So I’m having trouble with this, and I’ve went through different links on Google and can’t find an answer. So they would poke into sores of people who had smallpox and then proceed to cut the patient and insert the infection directly into them. I’m not understanding why catching small pox that way would be any different than catching it naturally?
I am specifically referring to how it was done during the revolutionary war, not today’s vaccines. But wouldn’t mind knowing how those two things differ as a bonus
In: Biology
So for smallpox – there’s multiple versions, or “strains”, of the virus, and they’re not all equally deadly. Some varieties had a mortality rate of like 30% while others had a mortality rate of like 1%. But their antigens are similar enough that if you gain immunity to one, you gain immunity to the others.
Yes, you’re still getting live virii (in the original innoculation procedure, anyway) and purposely getting yourself sick, but the point is you’re trying to purposely pick the *least bad* strain of the virus to put up with. If someone is known to have suffered from smallpox in the past and survived, there’s a good chance it’s because they caught the less deadly strain. It’s technically still a gamble – they could be one of the 70% that survived the bad strain – but it’s still *better* odds than gambling on whatever you happen to pick up naturally.
> But wouldn’t mind knowing how those two things differ as a bonus
There’s a lot of kinds of vaccines that work slightly differently. But in general, even though a virus doesn’t have that many parts, they do need to all be there and working for a virus to be infectious. Generally that’s a membrane like cells have, proteins on the surface of the membrane (“spike” proteins) that screw with proteins on the outside of victim cells, and the genetic information that codes for the spike proteins. So most vaccines usually include *some, but not all* of the parts the virus is composed of – enough to make your immune system freak out and start pumping out antibodies, but not enough to actually *do* anything per se.
Like the COVID vaccine was an mRNA vaccine, meaning it just includes the virus’ genetic information, but not the virus itself. That genetic information can get into cells where the ribosomes will transcribe it to produce the spike proteins. Oh shit, there’s spike proteins in the body, that raises the immune system alarms and its starts trying to find an antibody to counter them. But the spike proteins *alone* can’t really do anything unless they’re part of the whole viral package with a genetic payload and a membrane to hold it. So it can’t keep infecting new cells.
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