Wikipedia defines common sense as “knowledge, judgement, and taste which is more or less universal and which is held more or less without reflection or argument”
Try to avoid using this topic to express niche or unpopular opinions (they’re a dime a dozen) but instead consider provable intuitive facts.
The immune system is strong and defends your body against germs.
The immune system works 100% of 50% of the time. Immunology is the best way to convince someone that it’s a miracle that they’re still alive. Anyways, get vaccinated. Don’t rely on your immune system to figure things out
… in time to keep you alive. I mean, given enough time, the body will figure things out. Vaccines are cheat-sheets to cut that time so it’s accomplished before the host dies.
Which is why you should get vaccinated.
Vaccination primes your immune system so it can mount a coordinated response the first time it actually encounters the pathogen.
Yup, vaccination isn’t reinforcements, it’s training. It’s having the other team’s playbook before they even step foot on the field.
Umm, it’s your immune system that detects the vaccine and responds to it by developing antibodies specific to the vaccine (and by extension to the actual disease). Just as it would when challenged in real life by the pathogen.
Vaccination basically gives your immune system a several day head start on producing antibodies.
Not entirely true. Vaccines induce the adaptive immune system, which is slow but precise. Getting sick for real induces the innate immune system, which is god awful and you should not be relying on it. S. pneumoniae causes pneumonia because the innate immune system goes overdrive and kills you before it kills the bacteria. COVID-19 induces cell-innate inflammasome activation and leads to a cytokine storm, which then leads to even more damage to the lungs as the immune cells come in. Both diseases have effective vaccines that do not do anything close to this.
Deadly diseases tend to be deadly not because of the microbe itself, but because the innate immune system overreacts and kills you in the process of fighting off the disease.
Getting vaccinated diminishes the role that the innate immune system plays when you get sick, since the B cells responsible for producing antibodies for the disease are already mature. Having available antibodies also allows the immune system to rely on the complement system, which allows it to detect and kill invading microbes way earlier than otherwise.
This is actually good common sense. It works much more than 50% of the time. You’re responding to the very specific instance of anti-vaxxers, whose claims of relying on the immune system instead of vaccines are not considered common sense by most people.
No, I’m responding to regular people. Your immune system is way less effective than you think, hence the wrong common sense part.