Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive

by Philipp Dettmer

they exist in much larger numbers. As we discussed before, your body makes only a few B and T Cells for every possible invader. Think back to our example of the dinner party with millions

So when an infection first occurs, you might have only a dozen cells that are able to recognize the antigens of the enemy that invades your body.

Just by pure numbers, the chances that if the same pathogen invades you again, one of your memory cells will be activated very early and catch the enemy very quickly are pretty high. All

There are diseases though that are able to destroy your immunological memory. To kill the memory cells that defend you. It is tragic that one of these diseases is currently making a huge comeback: Measles.

smallpox, it has made somewhat of a comeback in the last few years as more and more people decided to not vaccinate their kids against the virus.

Kids who overcome a measles infection have a higher chance of getting other diseases afterwards because the measles virus kills Memory Cells.

The measles virus is extraordinarily infectious—considerably more infectious than the novel coronavirus for example. Similar

Measles is targeting the actual, living, breathing memory part of your immune system and at the peak, millions, if not billions of your immune cells may be infected.

Luckily your immune system usually regains control of the situation and eradicates the measles virus. But the memory cells that were infected by the virus are dead and can’t be brought back.

So in the end, being infected with measles erases the capacity of the immune system to protect you from the diseases that you overcame in the past. Even worse, a measles infection can wipe away the protection that you might have gained from other vaccines,

most vaccines create memory cells. Therefore, in the case of measles, what does not kill you makes you weaker, not stronger. Measles causes irreversible, long-term harm and it maims and kills children.

In any case—this might be a good moment to talk a bit about a huge idea in our history. The idea to cause immunity without suffering a disease.

Hundreds of years before humanity knew about the microworld, before anybody knew about bacteria or viruses, someone came up with the method of variolation:

Up to 30% of all the people who contracted smallpox died, and many survivors had extensive scarring on their skin, leaving them disfigured, while as a horrible bonus, some permanently lost their eyesight.

but it was at the very least hundreds of years ago, in medieval China.

Different areas of the world practiced variolation in different ways, using needles or small cuts to rub in scabs or pus from infected people.

Still, variolation was not without risk with as much as 1–2% of all patients going through the procedure contracting a more serious version of smallpox, with all the potentially negative consequences.

The proper start of the history of vaccination was the realization that it was not necessary to variolate with the actual real smallpox disease, but much safer to use material from cowpox, which was a variant of smallpox that affected, surprise, cows. This

Today, vaccines provide immunity against a whole plethora of dangerous infections by creating Memory Cells that are ready to meet a specific pathogen in case it ever shows up for real.

So to make a good vaccine we somehow need to safely provoke an immune response to make the immune system think a real invasion is happening so it makes memory cells—but without accidentally causing the disease we want to protect ourselves against.

Passive immunity is basically the process of borrowing immunity against a disease or a pathogen from someone who survived something.

In the small world, a toxic substance is nothing more than a molecule that disrupts natural processes or causes damage by destroying or dissolving structures. Antibodies

So to basically cheat the system humans began producing antivenoms—which are nothing more than purified antibodies against the venom molecules that can be injected into the system of a person that got bitten!

Passive immunization also occurs naturally

certain antibodies can pass through the placenta and enter a fetus to give it the protection of its mother.

in a therapy called IGIV, for “ImmunoGlobulin IntraVascular” administration, Antibodies are collected from donated blood at blood banks, pooled together, and carefully infused into patients that suffer from immune disorders and are unable to produce Antibodies themselves.

If you administer Antibodies to someone, they will stay protected as long as the Antibodies are around. But this protective effect goes away as the Antibodies are either used up or decay through natural processes.

To really actively create immunity in people, we need to stimulate the immune system to create immunity by itself!

So the solution seems easy, all we need to do is to trick the body into thinking it is sick to become immune against all sorts of diseases!

So we must somehow safely provoke a proper immune response but avoid causing the actual disease we want to protect ourselves against. There are a few different ways to do this.

we put the real thing into our bodies, but a weak version of it.

The mechanism of how live viruses are weakened is pretty interesting because it is literally using evolution.

Weak and harmless and a pathetic version of its wild distant cousin. It still can grow and multiply but it is unable to cause a proper measles outbreak, while it still is provoking the same strong immune response as a real and dangerous measles infection would.

One to two rounds of this vaccine are enough to create enough memory cells in kids to protect them for the rest of their lives!

they have to be stored at the proper temperatures so the weak pathogens don’t die before they can be administered. And they can’t be used on people that are severely immunocompromised,

Using living pathogens is not always an option though. Just like you can’t domesticate great white sharks, some pathogens refuse to be tamed and

another method is to straight up kill the pathogen before injecting it, which is called an inactivated vaccine.

the immune system on edge, your immune cells will not be able to make the distinction but order the creation of memory cells. Unfortunately a number of people who don’t understand chemistry have deducted from this that vaccines are filled with poison, which could not be further from the truth. For one, the doses of these chemicals are laughably

small and usually only able to create a local reaction. And without them, the vaccine would not work.

subunit vaccines. Instead of injecting a whole pathogen, only subunits, or in other words, certain parts (antigens) of the pathogen, are used so they can more easily be recognized by T and B Cells—which is a very secure way of vaccinating, as it massively decreases the likelihood of an adverse reaction to the pathogen. (This is because sometimes it is not the pathogen directly who causes harm but their metabolic products, which is a nice way of saying “bacteria poop.”)

mRNA vaccines. The basic principle here is pretty genius,

it is basically making our own cells produce antigens that the immune system can then pick up. Remember mRNA, the molecule that tells the protein production facilities in your cells what proteins to make? Basically, you inject someone with mRNA that will make a few of your cells make viral antigens, which the cell then showcases to the immune system. The immune system is pretty alarmed by this and will create defenses against this antigen.

Despite the fact that vaccines protect us from some of the worst diseases humanity has suffered from, more and more people have stopped vaccinating their children.

The reasons for the anti-vaccine movements mistrusting vaccines are diverse, but in the United States and Europe

That vaccines are an artificial intervention into natural processes and that it is less dangerous ...

They create Memory Cells by triggering an immune reaction. But while pathogens do this by attacking the body and causing a huge amount of stress, which carries the very real risks of various long-term consequences including death, vaccines arrive at the same goal, without

Let’s be real, nothing in life is entirely without risk—but we can make educated decisions that are less risky and more likely to avoid damage. And in the case of vaccines, if you don’t make a decision your kids are automatically enrolled in “Nature Dojo.”

On top of everything else, vaccination is a sort of social contract that has benefits for all of us. If everyone that is healthy enough gets a vaccine for a disease, we are creating herd immunity, and are protecting everyone who is not able to.

Only the collective can protect these people from the diseases we vaccinate against. Herd immunity basically means that we immunize enough people against a disease so that it can’t spread and dies before it reaches its victims.

for measles, for example, 95% of the people need to be vaccinated to create efficient herd immunity.