Right Angle: Backstage (01-11-2022)

More likely you are misinterpreting what I’m saying. And I never said it was a traditional vax. I’m talking about how it works, not how it is made. When I say it causes your body to “make” the vaccine, I’m saying it provides instructions to your cells to produce the spike proteins that serve the same purpose old-school vaccines do. The purpose of a vaccine is to prime, or train your immune system to recognize and neutralize a virus, regardless of how it is produced.

So the mRNA vaccines are NOT the spike protein(s) themselves. The mRNA vaccines are basically instructions to your cells to produce the spike proteins. And not one specific spike, but several of the spikes on the target virus, and a virus can only mutate so much before it becomes non-viable. It doesn’t change very many of them at a time. They’re still like 99%+ similar in structure. Therefore your body can likely still recognize some of the spikes on a variant that it was not specifically developed for. It won’t be AS effective, but it will still slow the virus down some while your body figures out some how to adapt to more of the spikes. Far better than if your body had never been exposed to those proteins.

And that’s what it’s really all about. Slowing the virus down enough to allow your immune system to overwhelm it before it overwhelms you.

We’re getting a little picky about semantics here. I’m using the word “killing” here in a loose sense. You can kill time, kill processes, there are kill switches … if you prefer we can use the term “neutralize” but ultimately I mean neutralizing and getting rid of it — pretty sure that’s how most people read it.

“The vaccines never put out a “force field” around you.”

That is pretty much a re-phrasing of exactly what I said. That was really half of my my point. A lot of people have this idea that a vaccine keeps you from being infected, when in fact, it really just “trains” your immune system so it is able to fight it faster. Depending on the virus and the vaccine and your immune system, you may or may not develop symptoms — but you still get infected. But it’s not exactly correct to say the vaccine didn’t “work”, even if you get somewhat sick. The only way the vaccine didn’t “work” is if it didn’t cause your body produce antibodies. The rest is up to … your body.

And yes, naturally acquired immunity is more effective at neutralizing a virus than vaccines … but of course the point of the vaccine is — you don’t have to get ill, perhaps very ill … to acquire at least some immunity from it. It gives your immune system a leg up on it (I know, your immune system doesn’t *actually* have legs).
T-Cells and memory B-Cells are specialized antibodies that remain in your system when the main army of antibodies your body produced is sent home Essentially they disappear after a while … your body gets rid of them. It’s too “expensive” to keep producing them all your life. But not the T-Cells and memory B-Cells. Together they enable you to recognize the virus and contain the blueprints for making antibodies for those protein structures again. Your body keeps a few of those around – and at that point the virus is no longer “novel” to your body. It’ll recognize it faster and crank up the antibody production factory faster next time it sees it (I know your immune system can’t actually “see”).
Yes, all of the stuff you said about the structure of the virus is true, and UV light, and such things as unfriendly humidity and temperature will … I’m going to say it again, “kill” the virus by making it ineffective. But it’s irrelevant to what I’m saying.