Question: What’s your favourite Italian recipe

A vaccine usually works by preparing the immune system to fight off a virus before a person is infected. That means, if they become exposed to the virus in the future, the vaccine will have ‘primed’ the body to respond quickly before the levels of the virus get high enough in the body to cause health issues.
A vaccine is normally a ‘dead’ or weakened version of the virus it protects against. Usually, it is injected into the body. This dead/weak version cannot cause someone to become ill because the virus is not able to multiply in the body – a virus needs to invade cells and multiply in order to cause health issues. But, what does happen is that the immune system recognises the dead/weak virus and begins to develop what is called an immune response. As part of this immune response, the immune system makes proteins called antibodies that specifically recognise the virus that the vaccine was designed to protect against, and these are stored in the body for many, many years. If in the future somebody is infected with that virus, these antibodies will recognise the virus quickly and alert your immune system, activating a cascade of processes that stop the virus in its tracks. As a result, the virus cannot make enough copies of itself. If a virus cannot make enough copies of itself, it does not get to a high enough level in a person’s body to cause health issues.

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