Vaccines are one of the most important and most efficient inventions in the history of medicine, if not the history of mankind. As vaccines started to become widely available in the 1960s, the incidence of many dangerous and even fatal diseases such as polio and measles was greatly reduced.
The way vaccines work is an amazing process: when a child or adult receives a vaccine for a specific disease, their body builds protection against that disease, which means they are ready to face the disease with minimal (if at all, any) symptoms in the case of an outbreak or if they come into contact with someone who has the disease.
That’s because a vaccine works by preparing the body to face a particular disease using our own immune system. Vaccines do not contain the live virus or bacteria that cause the disease but rather bits and pieces or a small amount of a weakened or dead bacteria or virus.