Online Class Notes (Jesse)

it’s about vaccines – vaccines are celebrated for their contribution to protecting people’s health, but a growing group / number of people is / are thinking that they endanger our health instead of protecting it, so i would like to summarise the video and try to answer the question: why the vaccines are helpful and trustworthy / should be trusted. Firstly, how the vaccines work. Our immune system is a complex army of billions of cells, so generally speaking there are 3 types of cells, we call them soldiers, intel cells and weapon factories. The soldiers are responsible for daily guard against normal diseases, but if the diseases are too hard to take over / manage / deal with / destroy / defeat for the soldiers, the factories start work, they produce antibodies to kill the invaders, but the process usually takes a lot of time to complete which gives the invaders a long time / a considerable amount of time to do damage. So in order to make the process faster and more efficient, when meeting the same invaders next time our body came up with an ingenious idea – it is a memory mechanism (MEH kan nizm) which is executed by memory cells. Memory cells can remember specific clues of the invaders and inform the immune system to produce the same antibodies as last time once they are activated. So the vaccines make use of this machanism. They provoke / promote / encourage / initiate / start / prompt the production of antibodies to defend against specific diseases by injecting less harmful or even dead (dehhd) virus into your body. So even though the vaccines are so effective, they have side effects as well so second let’s talk about the risks of vaccines. Are the side effects of vaccines dangerous, let’s take the measles as an example. Before the measle vaccines were available, virtually every single child on earth were contracted by measles at some point. It was reported that 143 million children were contracted measles in a single year but what has been the effect since the measles vaccine started being used? so is it worth the risk? / are the side effects worth the risk? are vaccines worth the risk, considering the side effects? The video gave us a thought experiment. Imagine there’s a devloped country in a parallel world. In a scenario where there are no vaccines, if there are 10 million children who contracted measles, actually around 2.5 million kids will suffer from serious symptoms and around 20k will be killed. Even more, the ones / people / those who recover from experiencing serious symptoms / those who don’t succumb to measles / those who escape death / those who survive will still suffer a severely damaged immune system which takes a lot of time to regenerate. And time for other diseases to potentially do damage. In another scenario where all of the children are (being) vaccinated, only 120 among them / in total will have serious side effects, and none of them will be killed / will die. All of them will get well treated by modern medical technology and recover. So to sum up, I think vaccines are the most powerful weapon for humans to fight against deadly viruses / diseases. The argument against vaccines are always a wild mixture of gut feelings and misinformation.

Vocabulary

symptoms – from diseases
side effects – from medicine

the ones = those = the people 

forecast – professional prediction of finances / weather / numbers
prediction – event in the future

swab – the long thing they put in your nose / mouth / butt to test for COVID

butt / ass / arse / bottom – pi gu

Grammar

i have tested for 10 times – I have been tested 10 times