About Me

The flu vaccine is a harmless foreign body introduced to your body.

The purpose of vaccine is to introduce this harmless foreign body so that your immune system is prepared against viral attacks involving viruses of similar shapes and produces complementary antibodies that will combat this foreign body u are injected with.

There are basically 2 lines of defense in our immune system:

1st line of defense – to combat against ALL foreign bodies introduced

2nd line of defense – is to combat against foreign bodies that have once attacked.

It should be noted that the latter is of higher effectiveness because antibodies are specifically produced for the purpose. The only drawback is it needs longer time for the defense to be up.

I will provide the same 2 scenarios I have described in the debate.

1) Without prior vaccination, a HARMFUL flu virus is introduced to the body. Owing to lower effectiveness of the first line of defense; the virus was able to penetrate further and cells are infected. The second line of defense takes time to produce antibodies to combat against the virus and by the time the antibodies are created, several irreversible damages has been done to the body.

2) A vaccine is like a virus cell without the viral genome or viral RNA (ribonucleic acid) hence it is harmless. When introduced to the body, it similarly penetrated through the first line of defense, as the body was not ready for the attack by a foreign body of a shape that is not recognised. As there is no viral genome in the vaccine, the vaccine do not proliferate within the body and infect cells. The second line of defense has enough time to produce suitable antibodies that recognize the vaccine and destroy it. Shape-recognizing antibodies has been placed on the 1st line of defense after vaccination. Therefore, when a flu virus that takes the same shape of the vaccine attacks, the 1st line of defense is then effective enough to combat against it.

This is why when the flu vaccine (harmless foreign body with the same shape as flu virus) is introduced, the first line of defense identified it as a foreign body and triggered the bodily response similar to flu symptoms to take down the suspicious foreign body.

I am not sure if most of the readers had heard about the smallpox vaccine story, which cowpox virus was intentionally introduced into the human body to vaccinate against smallpox, as both virus has the same shape but smallpox was lethal enough to cause death while cowpox only result in much milder effects. This success story of vaccination against deadly cowpox was studied, investigated and concluded the existence of shape-recognising antibodies.

To reiterate the main idea, a vaccine introduced is usually harmless (or not as harmful) and does not cause much problems except for the slight symptoms. When a harmful flu virus of the same shape attacks your immune system, your system is prepared to resist the attack.