"Wildly wrong" may be stretching it a bit, but you're not entirely off base. There's more to the vaccines than simply getting antibodies to show up in the blood

"Wildly wrong" may be stretching it a bit, but you're not entirely off base. There's more to the vaccines than simply getting antibodies to show up in the blood stream. From https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-science/mrna-vaccines-spur-lymph-nodes-for-longer-term-protection-covid-19-test-accuracy-may-vary-by-time-of-day-idUSKBN2B72J0 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-scienc...: Along with inducing antibodies for immediate defense, mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 also stimulate the lymph nodes to generate immune cells that provide protection over the long term, a new study confirms. The early wave of antibodies are generated by B cells called plasmablasts. In healthy volunteers, blood tests showed that two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine induced "a strong plasmablast response," said coauthor Ali Ellebedy of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The immune cells that will produce antibodies upon exposure to the virus in years to come - called memory B cells - are generated by germinal center B cells found only in lymph nodes near vaccine injection sites, his team explained in a paper currently undergoing peer review for possible publication in a Nature journal. In repeated biopsies of volunteers' lymph nodes, "we saw a robust germinal center response," Ellebedy said. The responses lasted at least seven weeks, "with no sign of cooling down anytime soon," he added. "While we do not have long-term samples yet, it is safe to assume given the magnitude and persistence of the germinal center reaction that those individuals will develop a durable immune response" to mRNA vaccines. Moderna Inc's vaccine also uses mRNA technology.