Vaccines work. Get over it fast.

 

accines work.

   It’s not a matter of opinion. It’s an objective scientific fact. A virus cannot be destroyed except by eliminating its ability to reproduce. You cannot kill a virus because it is not a whole living organism. Unlike bacteria, a virus doesn’t eat, you cannot starve it to death.  It doesn’t reproduce sexually so there’s no way to make it infertile. It does not have intelligence so there’s no way to influence its behavior.

   So the only way to stop it from multiplying is to disrupt the biochemical mechanism by which it copies itself. Our immune system does this by directly dismantling the cluster of proteins that make up a virus. This is conventional one-one-one combat on a subcellular level. Unfortunately, the immune system is limited by the  resources of the finite individual cells that make our bodies. On the other hand,  sky is the limit in the growth and reproduction  of viruses.  In a population competition, our disease-fighting antibodies get overwhelmed if it’s a purely numbers game.

  Enter modern genetics technology. The idea sounds unbelievably simple. You don’t have to destroy the whole virus—just its DNA—that pesky double helix of organized molecules that carry the blueprint of future copies of the same protein.  Scientists have discovered a way of adding new sequences to that chain that effectively tells the protein it has become stable enough to remain inert permanently—ergo, to stop reproducing until it’s simply metabolized away.  In other words, the viruses’ DNA is deprogrammed not unlike the way software hackers introduce “patches” of new programming code in a computer software   to disrupt and change the way a computer program executes.

   It’s all done in virtual laboratories where the battleground is the software simulator. This is why it took scientists no more than a year to produce a testable vaccine. They were not playing around with the virus itself, trying to coax it into benevolent mutation in a petri dish and counting on the virus to cooperate.  They were just mapping its genome sequence to find the right spot to paste that patch of new destructive genetic code.

   Scientists have been doing this for years. Genetically modified organisms have been around for decades, especially as food for human consumption. From featherless chicken that need no dressing and go straight from farm to freezer, tank-grown  fish that reach maturity in less than 45 days and chicken eggs that scramble and go over easy but would never hatch into chicks. There are seedless varieties now of almost any fruit you could think of—orange, watermelon, strawberry, cucumber--you name it.

   The public uproar over GMO’s has all but vanished, not necessarily due to the death of outrage, but more because of unwitting public acceptance  fueled by consumption. The bread you ate this morning for breakfast was baked with flour from wheatfields that were no longer pollinated by bees, and you couldn’t care less.

   If your objection to vaccines is because of the genetic engineering component involved in its production, then you’re placing your sentimental empathy for organic vegetables,  natural poultry and livestock on the same pedestal as some unexplainable  concern for the health and well-being  of deadly viruses.

   And that is just plain absurd.Ⓒ 2021 Joel R, Dizon