Vaccines ‘Overload’ the Immune System?

Dec 14 2024 The New York Times
Updated - Dec 24 2024 The New York Times
Updated again - Jan 14 2025 The New York Times

There is a piece in the Times about the claims that vaccines overload the immune system. Like it says in the piece, they very clearly do not, especially the modern ones which are used in the 21st century. The link is below. Well worth the few minutes it takes to read it. Definitely worth more than the algorithm driven, brain rot inducing, stuff on social media.

Are Childhood Vaccines ‘Overloading’ the Immune System? No.

*****

And here is the Dec 24 update, which ends with a quote about the causes of autism; “Whatever it is, it’s not vaccines.”

Research Finds Vaccines Are Not Behind the Rise in Autism. So What Is?

*****

Update on Jan 14 2025.

Even Adults May Soon Be Vulnerable to ‘Childhood’ Diseases

“Outbreaks among the unvaccinated are a predictable consequence of falling immunization rates. But even vaccinated adults may be vulnerable to some illnesses.”

*****

Looks like some people did not learn anything from the pandemic.

What would the Covid death toll be by now, without the vaccines? The latest numbers, I think, were over seven million deaths, and over seven hundred million cases. And those numbers are as ‘low’ as they are, because we had the very rapidly developed effective vaccines. Those vaccines saved lives, most likely tens of millions of lives across the globe.

We may need another pandemic to hammer the message home. Bird flu, m-pox, zika, ebola or marburg, or maybe one from the “good old times, when everything was better”, polio, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, cholera or smallpox, or if these are not bad enough, what about The Plague? What will it take for some people to “wake up and smell the coffee”?

The argument that we are somehow “overloading the immune system” is, in my humble opinion, not very thought through, to put it mildly.

We humans, as a species, originally developed in the African jungle. And for tens of thousands of years we lived in caves or huts or communal round houses or other similar places, none of which are exactly known to be clean and hygienic living environments by today’s standards.

You do not have to go too far back in time, when we all were still using outhouses or were living on farms with animals, or in cities with open sewers. During the hot summer of 1858 the great city of London basically came to a standstill due to The Great Stink; the overwhelming stench that radiated from the surface of the River Thames. The river was described at the time by none other than Michael Faraday as “a real sewer”.

If anything, instead of “overloading” the immune system, we in the developed world at least, are “underloading” the immune system. The clean and hygienic environment we live in now, is not the environment our species, including our immune system, developed in. Our bodies developed in an environment where we constantly came into contact with all kinds of pathogens, and our immune system developed to fight those pathogens to keep us healthy and alive.

We are definitely not overloading our immune system with the historically ultra clean environment we live in, or with the extensively researched and tested 21st century vaccines which have far fewer antigens (bits of pathogens) than the previous ones.

We do have more allergies and autoimmune diseases today than “in the good old days”, and one dominant idea is, that our environment is too clean. Our immune system developed to constantly fight pathogens around us, and now that the pathogens are not there anymore, our immune system attacks something it thinks is a pathogen, but which is not, and the result is an autoimmune disease.

We are still the same creatures we were “in the good old days”, but our environment is drastically different. The development in the last hundred or so years has been unprecedented in human history, but we humans, as a species, are still the same creatures we were thousands of years ago.

Evolution is slow, our genes do not radically change from one generation to the next, any fundamental change takes hundreds or thousands of generations. So, we as a species stay pretty much the same as the generations before us.

But if you look at the environment we live in, we definitely have changed it, and we have changed it very fast, and not that long ago. The last naturally occurring Smallpox case was in 1977, and the disease was declared eradicated in 1980. That is not ancient history, that was just over 40 years ago. Two generations ago, or one and a half, in today’s standards.

We still also have polio. We are close to eradicating it, but because of wars and instability, we are not there yet. Measles, chickenpox, mumps and other previously common childhood diseases have not been eradicated, but are kept in check with vaccination programs.

Maybe the whole issue here is the two words in that sentence, “previously common”. Since we do not have first hand experience with these diseases, we start to think that they are not that serious, a mere inconvenience and not something that could potentially kill you.

Then again, I do not think anyone actually really wants to have that first hand experience. My own grandmother was one of eight siblings, of which only two lived long enough to have children of their own, the other six succumbed to the “previously common diseases”. And on top of that, she lost two of her own children to what we today call “preventable diseases”.

Preventable with vaccinations, that is. Her generation had personal experience with these diseases, and saw that vaccines really saved lives. To them this was a question of life and death, and vaccinations were the obvious rational choice. They saw vaccination programs fundamentally change the world they lived in, and the scientists who developed the vaccines, and the doctors who administered them were highly respected.

It is a fact that there are more autoimmune diseases today than before, and maybe there are more diagnoses of autism as well, and that is not just the case of better diagnostic methods. But, rather than blaming thoroughly researched vaccines, and spending money on trying to prove that already debunked science and bogus theories are valid, maybe we should instead use the money to research how the radically changed environment we live in today has affected how our immune system works.

Like it or not, it is a fact that vaccines save lives.

(Maybe if I wrote it in ALL CAPS, it would work better.)