Vaccinations: What You Need To Know

Vaccines are our best way to protect against some infectious diseases like COVID-19 and the flu.

Why are vaccines important?

The development of vaccines has been an amazing scientific invention which helps to protect humans and animals from getting sick by the pathogens that cause infectious diseases. Vaccines keep us safe from getting severely sick from contagious diseases and overall maintain family and community health. Through vaccinations and immunization programs implemented worldwide, we have been able to clear out many dangerous diseases such as smallpox and polio from our society.

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What exactly is a vaccine and how are they made?

Vaccines are agents that expose you to a minor version of a pathogen that can cause an infectious disease and encourage your own body to begin building a natural immunity against the dangerous disease. Vaccines allow your body to form resistance against the infectious disease and to produce the right type of immune response so that you don’t get sick. There are different types of vaccines and how they are made varies depending on the targeted pathogen and disease.

6 types of vaccines

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Inactivated Vaccines

To prompt your immune system and to create a response towards a virus or bacteria, some vaccines can be made using an inactivated pathogen. This means that the viral particle or bacteria is first inactivated so that it can no longer infect others or replicate but is still intact so that your immune system is able to recognize it. This allows your body to develop a response against the pathogen and be ready if it does encounter the active pathogen. Examples of inactivated vaccines are the polio vaccine and seasonal flu vaccines.

Live Vaccines

Live vaccines are created by taking the pathogen that normally infect humans and to make it infect cells from other animals causing it to become weaker and weaker. After a certain point, it is introduced to humans again in the form of vaccines and can be used to prompt an immune response. As it has weakened, it will not cause an infection in humans nor will it make you sick but will still be recognized by the immune system. As this is a live pathogen, the immune response is quite powerful and usually, one to two doses of the vaccine should be enough for a lifetime of protection. Common live vaccines are the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR), smallpox and chickenpox vaccines.

mRNA vaccines

mRNA is a molecule that your body’s cells use as an instruction manual to create helpful substances that allow us to continue with our day-to-day functions. mRNA vaccines use that natural system to ask our cells to create small substances that belong to a pathogen instead of our own cells. Once our own bodies create this, our immune system recognizes parts of the pathogens as foreign and begins to prepare an immune response to protect against it. As it is only a small substance that is created, we do not have the actual pathogen in our bodies and so we are not infected. However, if we do encounter the real pathogen, our bodies will be able to instantly recognize it and defend ourselves. mRNA vaccines have been used for protection against COVID-19.

Conjugate Vaccines

Toxoid Vaccines

With some bacterial illnesses, the disease is actually a result of substances that the bacteria releases called toxins instead of being caused by the actual bacteria itself. Therefore, it is important to prime your immune response towards the toxin rather than the bacteria so that it can prevent the toxin from making you sick. Toxoid vaccines help achieve this. By exposing you to an inactive version of the toxin, these vaccines help prepare your body to stop the toxin and avoid some of the harmful symptoms that it can cause. Examples of toxoid vaccines are tetanus shots and diphtheria.

Viral Vector Vaccines

Similar to mRNA vaccines, a viral vector vaccine is a modified weaker version of a different virus called a vector which can be used to deliver instructions to our cells and produce proteins and particles that can be found on the surface of the virus that causes infection. The surface substances can be recognized by our cells and to begin forming an immune response towards the actual virus. The vector is removed from our cells after the immune response is created so the vaccine does not cause an infection.

Are there risks to taking vaccines?

Vaccines help us to prevent getting infectious diseases and keep us from getting sick. However, many people worry about the risks associated with vaccines more than they worry about the risks associated with getting infected. Vaccines have been used for many decades and safety standards during the development of vaccines are very strict. This causes the vaccines that we are able to take to be very safe for our bodies. Upon receiving a vaccine, you may feel soreness in your arm if you received an injection, or tired and a bit sick.

But rest assured that this is not caused by the ingredients of the vaccine but instead, it means that the vaccine is working! When our immune system is active, it is using our energy to create a response which causes us to feel unwell. However, this is usually mild and will subside after a few days. There is a lot of misinformation about vaccines that is spread through the media. Please see our Vaccines Myth page where we will address some myths about vaccinations!

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How to talk about vaccines

Vaccines are important tools in our community that can help us stay protected against a variety of infectious diseases. How do we communicate this to others with compassion and empathy? Please feel free to explore our resource section to learn more about vaccines and how to discuss them with others around you.

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Fun facts to help talk about vaccines

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Vaccines are safe and important tools that we can use to prevent infectious disease.

Vaccines are one of the most notable tools developed in modern medicine and can be used to prevent us from getting sick from many infectious diseases. Vaccines can be used to create something called herd immunity in our community and that disrupts the pathogen’s ability to transmit from one host to another as our bodies are able to respond to the pathogen more effectively. This can be used to completely eradicate diseases from our society such as we have been able to accomplish for smallpox and polio.

Vaccines naturally encourage your body to create its own immune response.

Vaccines do not have long term effects as they are usually very targeted

Since vaccines prompt your own cells to create an immune response, they do not stay inside of our bodies for too long. Instead the immune response that is created is what persists and stays ready in case of encounter with an infectious pathogen. For this reason, vaccines do not have long term side effects in our bodies as it is cleared out quickly by our bodies and does not contain harmful ingredients. In our history of using vaccines, we have not seen any vaccine cause long term effects.

Vaccines do not contain harmful chemicals and are made following many safety protocols

The development of vaccines require a lot of steps which includes data collection, safety protocols and approval from science and ethics boards to ensure that they are effective and completely safe for individuals to take. If a vaccine is shown to have a lot of side effects or to contain ingredients that can cause harm, they are not approved and cannot be used. Rest assured that the vaccines that have been approved and are currently being used have passed all the appropriate checkpoints and do not contain any harmful or unsafe ingredients.

Bust vaccine myths

The way that vaccines work may be complicated and confusing to some people. This leads to a lot of misinformation spreading through different sources about vaccines in general. Please see our Vaccine Myths page as we address and debunk some of the most common myths and theories about vaccines.

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