Vaccines prepare your body to fight off harmful bacteria and viruses that make you sick.  How exactly do they do this?

• Vaccines contain harmless versions of germs or pieces of germs that teach your immune system how to protect you from disease.
• This process trains the immune system to remember the germ so it can fight off any real germs it may encounter. Once your immune system learns how to fight a disease, it can give you protection for life.
• It’s much safer for your immune system to learn how to protect you from disease through vaccination than for you to catch the disease itself.
• Having a vaccine not only protects you from disease, it also protects those around you — your family and your community.
• mRNA vaccines work by giving your cells a small set of temporary instructions to make a harmless protein. Your immune system learns from it and builds protection — without you ever being exposed to the virus itself. The mRNA breaks down naturally within days and cannot change your DNA. This technology has been researched for decades and was carefully tested before approval.
• Here is a video that explains how vaccines protect children against life threatening diseases. 

What is herd immunity?

• When a large enough share of a community is vaccinated, something powerful happens: the virus simply runs out of people it can easily infect. This is called herd immunity. With fewer opportunities to spread from person to person, the virus can no longer move easily through the population — which helps protect people who can’t be vaccinated themselves, like newborns or people with certain medical conditions.