this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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[–] CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 22 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I guess the idea behind a "measles party" is to introduce the virus to the child's immune system so that they can develop antibodies for it?

Damn, if only there was a safer way. Like if a doctor could introduce a very small amount of the virus to the child's immune system. Do you think a dead virus would be enough for the immune system to learn what it is and how to fight it? Why aren't scientists working on this?!

What's hilarious to me is that this was totally a Thing when I was younger.

Not for measels, because we weren't braindead dumbfucks, but for chickenpox.

You'd have whole groups of kids get together to have everyone get sick at once, instead of one kid at a time for months and months as it spreads through classes at school.

IDK if it made sense, but it was legit a thing that people were doing.

Of course, there's a vaccine now, so if you're still doing this you're one of the aformentioned braindead dumbfucks.

[–] kazaika@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

Just a small akshually : Viruses cant be dead or alive because the have no metabolism anyway so most (modern) vaccines work by extracting their mrna or the lipids on their surface and injecting that. Injecting a small portion of whole viruses my still infect you. Fyi

Edit: ok I talked some garbage here: while viruses do not have a metabolism and thereby are, by the definition of some, not alive, there is apparently a way to make vaccines by destroying the genome of the virus via heat or chemicals and using the "shells" to make vaccines..

Source (disclosure: website owned by vaccine producer) here

[–] silasmariner@programming.dev 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

mRNA vaccines are, of course, just the absolute tits - but they're a tiny proportion of modern vaccines and the very first ones are one a few years old, created to treat COVID. But yeah, 100%, we don't use the virus in the vaccine! Even the first ever vaccine was (as you will know) not created from the disease it was meant to treat, but from one similar enough that it gave protection to the other. And smallpox doesn't exist any more so, well, that worked out pretty well didn't it. You don't give someone the virus to stop them getting that virus, but you might well give them a virus, in an attenuated form of the target