This write-up has been a long time coming, but my inertia (laziness) towards actually writing anything was finally broken by the recent spate of posts (from well-meaning individuals) proudly announcing their vaccination and celebrating a path to normalcy, hopefully in the near future.
At this point, I ask you the question: does normalcy mean a return to health, or are you okay with papering over cracks just so things ‘appear’ normal? The vaccines, while certainly reducing mortality rates, may just be doing the latter.
Warning: I tend to write long posts, and this is no different.
Let’s start with a few basics first. An infection is a pathogen (say an intruder) entering your body and getting past the basic barriers (skin / mucosal / etc). It doesn’t matter if your body has seen this intruder in the past or not, it’s still an infection.
Symptoms appear when the infection is detected and the immune system responds. Now whether the symptoms worsen or get better depends on the robustness of the response, and also the ability of the immune system to distinguish between the intruder and cells that actually belong to the body (you do want to avoid collateral damage while you kill the intruders).
All of this will work if the immune system has created the necessary protection mechanisms: the acclaimed B and T cells you hear about in the media (in addition to other terms like interleukins, cytokines, etc). But what are B and T cells?
Let’s say there’s a fugitive on the loose in your area of the city. You have police cars patrolling the streets, carrying a snapshot of the person. If they find him, they will nab him and take him to the precinct for further processing. These patrol cars are the B cells, and the precinct is your lymph nodes. The streets they are patrolling is your bloodstream. And the actual act of ‘nabbing’ is done by antibodies. All well and good.
But what if he’s hiding in one of the homes (your cells)? Well, there’s a specialised killer SWAT team that searches the homes, and they are carrying a snapshot for reference too. The only difference is that if they find a home with him inside, they won’t just extract the person, they will burn the house down. This SWAT team is your cytotoxic T cells, and homes being burned are your cells infected with the virus. Here’s where collateral damage control becomes important. Especially if the cells are among those forming the thin lining in your lungs. Damage to these cells will essentially allow fluid to fill in (hence the term ‘drowning’ to describe some of the extreme pulmonary effects of Covid).
The final piece of the puzzle? That ‘snapshot’ that the teams were using came from a previous encounter with the same intruder. In pathogen terms, it means your body actually had the infection in the past, or a vaccine gave your body the snapshot that ‘best resembled’ the intruder.
All of the above works adequately only if the police force is staffed and armed AND the snapshot is accurate (imagine the damage if the snapshot resembled an innocent citizen). The same applies to your immune system. The mechanism used for the snapshot and the work done by T cells, B cells, etc are ALL carried out through various proteins. Making millions of these requires adequate protein, energy and time (hence the two-week period). Even with these present, you also need to give the immune system the ability to focus the proteins and energy on the task at hand without being distracted by inflammation issues elsewhere. Add to this the possibility that the snapshot may ‘change’ (mutations) and you get an idea of the complexity the immune system has to deal with.
The good part is the immune system is incredibly evolved and can figure things out (except for cases like cancer, HIV, etc, and I will make detailed posts/videos on that later). The only thing your immune system demands is “give me the necessary nutrients and don’t get in my way”.
The unfortunate reality that the Covid virus exposed is the fact that most of the population has elevated inflammation levels and compromised immune systems. Not to mention such poor nutrition that the amino acid pool needed for the work described above is barely being met. Combine the two, and you have a situation ripe for a pandemic.
So yes, celebrate the vaccines, but also demand the information that will lead you towards true health. Because at the end of the day it’s your immune system that decides the success of society’s return to normalcy.
PS: Hopefully, I have also explained why being vaccinated doesn’t mean that cases won’t still occur (and could spike). The ability to fight an infection or avoid serious symptoms or avoid passing the pathogen to someone else is extremely specific to an individual.