# Coronavirus COVID-19 (2019-nCoV) Thread - 2020 Breaking News **URL:** \ **Category:** The Quarantine Zone\ **Tags:** covid-quarantine\ **Created:** [February 11, 2020, 1:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-covid-19-2019-ncov-thread-2020-breaking-news/847758 "2020-02-11T01:16:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 6177
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2020, 7:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-covid-19-2019-ncov-thread-2020-breaking-news/847758/6177 "2020-12-20T19:11:37Z")
The other part of why it’s hard for a pathogen to evolve to evade the vaccines is that they don’t just give us neutralizing antibodies. With mRNA and DNA vaccines in particular, which induce the host cell to manufacture spike protein inside the cell, there is likely also a strong response from the adaptive **cell-mediated** immune system. This is the coolest part of the immune system, because your cells effectively _encrypt_ the antigens they encounter, and induce an adaptive T-cell response to anything that looks wrong (non-self) in the _encrypted_ form. And the encryption key varies very widely among humans. So if spike mutates to evade one human’s cell-mediated immunity, that evasion strategy may not work for any of the next 10 humans it encounters. I dug up an old post I wrote about this here. > [@How do antibodies work?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-antibodies-work/773945/7): > > There’s another really cool part of the story: antigen “encryption” by the immune system. In addition to the antibodies produced by B-cells, part of the adaptive immune response is mediated by T-cells that recognize antigens through receptors on their surface. These T-cell receptors have the same range of random diversity in antigen specificity (generated by V(D)J recombination) as antibodies. However, T-cell receptors do not recognize “raw” antigen. They recognize carefully processed ant… --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-covid-19-2019-ncov-thread-2020-breaking-news/847758)._