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…
Comments closedTag: Vaccine
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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The last couple weeks we have discussed the importance of vaccines and anti-viral drugs—our arsenal of weapons against viral infection. This week, I want to zoom in a bit and specifically investigate what researchers are doing to develop tools to fight Covid-19. Currently, most people who are able to do so are staying home, in order to curb the spread of Covid-19. A vaccine, if it can get past clinical trials and be distributed to the general public, could allow for enough herd immunity for us to return to normalcy. But it takes a long time to verify that a…
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Last week, we went through some of the science of viruses: how they infect, how they evolve, and how they can make the jump from one species to another. This week, I want to touch on some of the ways the medical field combats viruses, such as with vaccines, used to promote immunity, and anti-viral drugs, used to treat viral infections and reduce their severity. In the past few months, researchers around the world have been scrambling to produce a vaccine or anti-viral treatment to curb the spread and mortality rate of Covid-19, producing results at record breaking speeds. But…
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