Comment Re:Reduce the toxins (Score 1) 588
It's very Science. You tinker with the disease so it'll no longer kill you and then expose yourself so that your autoimmune response will be triggered. This results in antibodies ready to fight off the full strength version should you ever come in contact with it.
That's what a vaccine is.
The concept was discovered back when someone thought to wonder why milk maids always had smooth skin. It turned out they didn't get smallpox like everybody else. But every one of them caught smallpox's weaker cousin, cowpox, early in life.
Catch is, tinkering with a disease so it won't kill you is only about 99.999% successful. The other 0.001% of the time it kills you anyway. So you don't want to take a vaccine for every conceivable disease... just for those you're likely to come in to contact with.