Just recently got a flu shot, and it got me wondering: who or what exactly is our immune system?
I understand the basic concept of vaccines (i.e. injecting with a weaker version of the pathogen or mRNA so that our bodies are able to produce the necessary proteins to destroy the intrusive body quicker next time). Correct me if this is wrong.
The thing is, who exactly stores this information? Who in our body detects the virus, and tells the body to produce X or Y thing? How does it know this was seen before? How come they are able to store this information for every foreign body that has ever entered our organism?
The whole analogy of white blood cells being like “cops” and vaccines acting as those “wanted” posters make sense, but I imagine this works differently in our body.
Thanks
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[certain cells](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunological_memory) are responsible for that stuff. They basically remember how to kill a previous antigen and when it’s encountered again they go through their notes and remember how they did it last time and spread the word and start making the correct defenders to kill it again.
Edit: I’ll have to search for the video but basically your immune system is capable of killing any antigen it gets infected with. It’s a race though: is your body fast enough to find the correct thing to “kill” the enemy before it overwhelms your cells and kills you.
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