I read through the responses and notably, my first inclication was not metioned… A vaccine is preventive in nature, enabling your body to fight off a viral infection before it takes hold. However, a vaccine’s effectiveness after an infection may be limited and depends on factors such as the specific virus, its ability to mutate, and the individual’s immune response. While some vaccines may provide some level of protection post-infection, others may offer little to no benefit.
The first symptoms of rabies are once it’s already living in your brain and causing irreparable damage. Even if you could purge all the virus out of you the moment you experience symptoms, it’d be too late to fully recover. And it’s hard to get antiviral medications into your brain to treat the infection because the brain has a membrane around it for keeping strange chemicals out.
That’s why it makes much more sense to treat the rabies infection before it starts showing symptoms. After you get bitten by a rabid animal, the rabies virus takes months to crawl its way to your brain. Any time during those months, your immune system can kill it, and so can antiviral medications you take.
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