Dear NP

Dear NP,

I am in my late 60s. I am worried about the immunizations that my primary care provider is offering me. With flu season just around the corner, I am considering the influenza vaccine. Then, there is the possibility of the COVID-19 vaccine becoming available. Can you talk about vaccines, how they are made and the potential side effects of vaccines in general? M. S.

Dear M. S.,

Vaccines have certainly been a hot topic of debate over the last several decades, and I understand why people are thinking a lot harder about it during the COVID-19 pandemic. By and large, vaccines are incredibly safe and have saved millions of lives.

Vaccines rely on your immune system responding to foreign invaders. When the invader is a regular, disease-causing virus or bacterium, you become sick. The secret to creating vaccines is to introduce the disease-causing germ, but in a way that has little to no risk of causing illness.

There are a few ways this is possible. The first is by weakening a virus so it cannot reproduce effectively but is still detectable by the body. A lot of vaccines are made this way, including measles, mumps and rubella; rotavirus; and chickenpox. The only drawback to this form of vaccine is that it cannot be used on people with compromised immune systems.

Another way is to use completely dead viruses. This is how most flu shots are made. These vaccines often require multiple doses, but cannot cause any sort of illness, even a mild case. So, these are safe for people with compromised immune system.

The final way is to only use a component of the virus. This can mean actually separating out a particular protein from the virus and injecting that on its own, or using another, less harmful virus as a carrier for the component of the target virus.

This is how many of the developing vaccines for COVID-19 work. The biggest benefit to using components of the virus instead of the entire virus is that it will make it possible to immunize immunocompromised individuals – the group at highest risk of contracting COVID-19.

Advances in medical technology have made vaccines very safe – the safest in the world according to the CDC. However, with any medical treatment there is always the potential for some side effects.

For vaccines, the side effects will vary with the specific virus, but are almost always extremely mild. For example, some vaccines will cause swelling or tenderness around the injection site or a low-grade fever.

Some types of vaccines may cause severe illness in a person with a compromised immune system. However, a healthcare provider would be highly unlikely to ever recommend such a person receive these vaccines.

For most people, standard immunizations are completely safe. If in doubt, ask your healthcare provider for guidance on your unique situation.

It’s important to note that there are some harmful effects that some people attribute to vaccines that have little to no scientific support. For example, vaccines do not cause autism. This idea emerged as the result of a poorly-designed research study in the late 1990s, but has long been disproven.

Another misconception that’s been floating around about vaccines is the idea that a COVID-19 vaccine would somehow alter our DNA and could cause long term harm. This has also been debunked.

Vaccines do not inject foreign DNA into our cells. They just train the immune system to do what it’s meant to do in a way that is safe and controlled.

Vaccines are an essential part of a functional human society. Even if your individual chance of getting a disease (or dying from it) may be low, viruses serve a larger purpose in terms of the population of a certain disease.

Vaccines make enough people immune to an illness that even if individual cases pop up, they usually don’t spread very far. This makes the pathogen much less common.

Making pathogens less common benefits everybody in the long run. This is why herd immunity is important.

If you are in doubt about which vaccines you should have, talk to your healthcare provider. Not all vaccines are necessary for all people (particularly ones required for some international travel). But rest assured – you have little to fear from a flu shot.

Dr. Wesley Davis is an Emergency Nurse Practitioner at Crook County Medical Services District and Coordinator of the Family and Emergency Nurse Practitioner program at the University of South Alabama. He encourages readers to send their questions to [email protected]