No, the Covid vaccine won’t save you
First things first: This is not an anti-vaxx post. Vaccines have a documented record of saving lives in numbers unknown ever before in history.
What is a vaccine?
A vaccine is really an evolution of the antidote of yore. You fear dying of a substance, so you take small shots of it to make yourself immune to its effects in the body. Most of us have heard stories of anxious kings ingesting low doses of poison just so a real future poisonous rendezvous won’t be fatal. The English language has reserved the word ‘Mithridate’ — from the Greek legend of Mithridates — to refer to an antidote to a poison, recalls F Gonzalez-Crussi in his classic on the history of medicine.
The practice of antidote would later emerge as variolation (smallpox was called ‘variola’) before Edward Jenner announced his breakthrough with vaccination.
Jenner used a cowpox injection to vaccinate people against smallpox (the latin word for cow being ‘vacca’). Incidentally, one of the more famous vaccines that we would have all taken in our childhood — BCG, for tuberculosis — was also derived from the cow.
How does it work?
So the basic idea behind a vaccine is to prime your immune system. The human immune system has two lines of defense — innate and adaptive. The former includes the front-line barriers like skin, secretions like saliva and tears, and the army of white blood cells (WBCs, as they show up on your blood tests). Some of these white blood cells — specifically B and T — participate in adaptive immunity and are the focus of any vaccination. The vaccine — being either an inactive Cov-2 virus, or a non-lethal dose of the active pathogen, or an instruction pack to create one from the virus’ RNA (mRNA vaccine) — must provoke response from the human body’s B and T cells (to create proteins called antibodies; to create a memory of the invader for life; and to summon help from T cells to destroy that invader).
So that is really all that any vaccine can do for you — try to alert your immune system to recognize a virus as an invader; summon help from ‘killer’ cells to engulf and mark the virus for extermination; and provoke other white cells to create an inflammation in your body to throw out the invader (think nasal discharge, aches, swelling and the like as signs of inflammation). This is active immunity; you can also be injected with antibodies from an immune person to form what is called passive immunity.
Why it may not work, but what surely will
Long story short, it is your immune system that will save you — not the vaccine. Some colleagues and friends seem to be thinking of the vaccine as an elixir, imbuing the inoculated to ‘get back to lax ways’. Think of it instead as a life-saving idea shared by your EA on the morning of your crucial presentation to the Board. It now makes for a very persuasive pitch, but it’s still you who has to present and persuade the Board to go along with your recommendation.
So what could make the vaccine not work in some people? Precisely the same way that a brilliant idea may be missed or not presented in its full glory by a sub-optimal CEO. In vaccination analogy, that would be someone with a compromised immune system. Barring those who, for unfortunate reasons, acquire immune disorders from their parents, a lot of us corporate types, leading sedentary, armchair lifestyles render our immune systems deficient over time.
How would you recognise one? Ask yourself: are you on any medications consistently or frequently? How often have you had to pop an antibiotic or take an antiviral in the last 12 months? How often do you fall prey to changing weather? Are you able to enjoy 8–9 hours of relaxing sleep, daily? Is your food intake feeding your microbiome or just your taste buds? Have you noticed above-threshold levels of simple inflammatory markers (like C-reactive protein) in your blood tests? How much time and with what intensity are you stressing your mind and body every week? Do you suffer from chronic anxieties and/or aches? In the answers to those questions lies the saviour.
Disclosure and any possible conflict of interest: I am not a doctor. Nor do I hold any degree in medicine. I do not hold any positions in pharma companies or their equities. And this is not a prescription, but a lay person’s attempt at demystifying health concerns relevant to senior corporate executives.
