Vicariously Vaccinated

Oh sure ya betcha, discussing an unfortunately polarizing subject why dontcha? Oop, yep you bet yet britches so sit on the davenport and grab ya some tater tot casserole. No vaccines are not from Minnesota but I am. When I record this podcast I might just do the whole thing with a bad accent. You’ll have to wait and see. 

Everything has some controversy, or controversy (imagine a British accent) and vaccines may be at the top of the list. The amount of information, studies, anecdotes, and “studies” you can find on the subject can be overwhelming. I’m surprised our robot overlords had enough disc space for it all in the matrix. The list of arguments against vaccines include toxicity of additives and adjuvants, use of fetal cells, microchips, instigation of autism, death, and the list can go on. This is not that blog post, tune in for subsequent posts for that shtick. 

Vicarious means to experience something through someone else or by the action of another. It is also a classic Tool song so check that out. For this blog, vaccines can be vicariously experienced. There are a few ways however I’m going to talk about maternal vaccination and the baby. 

Neonates with hypothyroidism are usually not diagnosed until 5-10 days after birth. When inside the mother, thyroid hormone is transferred to the baby so that for that time, none needs to be produced. Some medications make their way through the placenta and into the baby, one of the reasons we have pregnancy categories, some make it in and cause defects or loss of pregnancy. Drugs such as opiates can be transferred and cause withdrawal in neonates. Bet you can’t guess where this is going? 

Immunity can be passed from mom to baby as well. This vertical transfer of antibodies gives the infant a temporary shield during the development of their own immune system. This happens both before and after delivery, through blood, amniotic fluid, and breast milk if the mother chooses. I talked about how much easier it is to destroy something in the early stages in my Tetrology of Fallot post. That is just as true here. There is a reason most diseases have a U shaped curve for severity. Worse outcomes for the younger and more elderly. Yes I know there is more to it, I’m just talking generally. 

I found a super interesting piece on this maternal-fetal immunity: “Due to the functional immaturity of the adaptive immune system, the newborn’s immune system characteristically lacks reactivity to multiple (including non-pathogenic) microorganisms in order to prevent excessive inflammatory responses. The placental transfer of maternal immunoglobulins to the fetus is a specific adaptation mechanism, compensating to a certain degree for the newborn’s deficits in antibody production during the first months postpartum and providing newborns and infants with temporary passive immunity” from Robl-Mathieu et al., in 2021. Pretty damn cool huh?

I will have more to say coming up. But for now, mothers figuratively run screens for their kiddos after birth which means having the most properly functional immune system possible is key. Yes. Sometimes that isn’t possible but we can work with mothers to give them the best chance, think controlling diabetes for example. Immunizations are another way, along with healthy diet, activity, don’t smoke or drink, etc… we treat mothers for certain microbes (GBS for example) so they don’t pass that to their kids, why not give them tools to pass on instead? For a much more coherent and better produced dive check out pretty much any episode of Immune from Microbe.tv and any episode but specifically episodes 26 and 27 of This Podcast Will Kill You. 

Let me know what you think, give me more resources and ideas. Also, listen to the Occasionally Preposterous podcast, follow my Instagram and twitter. Love y’all and peace out. 

References

Image of “antibodies” (looks like a scene from Star Wars to me) from Stanford Medicine.

Pregnancy enables antibody protection against intracellular infection from Nature 2022 by Erickson et al.

Robl-Mathieu et al., in 2021, the article Vaccination in Pregnancy from the DOI: 10.3238/arztebl.m2021.0020 because the article is German and I don’t know what that name is. 

Vertically Transferred Immunity in Neonates: Mothers, Mechanisms and Mediators from Frontiers in Immunity  2020 by Albrecht and Clara Arck.