Veterinary vaccines have had, and continue to have, a major role in protecting animal health and public health, reducing animal suffering, enabling efficient production of food animals to feed the burgeoning human population, and greatly reducing the need for antibiotics to treat food and companion animals.

Your immune system reacts to the vaccine in a similar way that it would if it were being invaded by the disease — by making antibodies. The antibodies destroy the vaccine germs just as they would the disease germs — like a training exercise. Then they stay in your body, giving you immunity.

Vaccines work by stimulating an immune response in an animal without causing the disease itself. When healthy animals are vaccinated, their own immune system responds to the vaccine and can remember the infectious agent to which the animal is vaccinated.

Vaccines help your immune system fight infections faster and more effectively. When you get a vaccine, it sparks your immune response, helping your body fight off and remember the germ so it can attack it if the germ ever invades again.

Absolutely. While we know recovering from a COVID-19 infection means you will have circulating antibodies in your system, we are still learning about how the immune system handles the antibody response after a natural infection.

Vaccines are made up of whole bacteria or virus, or parts of them, often a protein or sugar. These active components of the vaccine, called antigens, are what trigger an immune response when in the body.

Inactivated Vaccines: For these vaccines, the specific virus or bacteria is killed with heat or chemicals, and its dead cells are introduced into the body. Even though the pathogen is dead, the immune system can still learn from its antigens how to fight live versions of it in the future.

The content of the vaccine must be immunogenic, meaning that it will be recognized by your immune system, without being infectious, so that you don’t get the disease the vaccine is trying to protect you from. We often hear the phrase “inactivated vaccine”, but how exactly do scientists inactivate a virus or bacterium?

Viral inactivation renders viruses unable to infect. Many viruses contain lipid or protein coats that can be inactivated by chemical alteration.

The indigenous, inactivated vaccine is developed and manufactured in Bharat Biotech’s BSL-3 (Bio-Safety Level 3) high containment facility. The vaccine is developed using Whole-Virion Inactivated Vero Cell derived platform technology.

However, this vaccine is an inactivated vaccine with an adjuvant that is routinely used in many other vaccines with a documented good safety profile, including in pregnant women.

Dr. Krishna Ella

The AstraZeneca vaccine uses a chimpanzee adenovirus vaccine vector. This is a harmless, weakened adenovirus that usually causes the common cold in chimpanzees. It has been genetically changed so that it is impossible for it to grow in humans.