I straddle two worlds – the world of science and the world of yoga and organic food. The voices in the first are steadfast in their support for vaccines in general – and the recently developed Covid vaccines in particular. The yoga and organic food crowd, sometimes not so much. I’ve heard a lot of criticism of Big Pharma since the pandemic began. Here’s the thing, these are not the droids you’re looking for.

Vaccines are like exercise for your t-cells

When you want to grow your muscles, you lift weights. To build the most and best muscles in the least amount of time without hurting yourself in the process, you might hire personal trainer to guide you through the exercises. You would never say that exercising like this is an “artificial” way to build muscles! You would never say “well, if you want to lift something heavy, you shouldn’t build up your muscles. Just get an electric-powered lift.”

That’s crazy talk.

A vaccine is like a personal trainer for your immune system. The vaccine helps your immune system prepare to fight off a virus. It’s pretty much as natural a way of fighting illness as you can get. Yes, you could just “fight off the virus naturally” – except that viruses are very good at what they do, and too often “fighting them off naturally” doesn’t end well. Just ask relatives of the 200,000 people who died of measles in 2020 because they weren’t vaccinated.

The dangers of letting nature take its course

Viruses have evolved to trick the body’s immune system into ignoring them. Vaccines teach those T cells and red blood cells to see through those tricks and do their job anyway. In a way that might make you sick, but is vastly less likely to kill you.

Vaccines have been carefully crafted by very dedicated, very smart people to keep people from being hurt, from dying, from suffering. A vaccine is enough like the virus so your body learns to fight when a real one shows up, but not enough like the virus that it kills you. You might get a fever, or feel crappy for a few days, but that’s a pretty small price to pay.

P.S. If you want to learn more about vaccines and vaccine development, see this blog post (in Main Entrees).

Vaccines are not like that electrical lift

I understand if you’re up in arms about Big Pharma for being elite money corporate colluding to make big money off the backs of  sick people. But vaccines are not the boogyman. They’re not cheating and they’re not dangerous.

You know what is that boogeyman? For-profit insurance companies with zero incentive to lower costs, and lots of incentives to promote expensive treatments (i.e. medications) whether or not they’re effective.  Expensive drugs for chronic conditions, and a medical/healthcare system that’s set up to slap a bandaid on what ails you instead of figuring out what’s gone wrong to cause your high blood pressure/high cholesterol/name-your-favorite-ailment here.

Drugs have their place. So do lifestyle changes.

Not everything can be cured with better nutrition, more exercise, less stress. But a lot of things can. So if you’re going to beat up on Big Pharma, take a hard look at where there are other, better options. Advocate for universal health care. And doctors who have time to listen to your history and figure out what is going wrong and how to fix it. And food regulations designed to make sure what you eat is good and good for you. Get involved in and work to improve those things, for sure.

Please, don’t spend your finite energy bashing one of the most amazing miracles of modern medicine. Go get your Covid vaccine, so you can stay healthy to fight the good fight against real evils.