Dr. Helen Chu

So babies who get BCG vaccine at birth seem to have protection against other things, not just against tuberculosis.

We think that measles infection depletes your immune system.

And the way that it depletes it is that it wipes out all your B cells, the cells that make your antibodies, and prevents you from being able to respond to new infections that you get after your measles infection.

So measles infection makes you sick, not just from measles, but from other things.

And so measles vaccine, therefore, protects you against all of these other infections.

other things as well.

That's fascinating.

So that's one way where a live vaccine may be more broadly protective than a killed vaccine or an mRNA vaccine.

But we also know that the infections themselves, the infections that you're preventing with either your live vaccine or your mRNA vaccine or any other type of vaccine, those infections themselves are also

inflammatory.

And so when you protect against that infection, irrespective of which type of vaccine you get, you are preventing the downstream chronic inflammation and these other diseases that are developing.

Yeah, there's a lot of good data now showing that COVID vaccines are protective against long COVID.

And I think that's really an important message for people to understand is that you may not be at risk for severe disease due to COVID, either because you're younger and you don't have chronic conditions,

or because you've now received a vaccine multiple times or have had vaccines plus infections.

But people are still at risk for developing pretty debilitating symptoms of long COVID.

And there have now been multiple studies that have shown that being up to date on your COVID vaccine is protective against development of long COVID.

I mean, I'm an infectious disease doctor, so I think infections cause a lot of things.

And I think we're starting to be proved right.

And that getting vaccines that prevent these infections really are protective not just for that infection, but also may have all of these other downstream effects that we're really only beginning to understand now.

Thanks for having us.