Today’s new commercial frontier is the human body – the “body as a platform.” We are being ushered toward a life-time subscription to an artificial immunity service.
Before we dig into the studies about mRNA vaccines and their impact on our innate immunity, let’s talk about how our immune response works in general, in layman’s terms. Our innate immune response is a very complex, coordinated dance between different types of cells and receptors.
All day long, our body is fighting off different mutations (i.e. potential cancers, for example), keeping in check dormant viruses, and so on. When our bodies are in their natural state, our immune systems get trained from doing the work. Just like an athlete or a pianist gets better from exercise, different components of our immune system get better from being exposed to different pathogens and fighting them off successfully.
And just like a person who has solved a particular challenge gets more experienced in general and develops the ability to solve other challenges more effectively, our natural broad immune response also “learns” broadly from solving specific challenges.
With vaccines — which in a good world could be a useful addition to the medical arsenal, if designed and manufactured with total integrity, thoroughly tested, and used without fanaticism — it gets tricky. The problem is that the scientists’ understanding of the tremendous complexity of how everything in our body talks to each other is still very limited.
So, when they design a solution to a particular problem — even with the best of intentions — they don’t necessarily consider how their solution impacts us as a whole. Same applies to drugs, this is kind of just the myopic nature of how things are done in our culture. And when we add commerce and hubris and God knows what else to the mix, it gets even trickier.
As a type of a medical product, vaccines (or drugs) are as good or as faulty as our overall state of science and commerce. And because our culture leans on the side of “moving fast and breaking things,” when vaccines are designed to solve a particular problem, the measured outcomes are about that problem alone.
In the real world, however, we are whole organisms, and everything in our bodies is interconnected and works together. Therefore, if a medication or a vaccine solves one problem at the expense of creating another problem, then we suffer as a whole.
