Quote:
Originally Posted by coffeebean
Agree....I recall when the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were initially being developed, there was euphoria in the pharma community when they discovered the virus was "neutralized". This neutralization made the virus inactive and unable to replicate itself. Without that activity going on, humans could not become infected with the virus.
That is my take-away from reading several articles about the mRNA vaccines. Is this correct?
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The virus is nothing more than a chain of proteins. It's a snippet of biological code. All that it does is link with your cells and reprogram them to make more of itself and in the process your other systems become up or down regulated. The mis-regulation is what causes all the havoc.
The virus doesn't replicate itself. It cannot. You replicate the virus for the virus.
The Vaccine simply tells your body what to look for and neutralize it. In this case, the MRNA Vaccine is like a virus in that it reprograms your own cells to produce a spike protein that looks just like the virus.
Your body sees it, realizes it's not suppose to be there and starts to attack it. Since the spike protein you created doesn't do anything but make an appearance, you don't get sick. It trains your system what to look for.
This primarily done via t-cells. Killer t-cells come along and drop cytotoxins all over the viruses it spots. It's cellular level cyanide. There are also macrophages which are big blobs. They bump into viruses and surround them, engulf them like the blob and once inside they dissolve them.
With enough of an immune response, memory t-cells are created. These are what give you long lasting immunity. A new invader is spotted, if it matches what's in the "memory bank", anti-bodies for that particular pathogen are produced rapidly.
I'm vastly over simplifying the process here, but that's the gist of it.
The vaccine doesn't make you partially immune. It either works or it doesn't. It seems to work for about 95% of the people. If you are in the 95%, you're immune. You won't get a weak case, you simply won't get any case. You won't make more virus, you won't pass it on to anyone else.
The only slight issue here is the immune response in the nasopharynx(back of the nose). It is a bit on the "outside" so to speak and the immune response can be slower here. You theoretically could have an active infection here that may take some time to resolve. The idea is that maybe you could shed enough virus to still infect others but internally, in areas, like the lungs with tons of blood flow, your immune system will shut down any infection quickly. This is why they keep talking about wearing masks and whatever long after you are immune. It's a stretch, there simply isn't any data one way or another.
The amount of virus shed by someone who is fully infected with a lung full of infection is probably several orders of magnitude greater than what can be made in the nose. The likelihood that nasopharyngeal infection in a vaccinated person is enough to infect others is very very low. It's not zero though.