i’ve been asked several times lately why so many people are against vaccination when they’re so clearly beneficial to our health and the answer is both surprisingly simple and painfully complex.
it’s easy to say the fault lies with the christian right and in many ways it does, a group that’s been pushing health disinformation for as long as the church has existed but more aggressively in the last couple of decades.
there’s far more to the issue than that, though. if that was the only underlying cause for antivax sentiment, it would only be the religious delusionals who had issues with vaccination but it’s spread to the general population, even across the political and social divides.
the real problem is that, when faced with blatant disinformation or religious nonsense, the vast majority of the general public doesn’t have any fundamental knowledge or understanding to fall back on. vaccines are relatively involved to create but that’s a job for researchers and technicians, not the general public. the difficulty comes with the fact that they are also somewhat confusing to understand and have never been well-explained to the public.
for the first two-hundred years of the history of vaccination, from the end of the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth, most people had a basic awareness that vaccines kept them and their children safe from a variety of diseases – smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella and most famously polio to name only a few. the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, saw people suddenly deciding that, not only didn’t they understand how vaccination worked, they weren’t going to accept them because they didn’t understand and were simply going to make stories up to convince everyone else not to accept them, either.
strangely, these same people present vaccination as a new idea, calling it “woke” or “liberal”. while there’s nothing wrong with woke ideas, vaccination came about only a decade after the american revolution in 1796. yes, that’s the eighteenth century, the century of bach and mozart’s music, not taylor swift and charli xcx’.
the eighteenth century brought a vaccine for smallpox and by the end of the nineteenth there were vaccines for rabies, cholera, tetanus, typhoid fever and the bubonic plague. benjamin franklin even founded a hospital (with thomas bond) where vaccines were administered only a few years after his death.
before the second world war, we had vaccines for tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough, yellow fever, typhus, the flu, anthrax and even one type of encephalitis (swelling of the brain).
if you’re a baby-boomer, your grandparents grew up in a world were vaccines were common and your parents were likely vaccinated against a variety of diseases before you were even born. the flu shot predates the first flight of a jet plane, indian independence and the end of segregation, not to mention the rise of america and the soviet union as superpowers or even the nazis declaring war on france.
having established that vaccination is actually more traditional than most modern medical techniques used in today’s clinics and hospitals, the larger problem is that people feel like they want to understand what’s happening to their bodies in healthcare scenarios without actually having the foundational knowledge to fit that knowledge into. which begs the question of what exactly needs to be understood to “get” the idea of vaccination.
for the simple version, very little.
imagine you’re a student in first grade looking at the question 3+5= but you don’t know the answer. someone could come along and whisper “8” in your ear and you’d be able to answer the question correctly but, if someone writes 7+2= on the board and asks you to answer it you won’t have any idea how. if they give you some samples and show you how to do simple addition, however, you’ll be able to figure out 7+2=9. you might not get every answer correct but you’ll have a good shot at it and you’ll probably be close even when you’re wrong.
in this example, the student is your immune system, the question is the virus, the answer is the treatment for the virus and learning addition is the vaccine.
what the vaccine does is gives your immune system a harmless way to practice fighting the virus before it has to actually do it. that means it might be able to do it properly when the time comes but, even if it doesn’t get it perfectly right, it will likely get close. you’ll either not get sick or at least have a much easier time recovering from a milder version of the virus.
that, of course, is a very simplistic explanation and doesn’t really give an understanding of how it works in your body. it’s accurate to a certain degree, though, and it’s probably all most people really need to know.
knowing that much, though, doesn’t insulate you from the disinformation floating around out there from the antivax crowd and, mixed with christian nationalism, that is a very powerful force. the only way to fight that disinformation is with a real understanding rather than an allegory, even one that explains it in an easily-comprehensible way. in other words, when someone says vaccines don’t work or vaccines make people sick instead of healthy, having a fairy-tale level of understanding doesn’t tell you why they’re wrong or stop you from believing their lies and, far worse, spreading them like an infectious disease, which is exactly what’s happening all over the western world.
the first step to understanding vaccination is to have an understanding of how infectious diseases are spread. practically speaking, you can think of an infection spreading by “pathogens” making their way from one body to another. it’s best to see this through an example most people are familiar with at least in part like the flu. if someone has the flu, it can be transmitted through the air or body fluids. the process is the same. you produce tiny bits of infected material and they are breathed out or deposited in your spit, mucus, urine, feces, blood and other materials coming from your body. that includes your sweat. so everything you touch and the air around you contains them. when someone else gets close to you or touches something you’ve come in contact with, coughed on, etc, those infected bits can pass to you. in the case of the flu, that usually happens by breathing the air or touching something then touching your face, allowing infection.
not every infection can be passed through every method. some require body fluid contact, others like hiv (the aids virus) are passed with only some fluids and not others so are far less likely to be caught. but the process is the same even if the specific material the infection is passed through differs. once it gets into your body, the infection makes contact with the part that’s susceptible to it. in the case of the flu, it gets into your respiratory system.
the next piece in the puzzle is to understand how your body tries to prevent infection. we call that the immune system. part of that system is that our body has an outside shield, the skin, that most infections can’t get through. that has holes in it, however, for breathing, eating, etc. if an infection passes the skin barrier – for example, if we breathe it in or swallow it – the main defense the body has is to attack the infection. there are various ways that can be done, the most commonly-experienced for most people being that we raise our internal temperatures to try to kill the infection. when that happens, we have a fever. most infections can only survive in specific temperatures so that’s often beneficial.
when our immune systems successfully beat an infection, they keep a record of how it was done. that’s an “antibody” or a key that can be used the next time that infection appears. a common example is that people frequently get chicken pox as children but only get it once or, if they get it again, it’s much milder. that’s because the body has “remembered” how to fight it from the first time, using the antibody.
that’s great if the infection is relatively harmless or mild but, if the infection causes serious damage or even death, the first time getting it might be enough or it may never be killed. chicken pox can certainly be fatal but that’s very rare. a virus like yellow fever, tetanus or anthrax, however, has a much greater chance of killing you or causing permanent harm even the first time so exposure isn’t a great solution to infection. that would be like drinking poison to train your body not to die from drinking poison.
that’s where vaccines come in.
the concept is relatively simple. instead of the actual infection, something else is put in your body to train the immune system, as if it was fighting the real infection. that way, if it ever comes in contact with it, it will be able to fight it more effectively, hopefully making sure you don’t actually get sick at all but at least minimizing the risk of potential damage. it’s not a guarantee but it works in most cases for most people, much like the child who learns addition will usually figure out that 4+5=9 but, even if they’re not correct the first time, they’ll know the answer isn’t going to be 5000 or -30 and that’s enough to get close. even when the vaccine doesn’t completely prevent the infection, having trained your immune system on something very similar, it should be able to adapt that antibody and fight the new infection more effectively than if it was starting from nothing.
while that is a good basic understanding of how vaccines work, it’s far from enough to get a handle on vaccine disinformation. for that, you need a list of other basic knowledge.
the first of those things is evolution. not every detail of evolution in practice but the general way it’s formed life for us and everything around us. if you don’t have a good grasp of evolution, infection, sickness, the human body and vaccination don’t really make sense for a variety of reasons. first, evolution is actually a fairly simple concept until you start looking at the specific details for individual species. it comes down to mistakes over time.
we are made of cells, tiny bits of material. each time a cell is duplicated, there’s a chance it could be slightly different from the original it was supposed to copy. if there’s no difference, that cell can be thought of as a clone or perfect duplicate. if there’s a difference, it’s an error. practically speaking, that error usually means the cell won’t work properly. if it does work, however, it might continue to make copies of itself with that change. if that change makes it work better than the original, the changed version might replace the original over time. if not, it might simply die out over time. that process, repeated over extremely long periods of time, is responsible for all life.
on a larger scale, however, humans and other animals don’t duplicate each other. they create new lives through reproduction – in other words, sex. when a new animal is born, it might have a tiny difference from its parents. if that difference makes it more successful in the wild, it will have babies of its own that might also share that trait. if it makes it less successful, it probably won’t pass that trait on because it won’t survive.
that sounds very theoretical so an example might help at both cellular and animal levels.
imagine a cell duplicates at one copy every second and almost always makes good copies. now let’s say one of those copies happens to have changed and can make ten copies of itself every second and they’re almost always good copies. that’s probably going to be a huge improvement and the new version will quickly grow in population compared to the old version.
but what if there’s very little food in the environment. the copies that duplicate very quickly will never be able to sustain themselves without starving so they might be successful at duplication but terribly adapted to their environment. they might burst onto the scene very quickly but will soon likely go extinct and be replaced again by the slow-duplicating original versions who don’t need nearly as much food to continue to survive.
looking at animals with obvious and well-known adaptations, think of a cat in the wild. it has many senses but the main one for finding food is its sense of smell. when a kitten is born, if it has a better sense of smell, it will probably survive much better in the wild without starving. it will also smell predators more quickly and be able to escape. that gives it a far better chance to reproduce and pass that sense of smell on to its children, who might even continue the trend and have better senses of smell.
these are tiny changes and don’t amount to much in a single generation but life on earth has existed for literal billions of years. even humans have lived thousands of generations. every tiny change contributes and they build over time to form the ecosystem we live in.
why this is significant to understanding vaccination is twofold. first, it explains how the infectious diseases are constantly adapting and changing. why new diseases keep appearing and old diseases change over and over to create new “strains” requiring new treatments and vaccinations to stay ahead of them.
second, it explains how animals (including humans) can adapt to our environments in different ways, allowing our immune systems to be different person to person despite us all being the same species.
it also gives us a good understanding of the next piece in the chain of understanding, that humans are only another species of animal, not something different.
while that may sound controversial to religious extremists, it’s not unsubstantiated or opinion. humans are part of an evolutionary system that includes all life on our planet and our bodies work the same way as those of dogs, horses and mice. that’s a very important concept to wrap your head around for many reasons but it helps with the question of vaccination because it explains where many of our viruses come from – the animals we share our world with. in fact, it’s estimated that 3/4 of new diseases are “zoonotic” – diseases that come to humans directly from other animals. we’re all familiar with names like “avian flu”, “rabies”, “ebola”, “malaria” or “mpox”, which all come from animals.
almost all animals can transmit diseases to humans but other mammal diseases may even make the jump without ever having been human diseases to start with because our biology is so similar. that’s the case of the bubonic plague, rabies and covid-19. understanding our connection with other species is necessary to see how these infections spread and what vaccination brings to the table. eliminating human viruses doesn’t fix the problem when new infections and variants are constantly popping up in the wild for us to deal with.
the final piece of the understanding puzzle is basic genetics – dna. dna is stored in every cell of a living organism and it was, in many ways, the gateway to sustainable life. once dna evolved, it allowed a cell to contain a blueprint for the creation of other cells within that organism. that means many things from a biological perspective but the important part to understand here is that our genetic material is where our evolutionary progress is stored. we get our dna from our biological parents and pass it to our biological children but it’s modified with every new generation. you have some of each of your parents’ combined in a new way and your children will have some of yours mixed with some of someone else’s in a new combination.
your dna, your genetic blueprint, is what allows your body to build itself in the uterus and it remains the same through your entire life. what is transmitted to your children, for example, is written in stone before you’re even born.
there are many things in your body determine by the dna itself and how that dna is expressed through your life, which changes over time. but the code itself remains. if your dna was read as you were taking your first breath then again on your hundredth birthday and every year between, the pattern would be the same.
the genetic makeup of an individual cell may be modified by an infection. that fact may sound frightening until you realize that the human body contains more than thirty trillion cells. that means that, if every person on earth counted a cell in your body every single day, it would take them more than ten years to get through just your body. in other words, the idea that your body’s dna will suddenly be altered by any substance, even an infection, is a scare tactic used against you because it’s hard to imagine just how big a change that would have to be.
our body is actually designed to stop genetic change. cells whose genetic material isn’t right are actively hunted and destroyed by our immune systems so strengthening our immune systems is actually the best way to ensure no possibility of genetic manipulation.
that is only a brief overview of the understanding needed to fight against vaccine disinformation but it’s a start.