The last few weeks, we’ve been discussing some of the complicated history and science surrounding vaccination and immunity. The strategic and targeted defensive strategies employed by the immune system are by no means perfectly impregnable, but they represent several millennia of evolution under fire. Pathogens have always had a leg up on multicellular organisms—evolving more quickly and chaotically, unburdened by the constraints of form and function. They aren’t very sophisticated, but in terms of sheer brute force, there are already more viruses on earth than there are stars in the entire universe. We are besieged on all sides by these…
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As we finally exit the long slog that was 2020 and enter the new year, the topic on everyone’s mind right now is vaccination. With the recent FDA approval of both the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines, many of our long-standing questions and concerns about vaccination have come to the forefront of public consciousness—especially since these new vaccines are pioneering a relatively novel method of vaccination. Vaccination itself may seem like a relatively recent endeavor, a product of 20th-century science and public health initiatives. And while the first laboratory-concocted vaccine wasn’t created until 1879, the legacy of vaccines and inoculation against…
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