My parents - sigh - heard a quack on You Tube who claimed that when you get a vaccine but don’t have a disease, the vaccine, or maybe the antibodies, get stuck behind your heart valves or some stupid shit like that. Makes absolutely no sense, but they’re going further down the rabbit hole. However, my mother asked me what I thought and I figured there might be some factual answer that could be broken down in layman’s terms and not be really long and boring so she doesn’t think I’m “lecturing” her.
I’m not sure where else to find this information or what search terms to Google.
Here’s what Google told me, via the Oxford English Dictionary.
a blood protein produced in response to and counteracting a specific antigen. Antibodies combine chemically with substances which the body recognizes as alien, such as bacteria, viruses, and foreign substances in the blood.
They circulate all around but where they do the most good is in the the lymph nodes which are sort of the grand central stations of your adaptive immune system.
The primary function of lymph nodes is the filtering of lymph to identify and fight infection. In order to do this, lymph nodes contain lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell, which includes B cells and T cells. These circulate through the bloodstream and enter and reside in lymph nodes.[20] B cells produce antibodies.
I just got done reading a 300 page on the immune system for lay people. Even at that length there are parts where the writer says, “It’s more complicated than I’m willing to write about and you’re willing to read, but the gist is…”
The vaccine, if it’s one of the mRNA ones, tells your cells to build the spike proteins and then the mRNA breaks down and goes away. Your immune system attacks the spike proteins (that your cells built) with antibodies and learns how to destroy them. Then, when the spike protein that’s part of the COVID-19 virus shows up, your immune system knows how to defeat it before you get infected (or before you get too sick) by using the antibodies it created for this particular virus.
Your antibodies go wherever they normally go when you fight off a disease.
I am picturing heavy artillery battles by the immune system against the viruses, with massive explosions and heavy collateral damage among any hapless non-combatant cells nearby.
This might be a reasonable description of crude chemotherapy or radiotherapy.
To the contrary, the adaptive immune system is exquisitely specific. That’s why, when you’re vaccinated and already have antibodies surveilling for the specific pathogen, they will often eliminate it without you even knowing you were exposed to a potential infection.
They don’t really go anywhere in particular. They diffuse in body fluids until eventually your immune system destroys it. Then it gets broken down into smaller bits until eventually it gets excreted, the same as any other cell in your body.
No part of the vaccine remains in your body permanently. The only thing that remains is immune cell memory. When your immune system destroys the vaccine, it “remembers” how to do that. That’s what helps the body react faster the next time it sees the virus.
Some vaccines use dead or weak viruses. The COVID vaccine doesn’t use a whole virus, it just uses a part of a virus called the spike protein. The spike protein by itself can’t spike anything, like a finger can’t pick your nose unless it’s attached to a hand. The only purpose of the spike protein in the vaccine is to poke the immune system like a bee’s nest, so that the bees will be more ready to attack that enemy in the future.
I am deliberately leaving out the part about how mRNA works because that would probably be more information than your mom can handle until she has digested the basics.
Thanks for the replies. It is my understanding that the substance of the MRNA vaccine itself dissipates pretty quickly and just teaches the body to recognize part of the spike protein of this virus. Just wasn’t sure where the actual antibodies go. I think after a while you just have memory cells that can sound the alarm if they see the spike? It sounds like they mostly circulate in the blood. I think.
This is helpful. I guess it’s way more complicated than I even thought! I will reiterate to her that antibodies prompted from a vaccine would do the same thing as antibodies formed in response to an actual infection and that you’re way more likely to get myocarditis or other complications from actual infection than from the shot. She worries me!
She remembers how grateful her own mother was when the polio vaccine came out when my mom was a child. She KNOWS how important vaccines are. But she gets exposed to the misinformation. Ugh.
Let’s say your immune system is the military. The antibodies are essentially the trained anti-aircraft crews- radar and missile battery who know how to recognize and fight the enemy.
Killed virus vaccines are like having the wreckage of an enemy plane to look at and train your crews how to recognize and fight. Weakened virus vaccines are like having a captured plane. mRNA vaccines are a lot like getting blueprints for how to modify your own equipment to look like the enemy equipment (OPFOR style) so that you can train your AA crews to fight.
So when the modifications are done, and the troops are being trained, the blueprints are thrown in the trash with the rest of the paper (mRNA is used by your own body for various purposes as well, so we have natural built-in disposal mechanisms for it.)
Well, almost. The new neat trick that mRNA does is that it actually teaches your cells how to produce the spike protein. Your body then produces COVID proteins, and recognizes them as foreign, which triggers the immune response.
The actual antibodies break down and follow the same path as other proteins that the body no longer needs.
The information about how to make those antibodies… as you said, it resides in the memory cells. Those can be found everywhere in the body, but they’re concentrated in the immune system organs… bone marrow, lymph nodes, tonsils, places like that. (Also in blood circulation as you mentioned).
Adaptive, yes, but the innate immune system is a lot less discriminatory. The writer of the book I mentioned above, who has a knack for creating vivid analogies, described neutrophil-killer cells as an angry chimpanzee hopped up on coke with a machine gun. They can respond to a pathogen within minutes, utterly destroying it if there aren’t too many, but there is a lot of collateral damage.
I think a better analogy is the police looking for a criminal by using one of those “most wanted” posters. The vaccines are like wanted posters showing the cops who the bad guys are. The cops are your immune system. If they know who to look for ahead of time, they can stop the “criminals” AKA whatever virus the vaccine is for, before they commit any crimes / cause an illness.
Once the cops know who they are looking for, it doesn’t really matter what happens to the wanted poster / vaccine.
It isn’t a “new, neat trick” and it doesn’t “teach” anything. The mRNA vaccines work like viruses have since the first virus evolved - it introduces nuclear material that the cellular mechanism then uses to produce proteins. A virus will replicate entire new viruses, the mRNA vaccine will produce Covid-19 spike proteins (which is just a part of a virus). The cell does not “learn” anything, it just does what it already knows how to do (transcribe mRNA into protein), and once the mRNA is gone, it keeps working on mRNA from the cell nucleus.
The only new part of these vaccines is using a lipid nanoparticle to introduce the mRNA into a cell. Other vaccines (AZ, J&J) use viral mechanisms to achieve this by modifying an adenovirus to perform the mRNA introduction to the cell.
Truly. Compare in my post #15 above my cribbed analogy about an angry chimpanzee with the neutrophil-killer link to Wiki just above it. Which is more easily graspable.
When you make a mean-spirited post denigrating @HMS_Irruncible’s perfectly reasonable brief informal description because it didn’t lay out all the technical details… expect to get skewered if you don’t get the technical details right.
mRNA > protein is translation, not transcription
Adenoviruses are dsDNA. The adenovirus does not "perform the mRNA introduction to the cell’. It enters the cell as DNA. The native cellular machinery then carries out both transcription of DNA to mRNA and translation of mRNA into protein.
The overarching concept of introducing nucleic acid templates into cells is shared. But direct introduction of mRNA is new, and requires important new technology because RNA is much less stable than DNA - not just in the nanoparticle, but in the use of modified nucleotides. The direct introduction of mRNA allows direct modulation of the stability and translation of the mRNA, to a degree that is not possible with DNA when the cell carries out the transcription step.
You claim that describing it as a “new, neat trick” is inaccurate… perhaps you’d like to write a letter to Nature and tell them that the title of this review is grossly misleading?
