Viruses Are Sneaky Little Creatures

Viruses are not “alive” in any sense of the word; they are just biological machines. Their prime directive: make more viruses.

That’s it. To achieve their prime directive, they invade cells in your body, take over their machinery and pump out more viruses. Different viruses infect different kinds of cells — — lung, brain, liver, heart, blood vessels — but they don’t know — and don’t care — if their invasion kills off the body it’s taken over; they only know how to do this one thing.

The key to avoiding viral disease is to interrupt the viral life cycle.

There are two ways to do this:

Avoid exposure. This is done by controlling your environment: washing hands, disinfecting shared surfaces, wearing masks, keeping distance from others, sometimes wearing gloves, and for sexually transmitted viruses (like Herpes, Papilloma and HIV), using barriers like condoms.

Vaccines. Vaccines work in two ways: either they prevent you from getting infected or they prevent the infection from causing disease.

Vaccines prime your immune system to recognize a virus or its effects on your cells, in advance of any direct exposure. That way your body can go to war with them before you have to experience a massive invasion. With a massive viral invasion there are two outcomes: survival or death, and, as we have seen with polio, meningitis, hepatitis, and now with “long-COVID”, sometimes survival leaves us with lasting disability.

While COVID-19 vaccines prevent infection (the risk of infection was reduced by 90% by two week after the second dose of the mRNA vaccines [Pfizer or Moderna]), some vaccinated people can still be carrying the virus. However, even in those people who still get infected the vaccine significantly reduces their risk of getting very sick and dying; the vaccine keeps the virus in check and prevents it from taking over too many cells.

This is not a problem if everyone is vaccinated. In a well-vaccinated population, over time the virus may be passed around but will eventually die out or lose its potency because it just can’t get enough of a foothold. Yes, there are occasional breakthrough infections, but that’s because, just like almost every medication on the planet, not every vaccine works 100% of the time. Let’s keep in mind that not every antibiotic kills all germs, and even the best medications for diabetes, asthma, hypertension and other diseases do not work for everyone, every time. Breakthrough infections are not a reflection of a problem with the vaccine; everyone’s immune systems are different.

Vaccines are developed based on specific viral characteristics. But you need to keep in mind that a virus — like any good self-sustaining machine — is constantly modifying based on its interactions with your cells. Since the virus lives in your cells, it interacts with your DNA and affects little changes (this is how some viruses can transform a healthy cell into a cancerous cell). Over time these changes may be to its benefit — making it a more efficient virus machine — and this becomes a new “variant”.

And while some vaccines can overcome different variants (because they have similar characteristics) the problem is that if there are people in the community who are not vaccinated, new, more efficient (and sometimes more deadly) variants have a place to incubate and grow in size and strength. And eventually, the virus may find a way to overcome the barriers to infection created in your body by the vaccines: vaccine-resistant viruses.

The unvaccinated population — whether by choice or by protocol (such as young children for COVID vaccine) — remains at risk for preventable infection, death and disability. But it also serves as a reservoir for the development of vaccine-resistant variants which can even put the vaccinated population at risk. As long the COVID remains prevalent in our communities, we all benefit from measure to interrupt its life cycle by wearing masks (even if vaccinated), washing hands, keeping some distance, and whenever possible getting vaccinated. The longer we take the vaccinate everyone possible, the more time we give the virus to create new variants. Do we want to start the pandemic all over? Do we want to unnecessarily overwhelm our healthcare system? Do we want our children to spend another year learning remotely?