Current Events > I keep seeing misinformation even from pro-vaxxers.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Im not an epidemiologist but Im a health-care worker who has paid attention to what the experts say.

Please stop saying the vaccine is not meant to prevent you from getting covid.

The covid vaccine has a dual purpose. Two abilities/shields/walls - whatever you wanna call it.

Ability 1: Makes your immune system attentive to the covid virus which decrease the risk of getting covid in the first place. Our immune system prevent infections on the daily by killing hostile virus and bacteria before they can infect cells in the body and start replicating (which creates an infection). The vaccine adds covid to the list of viruses the body try to kill right away.

What the omicron variant in particular do is bypass Ability 1. It sneaks past the immune system which increase the risk of infection for even vaccinated folk. Ability 1 has also proven to decrease in efficiency as time goes on. The immune system need a reminder with booster shots.

And if you are exposed to a big viral load, the risk of a breakthrough infection go up as well since your immune system isnt magical. It cant keep up if the number of viruses is too large. This is how being vaccinated also help others and not just yourself. Many vaccinated folk decrease the risk of big viral loads for everyone.

Ability 2: Make your immune system better and quicker at killing the covid virus if it do manage to infect you. This make symptoms milder and the duration of the infection shorter for the average vaccinated person.

So the vaccine is both meant to prevent you from getting covid and to decrease the risk of serious illness and death if you do catch the virus anyway.

alright

I feel like many of them are talking past one another.

I was led to believe the vaccine will prevent me (at least to a very significantly high degree) from getting sick from the virus, period. I don't know where some are getting this idea that "you might still get sick when you get a vaccine but at least it will prevent you from spreading it to other people". No I thought everyone has to take steps to protect themselves, not protect other people from them.
But maybe TC can clear this up for me.

big viral load

CommonGrackle posted...

I feel like many of them are talking past one another.

I was led to believe the vaccine will prevent me (at least to a very significantly high degree) from getting sick from the virus, period. I don't know where some are getting this idea that "you might still get sick when you get a vaccine but at least it will prevent you from spreading it to other people". No I thought everyone has to take steps to protect themselves, not protect other people from them.
But maybe TC can clear this up for me.

That is probably true. The talk past each other part

Getting vaccinated is one big part about protecting yourself for sure. Pre-omicron, or if youre now triple jabbed, youre less likely to get infected and less likely to get gravely sick if you do get infected.

The protecting others part come from this:
viral contagion require viral replication, to simplify the process. So since the vaccine decrease the risk of replication, it decrease the risk of you becoming contagious and spreading the virus to other people. So if everyone around you is vaccinated, the risk of someone becoming contagious goes down compared to a group who is not vaccinated since unvaccinated people stand a smaller chance of fighting off the replication process before it can start.

HIV and covid are two very different kinds of infections but some similarities can still be used to explain.

A person with HIV who is properly treated cant infect others. The HIV virus do still lurk deep inside the person and require daily meds to be kept in check. But what the meds do is that they kill the replication process of the virus. So the viral load is so insignificant that it becomes harmless. Both to the infected person and to people who come in contact with the persons blood and semen. Essentially.

My biggest piece of advice is learn what the vaccine actually does.

No, I don't mean the end result of "reduces severity of illness". I mean, on a biological level, what happens when you are vaccinated, what happens when you're infected, and how the two end up interacting.

The exact outcomes that do and don't occur from vaccination make so much more fucking sense when you understand the underlying workings.

It's misinformation, but it's misinformation with the context of trying to talk through an anti-vaxxer's logic of "if you get the virus through the vaccine, then what's the point of the vaccine?". It's protection against getting the virus, but also protection against severe symptoms should you get a breakthrough case. The long and short of it is to help our Healthcare infrastructure from collapsing.

CommonGrackle posted...

I feel like many of them are talking past one another.

I was led to believe the vaccine will prevent me (at least to a very significantly high degree) from getting sick from the virus, period. I don't know where some are getting this idea that "you might still get sick when you get a vaccine but at least it will prevent you from spreading it to other people". No I thought everyone has to take steps to protect themselves, not protect other people from them.
But maybe TC can clear this up for me.

The best way to think about it (while still keeping it simple) is that the vaccine provides your immune system with a "training dummy" it can practice against, so that when the real covid virus comes, it's prepared.

New variants won't exactly match the dummy, but they'll still resemble it. That's why the vaccine still has an effect, but less of one, against new variants.Boosters provide a larger quantity of dummies, and your immune system responds by preparing a larger contingent of "soldiers". That's why they can help - they don't result in your immune system being trained more accurately, but they basically just use the "throw even more in the virus's way!" strategy (and indeed, are not as optimal as an updated vaccine would be - but they're still much better than nothing).

You infect other people when the virus cells that have infected and reproduced in your body, enter someone else's body in sufficient quantity. If your immune system is killing them off more effectively, you emit less, and therefore have a reduced chance of infecting someone else. That's where the part about vaccines reducing transmission comes from - but they do not, at least in the present form, train your immune system well enough to eliminate the chance of you infecting anyone else, only enough to reduce it.