How do Vaccines work?

1. The First Vaccine ever used: In the year 1796, a scientist called Edward Jenner injected material from a cowpox virus into an 8 year old boy. Successfully the vaccine provided the protection needed to save people of the smallpox virus to the boy and vaccines started to be used.

2. Adaptive immunity: It is composed of B Cells and T Cells, both type of cells fight microbes and record information about them, remembering how the microbes looked like and how to fight them in case they invade the body again. But this remembering process takes time making vaccines needed to make our bodies able to fight the disease faster.

3. Subunit Vaccines: This other type of vaccine is made of only a part of the pathogen, the antigen, by isolating components of antigens, these vaccines can prompt specific responses.

4. DNA Vaccines: To make this new type of vaccine, scientists isolate the very genes that make the specific antigens the body uses to trigger its immune response to pathogens. Those genes of the vaccine, instruct cells to make the antigen causing a stronger immune response.

5. How does the immune system defends us against diseases?: Our immune system triggers a series of responses to identify and remove foreign microbes like coughing, sneezing, inflamating or geting fevers which trap, deter and rid the body of threatening microbes.

6. Live attenuated Vaccines: This is a type of vaccine which are made of the pathogen itself, but in a much weaker version. Unfortunately, people with weak immune systems can't have this vaccine.

6.1. Inactive Vaccines: This other type of vaccine is composed of the killed pathogen ensuring that the pathogen doesn't develop into the full disease. Unfortunately these vaccines don't create a long-lasting immunity.