Vaccination

You bet they do! Most importantly, they’re really good at keeping people from getting seriously ill and dying.

How good? Here are a couple of ways to look at it:

• You’re about 25 times less likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID-19 if you’re vaccinated.
• If you’re vaccinated, you have about a one to three in a thousand chance of being infected - and if you do, chances are you’ll just feel like you got a bad cold.

If they work so well, why are vaccinated people getting infected? Don’t forget vaccines are not magical force fields. The COVID vaccines’ primary job is to keep people from getting seriously ill and dying, and they continue to do extremely well. No vaccine is 100% effective, and yet vaccination is one of the most effective public-health measures in human history.

All of the available vaccines have the same set of common side effects: Tiredness, headache, muscle aches, chills, and pain at the injection site. (Not that you’ll get all of them - you might get just one, or none at all.)

If you do happen to experience a side effect, it typically lasts for two days or less - much better than getting COVID, which can last for weeks (or longer!).

And remember why the side effects happen: Because your immune system is doing its job. But if you don’t have any side effects, don’t fret - the vaccine will still work for you.

Yes, and here’s why:

• There are over 70 million children in the United States. That’s 70 million opportunities for the virus to mutate into something more contagious, more deadly, or both.
• Kids - especially younger ones - can transmit COVID to other people. They’re especially likely to give it to members of their households. And to guests at their birthday parties.
• More than 4,000 kids in the US have gottenmulti-inflammatory syndrome in children (a potentially fatal condition) as a result of having COVID-19.
• Kids under 16 who get COVID-19 are 30 times more likely to get myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) than kids who don’t get infected.
• A small but significant percentage of kids who are infected will get long COVID. With symptoms like extreme fatigue and shortness of breath, this syndrome seriously disrupts kids’ lives for weeks to months, and we don’t know what its long-term consequences will be for them.

Highly unlikely. How can we know this, since the vaccines have only been around since 2020?

• The body breaks down and removes the vaccine materials within 72 hours (three days).
• The longest it’s ever taken for vaccine side effects to show up is two months.

NPR asked teenagers for their most pressing questions about the COVID vaccines. Here are the answers pediatricians and other experts gave in response.

This video from Boston Children’s Hospital explains how vaccines work using words and animations that little kids can understand.

Yup, you sure do. Why?

• You get more protection from the vaccine than you do from infection alone.
• Being vaccinated makes you less likely to get infected by new variants - natural infection doesn’t do that.

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia provides answers to pretty much every vaccine question there is, and they keep it up-to-date. They also debunk the latest misinformation.

The It’s Up to You campaign at getvaccineanswers.org responds to a wide range of vaccine questions in English, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. From the Ad Council, the COVID Collaborative, and the CDC.

The WHO’s Mythbusters page addresses ALL the unfounded rumors about the vaccine.

Myths and Facts about COVID-19 Vaccines, from the CDC, addresses the misinformation that’s the most widespread.

The Stronger.org national campaign against vaccine misinformation has a great TikTok feed addressing everything from garden-variety concerns to conspiracy theories. Their Instagram feed has some great social-media graphics, too!

The idea for the technology behind the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines had been around since the late 1970s, and scientists have been developing that technology intensively since the early 2000s.

Pfizer and BioNtech started working together on a flu vaccine using mRNA in 2018. When the pandemic hit, they simply switched the vaccine’s target from influenza to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Why hadn’t this kind of vaccine been used before? Because it’s hard to keep the body from getting rid of the mRNA too fast. The vaccines protect the mRNA by enclosing it in a tiny bubble of fat, which helps it stick around long enough for your body to recognize it.

The shortest explanation possible: mRNA vaccines give your body instructions for how to make a protein that normally appears on the outside of the virus. Your body reads the instructions from the vaccine, makes the protein, and throws the instructions out.

Then your body sees the protein and says, “What’s that?? That’s not me! Kill it!” Your body makes some tools, uses the tools to kill the protein, and saves the tools for later use . . . just in case.

Later on, when the real virus shows up wearing that protein, your body will recognize it and will have the tools to kill it.

This video explains the above with simple animations. Looking for something more detailed? Try this one (available in both English and Spanish).

High-school students may also appreciate this Twitter feed explanation (warning: includes profanity).

Three reasons: Preparation, teamwork, and cash. (Want this explanation in animated video format? Here you go!)

1. Preparation: Fifty years of research on coronaviruses + more than a decade of research into creating mRNA vaccines = knowing what to target and how to target it.
2. Teamwork: A worldwide pandemic provides amazing motivation for scientists to collaborate internationally.
3. Cash (this is the biggie): Normally, drug companies don’t make lots of doses of a vaccine until they have proof that the vaccine works. Once they have that proof, it takes a while after that for them to ramp up production.
   
   Because we needed these vaccines so badly, the US government gave companies enough money that they could go ahead and make thousands of doses while they were still testing the vaccine. So this time, the moment research showed that the vaccines worked, there were doses ready to go!