Letters to the Editor: A reminder that the true purpose of vaccines is to strengthen the immune system

To the editor: Why do people misunderstand vaccines (“When I got COVID, readers said it proved vaccines don’t work. What has RFK Jr. wrought?,” Sept. 9)? It’s really not difficult. Many people seem to think vaccines prevent you from catching diseases, but that’s not quite right. Vaccines actually do exactly what Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he wants to do: improve your immune system.

Think of vaccines as a personal trainer for a particular sport (disease). They train your immune system how to better recognize a threat so it can become faster at reacting to it and stronger to fight it off. They do this by giving your body a small taste of “the bad stuff.” This primes your immune system to fight off whatever it is, whether it’s polio, measles, tuberculosis, the flu or COVID. Getting immunized does not keep you from getting sick, but if you do happen to come across “the bad stuff,” you have a really good chance to fight it off.

As columnist Steve Lopez pointed out, he got mildly sick when he had COVID, but was not hospitalized. His vaccination didn’t stop him from catching it. He had manageable symptoms instead of having his life threatened. Compare his situation to what happened during the pandemic before the vaccine was developed. So many people were hospitalized with severe illness, and so many people died from the disease before we learned how to train our immune systems to fight back.

Better. Faster. Stronger. That’s how vaccines work.

Dee Ois, Chatsworth