[Seil]

So hey, because I was recently accepted to college in the Care Aide program, that means that for part of the course (a few months) I'll be placed in a nursing home or private residence. That means that I need to get vaccinations. Recently, a friend on FaceBook posted this article:

3 reasons why medicinal chemist doesn’t vaccinate

Which I stopped reading after they called the opposing side "argumentative apes." But much like Jenny McCarthy claiming vaccinations gave her son autism, the "Medicinal Chemist" is wrong.

Let's break it down - a vaccine is

vaccine
?vaksi?n,-?n/
noun
Medicine
noun: vaccine; plural noun: vaccines

1. an antigenic substance prepared from the causative agent of a disease or a synthetic substitute, used to provide immunity against one or several diseases.

The purpose of a vaccine is to trigger your body to recognize and attack foreign cells. That's pretty much it. You're training your body to more quickly recognize, say, TB, and either break it down or secrete it. Why are we doing this? I would hope that the answer is obvious. It makes it harder for us to become sick. That doesn't mean that we become immune. It just makes it harder for us to catch tuberculosis or measles. There are some people who can not get vaccinated. That's okay - because if those people around that person are at lower risk of getting sick, that person is too.

So please, ladies and gentleman; if you need a flu shot this season, don't buy into any malarkey of "Vaccinations do more harm than good." They really don't.