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MMR vaccine is known to boost the immune system, who is to say the universal flu vaccine doesn't do the same?
by hvidgaard 6y ago
MMR vaccine is known to boost the immune system, who is to say the universal flu vaccine doesn't do the same?
- ejolto 6y agoAll vaccines boost the immune system. It seems like a lot of people misunderstand how vaccines work (not saying you do). Vaccines don't fight of infections for you, they train the immune system to correctly identify pathogens so the immune system can fight them off more efficiently.
- raxxorrax 6y agoMarketing for vaccines failed miserably. Instead of talking about nano-particles, which are basically small (nano!) bubbles of fat that are used by the body to exchange substances, they should have been sold as natural medicine that just strengthen your natural immune system. Vaccines, the yoga of medical drugs...
- hvidgaard 6y agoMost vaccines only prevent the specific disease they are designed to prevent. However, there is a clear causation at play here. People which have received the MMR vaccine, is simply less ill from other diseases unrelated to the diseases vaccinated against with the MMR vaccine.
- kian 6y agoDoes this control for people actually getting measles? I.e., are the incidences of disease less after removing the people who got measles who didn't receive the MMR vaccine? Measles is known to strip the immune system of much of its memory, rendering people who have had it susceptible to all sorts of diseases they used to have protection against. I would not be surprised at all if this led to a large outcome differential for the vaccinated and unvaccinated, even if only a few of the unvaccinated caught measles.
- beagle3 6y agoWhat I read is that the measles vaccine attacks and resets immune memory - so the MMR vaccine seems to improve immune system function more than other vaccines or infection, but in fact this is an outcome of just stopping measles from hurting the immune system.
- ben_w 6y agoIf it functioned by resetting the immune system, we’d need to be given all our previous vaccines again after receiving the MMR vaccine.
- beagle3 6y agoI didn’t notice until your comment and it’s too late to edit now, but the first place I wrote “vaccine” should have been “virus”, see also my response to myself. (Revaccinatiom may be needed after rituximab, which was specifically designed to attack immune memory cells in case if autoimmune disease - which apparently measles does as well - but the MMR vaccine doesn’t do that. I just typeda wrong word and didn’t notice)
- beagle3 6y agoOuch, too late to edit, but wrote a mistake above. The measles virus resets the immune system, and the measles vaccine stops it from doing that, so the MMR vaccine seems to have a much bigger effect than just preventing MMR, which used to be described as “boosting the immune system” but is now understood as “letting it do its work uninterrupted by measles”
- hvidgaard 6y agoDo you have a link to a paper or a study on that? Because the study I read I don't recall anything about the non vaccinated group having had measles, and that would be an obvious parameter to control for.
- beagle3 6y agohttps://www.bbc.com/news/health-50251259 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-50251259 Is an example reporting (google finds more). I didn’t read the original study and don’t know. I was echoing the general media reporting.