focus on that part of how vaccines work and be clear in our language surrounding vaccines.
* there is considerable evidence that the polyvalent HPV vaccines do actually prevent infections due to the nature of HPV transmission and the massive mucosal response to the vaccine; so that may be the first vaccine that prevents infection. But it wasn't designed to do that.