When you get infected by a bacterium or virus, it takes a while before your immune system gets going to fight it. Once that’s happened, your body usually manages to clear up the infection completely and you get better on your own. But with some diseases it’s much harder for the body to fight the infection by itself. Some examples are measles, whooping cough, and polio. But we can do something about that. What helps with those kinds of dangerous diseases is to make the body prepared for fighting the infection. We do that by getting vaccinated, in other words having ourselves inoculated with a vaccine. 

By getting vaccinated, we make sure that the body is already “armed” for fighting a real infection. When someone gets the vaccine, they may have a slight fever/high temperature or a headache, or the arm where they had the injection may be a bit sore for about a day. That’s just enough to make the immune system go fully into action, as it would if there were an actual infection. Within a few weeks after vaccination, we are protected against the infection. That’s how it works with measles, whooping cough, and polio. These and other serious diseases have practically disappeared, because medical researchers have succeeded in developing effective vaccines against them, and because almost all children are inoculated with those vaccines nowadays. 

It’s true that vaccines can have side effects. But they are only allowed to be used if they have first been extensively tested for safety by independent organisations. The vaccines that are now available against COVID 19 generally cause few or no side effects. We know that from scientific research involving tens of thousands of people. Specialists from all over Europe have checked that research very carefully. A vaccine is only approved for use if it’s been shown to protect us effectively and if there are no dangerous side effects.

Very rare side effects are only discovered when very large groups of people have received the vaccine. This is closely monitored worldwide, with experts then checking carefully whether there is perhaps a link between the vaccination and the side effect. If that is the case, they consider the risk of the rare side effect and whether some people are more at risk. This may lead to changes in vaccination policy. The authorities adopt a cautious approach here, even though the risk of becoming seriously ill from COVID 19 is much greater than the risk of harm to someone’s health from a rare side effect of being vaccinated.

If we get vaccinated with an approved vaccine, we aren’t only protecting ourselves. We’re also protecting one another, because it’s likely that after being vaccinated we will no longer be able to infect our family, friends, and colleagues. That’s not just an opinion in the discussion on vaccination. It’s the conclusion reached by the top scientific experts in the Netherlands and other countries. That’s why we – medical scientists from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) – are getting vaccinated against COVID‑19. How about you?