Dr. Kai McKinstry from UCF explains.
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start warming up eventually, only 46 degrees right now. We are in the midst of 1/5 wave now covid infections and since they’ve become available, health officials have urged everybody to get vaccinated against this virus, But our bodies already have a defense system in place as well. And Dr Connie McKinstry from UCF is joining us live this morning to talk about our immune system. How it works with the vaccines to better protect us. Great to see you, Doc. How are you? I’m great. Good morning, Amy. So we know the makeup of the human body is complicated. Right So briefly. How does our natural immune system work before we get vaccinated? Well our immune system is always there in the background, ready and poised to respond against any invading pathogens like a virus. But before we see that infection, we only have a few cells in our body that are able to respond and combat it. So once we get sick, those cells multiply thousands of times and provide a large strikeforce basically to attack the pathogen . And then once the pathogen is cleared, then our bodies return to sort of a baseline state. But some of those cells that were expanded and basically trained by the infection remain, and they can protect us against the second infection. So are you saying basically that the immune system is able to remember like Oh, we’ve already had that virus . We’ve already protected against it. Therefore, that virus won’t get us again. That’s right. We start at a much better starting point where we have many more cells in our body that have been trained and are ready to respond right away against reinfection, and that’s one of the Many benefits of immune memory and probably the most obvious when we when we look at people clinically or experiments , and I guess that’s why when doctors say Look, if you had the Delta infection, you know you can still get the omicron infection right? Because they’re not the same, so your immune system is not looking at them the same. That’s right. There’s certain components of your immune system that will be able to recognize different variants of covid, just like there are parts of the flu virus that your body can recognize, even though we need a new vaccine every year. But if the vaccine is not a perfect match, it means that you know, people might be able to become reinfected but hopefully won’t get as severe a set of symptoms, and that’s certainly seems to be the case with omicron. And then, of course, you introduce the vaccine into your system. How does that work with your immunity? Well Ideally, the vaccine is able to train your body to reach that memory state. Instead of the infection, so the goal of best of the best vaccine possible is to give you all the benefits of having been sick with a virus without any of the costs like severe infections. So basically, you can view a vaccine as training up this population of cells that will be then ready and on the guard when you come into contact with the actual virus, Okay, one last quick question. You’ve gotten all the shots and you still got sick. What does that mean? For your immune system is your immune system like Woo We? We did it all. Yeah That’s a good question, And I think there’s going to be a lot of research into that, with with all of the breakthrough infections that we’re seeing, but certainly if you got sick but became infected and got better without severe symptoms. That means your immune system is functioning pretty well. And you’re reaping the benefits of those vaccinations. All right. The whole thing is just fascinating. We could talk all day about it. Doctor Kit McKinstry
