this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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Humans need to go close to the infected animal to get infected.
Oh, so being exposed to new viruses reduces the risk of dying to a virus you got … because you were exposed to it?
To some extent yes, but 'get close to' is pretty broad: breathe contaminated air in the general vicinity of animals, drink water they've pissed or shit in, etc.
That is in fact how a vaccine/our immune system works, yes.
Don't go near animals. Boil water before drinking. Simple as.
Vaccines work using either diluted toxins, or increasingly, proteins / RNA that just look somewhat like the real thing. The immune system works by enough of the population dying off until only those with the necessary mutations are left.
Animals breathe, just like we do, they can expel airborne viruses that can travel for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of miles. 'Don't go near animals' is like saying 'just don't get wet' in a rain storm: the world is full of animals and they utterly suffuse every aspect of our life in ways that might surprise you.
I don't know what 'diluted toxins' has to do with viruses and immunology since toxins are a rather different matter entirely, but vaccines work (the non-mRNA ones anyway) by infecting you with a weakened version of the virus so that your immune system can learn to identify it without it overwhelming you. Once it learns to identify that disease it will know how to produce proteins and such that can attack the full version (same DNA) should you ever come across it.
Let me state in the sincerest possible terms: lolwut?
It's not about mutation, the immune system can 'learn' and 'evolve' over the course of a single human's lifetime (see: the description of how vaccines work above), it's not something that you either have a good one or you don't (autoimmune diseases aside) and the people with bad ones don't live long enough to reproduce or whatever, your immune system - like your brain - learns by exposure. So being exposed to those diseased animals is literally the only means by which to become immune to them. Viruses do mutate pretty quickly though, so you get the occasional plague/pandemic that overwhelms people's immune systems when they change enough to not be recognizable to our immune system anymore.
Airborne viruses usually travel about two metres (hence the two metre social distancing rules for Covid-19). Even if a single virus somehow travels farther - perhaps by hitching a ride on a vehicle - it is unlikely to cause a successful infection, because you need enough of them ('viral load') to overwhelm host defences.
Vaccines work in different ways. The oldest method is what you described - attenuated viruses. Newer ones usually do not contain active viruses. They either have inactivated viruses, or, increasingly, just the viral proteins or mRNA. This reduces the risk of the vaccine causing harm to the recipient.
If the person survives, their immune system may learn to identify and defend against that virus. Or it might just forget. Or it might cause random damage due to cytokine storms. Or it might forget all previous information. And in any case, some percentage of the population will die.
Thinking that infections are good because they will help increase immunity is like thinking that a country constantly being at war is good because then they'll always be ready for war. Particularly when you can give the same immunity at a fraction of the risk using vaccines that just have some proteins or mRNA.