Well, they kind of all work that way, it's just that most of the curriculum occurs naturally through interactions with wild pathogens
Well, they kind of all work that way, it's just that most of the curriculum occurs naturally through interactions with wild pathogens
From what I understand, random interactions with wild pathogens can prime the immune system in the wrong way, leading it down the wrong path. This is why some people can get lucky with immunity and be super resistant to flu, because they happened to luck into a response that targets a common factor in most flu strains. Other people have bad luck and target some area that mutates frequently, and they proceed to get walloped by every flu strain, every year.
This is why it's hard to make a 'super vaccine' for flu, becuase it takes many rounds of shots to retrain some people's immune systems once they've latched on to the wrong recipe for antibodies.
And every time you generate an immune response you are honing your natural receptors so although they are more specific to the specific virus at hand, they lose general response, so this can backfire for example if you over-vaccinate with the wrong strain of flu and this one year the flu changes direction, mutationally.
this is called “original antigenic sin”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_antigenic_sin
Wait, so what are we supposed to do. If you over vaccinate is bad, if you under vaccinate is bad, but if you vaccinate a little bit you can end up on the wrong strain. Great! /s
As someone whose had rheumatic fever, your immune system can definitely prime itself for the wrong target.
Right I'm saying it's always path dependent not that it necessarily improves outcomes.
An analogy of this is having the wrong math instruction in middle school could make your math classes harder at the university level.