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The flu mutates more quickly than other viruses. So each year, scientists change the formula for the flu vaccine to help our immune systems fight off that year’s mutation.
Read it »Science and a breakthrough vaccine conquered a virus that had sickened humans for thousands of years. It killed billions of people. Now smallpox is no longer a threat. In the year 1022, a Buddhist monk used a practice called variolation to immunize people against the virus. Still, it took 700 more years to develop a […]
Read it »Even when there isn’t a global pandemic, your immune system is constantly working to keep you healthy. A vaccine pre-arms your system to start protecting against an invader. Here’s a quick explainer on how it works.
Read it »This is a great — although a little advanced — explanation of the development of vaccines and how mRNA vaccines are a new technology that may help us beat all kinds of diseases.
Read it »In early 2020, the COVID-19 novel coronavirus was declared a pandemic. We know when a pandemic starts: it’s when a new virus is found all over the world. But when does one end? Find out in this short video. Because it’s a video from the summer of 2020, we already know how some of the […]
Read it »It’s a term we hear a lot but not everyone knows how to define it and why it’s important to get as many people vaccinated as possible.
Read it »mRNA vaccines are a new technology in delivering vaccination but they’ve actually been in development for decades. They work by swapping out a single block of ingredients that maps to the disease they’re targeting. In the future, they may help us develop vaccines within weeks of an outbreak occuring.
Read it »Vaccines are developed in a variety of ways. Most commonly, we think of a vaccine as containing a bit of the disease it’s fighting. That little bit of the disease teaches our immune system to develop antibodies. But the Covid-19 vaccines work differently. They send a message to our RNA to help build our immune […]
Read it »One way to stop an epidemic (even of pandemic proportions) is through vaccinations which increase immunity within the population and prevent viruses from spreading. We call that collective protection, “herd immunity.” Depending on how infectious a virus or disease is, herd immunity needs a greater or lesser proportion of the population to be vaccinated. For […]
Read it »“When we create such effective solutions, people forget how serious the problems were.” That’s the case with the many diseases we’ve virtually eliminated with vaccines. The number of people vaccinated against a disease also lowers the reproduction number of a virus. That means, the more people are vaccinated, the more quickly and effectively we can […]
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