Vaccines: The Endemic
Vaccines have been one of the most important scientific discoveries in history, preventing more than 2.5 million deaths each year, according to The World Health Organisation. The principle of vaccines is to recreate the natural immune response to a disease, without infecting the individual. It is due to worldwide and sustained vaccination efforts that smallpox has been eradicated, and the prevalence of diseases such as polio , measles , and tetanus dramatically reduced . Currently, it is a systematic vaccination programme which has reduced the risk of death and serious illness due to coronavirus, and it is the coronavirus vaccine that I will primarily be discussing in this blog. However, to understand the how vaccines work, we must first understand the mechanism behind an immune response, and I’ll use the analogy of a night club security team to help me explain. Normally, when a harmful foreign molecule enters the body, it is met by the body’s bouncers, called an ant...