Living as faithful Christians in the world means not only understanding the Bible, but also understanding the world through the lens of the Bible and thinking wisely about the world that God has made and in which God has put us. And so here on Thinking Theology. We want to think not just about classical theological topics, but also bring theology and biblical wisdom to bear on important topics and issues in the world around us. And one of the most important topics and issues from this year has been COVID-19 and the potentially forthcoming COVID vaccine. Some people have significant reservations about vaccines, and it can be hard to know what's right. And what isn't. So today we're thinking about COVID-19 and vaccines, and we're thinking about those things in the light of the Bible. And to do that, we're speaking with our first ever guest on Thinking Theology. My sister Associate Professor Dr Elissa Deenick, who is a research immunologist with the University of N ew South Wales and the Garvan Institute in Sydney.

Karl Deenick (01:11):

Hi, my name's Karl Deenick. I'm a pastor theologian writer and Bible college lecturer. Welcome to Thinking Theology, a podcast where we think about theology, the Bible and the Christian life, not just for the sake of it, but so we can love God more with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Karl Deenick (01:32):

Elissa, thanks for joining us on Thinking Theology. You're a research immunologist now. I didn't know what that meant until you started doing it. So I'm guessing lots of other people don't know what that means. What is that? What is an immunologist? What's a research immunologist.

Elissa Deenick (01:57):

Yeah. So an immunologist is someone who studies the immune system and the immune system is the part of your body that fights off infection be that viruses or bacteria or fungus or all those things that can make you sick. So as a research immunologist, I'm interested in finding out new things about how the immune system works. And in particular, for me I study people who have problems with their immune system, which means that they can't fight off infection properly. So they keep getting really severe or constant infections.

Karl Deenick (02:37):

So there are people whose immune systems do a good job at fighting infection you're saying, and then other people who, for some reason, that doesn't work so well.

Elissa Deenick (02:45):

Yeah, that's true. So for most of us, we think about, you know, we barely even noticed the constant, bacteria and viruses and fungi that are in the environment around us, but there are people who have almost no immune system or just parts of their immune system that are defective. And that means that they're unable to fight these infections off. And that might mean that they're constantly in hospital or they're constantly on drugs or for some of those people actually they end up dying because they get such severe infections.

Karl Deenick (03:24):

So is that a, is that a common thing? What, what causes those kinds of immune problems?

Elissa Deenick (03:32):

There are different levels of severity. So most of the ones that I study, these are people who have a genetic conditions, so problems with their DNA, which then impact the functioning of their immune system. And they're actually kind of over 400 different kind of gene defects that can have that lead to problems with your immune system. But many of them are incredibly rare, like three or four people in the world. Whereas some of them are a much more common. And then of course there are other people who have immune defects because they're on drugs that suppress their immune system. So people who have had organ transplants, so you have to suppress the immune system so your immune system doesn't reject that new organ or people who, for example, have auto immune diseases who are on drugs to kind of suppress their immune system attacking their body. And that means that those people too, can't infect fight infection very well either.

Karl Deenick (04:31):

Yeah. Right. So, I mean, obviously there's been a lot of talk about vaccines at the moment and that's why we've got you on thinking theology — because of COVID and the vaccine rates that's going on with COVID. I mean, I guess many of us probably have no idea about how vaccines work. We've seen, you know, videos and whatever media clips on the news maybe, but how do vaccines work? And, kind of just at the layman level.

Elissa Deenick (05:00):

Yeah. So vaccines are really about teaching your immune system to recognize a particular virus or bacteria. So because our immune system has this really tricky job where it has to be able to fight off like hundreds and thousands of different bacteria or viruses that you might come into contact with in your life. So the way it does this is by kind of randomly developing these different immune cells, which all of them kind of fight, are ready, kind of sitting there ready to fight off a particular infection. But that means when any particular infection comes along, you've got to find the cell. That's good for finding that infection. And you've got to grow up enough of those cells so that they can fight off the infection that's there. So basically what a vaccine does is it comes along and it kind of activates and expands those cells which are good for fighting off infection, so that you've got lots of them kind of sitting there already primed and ready to go. So that now when you encounter that infection, you've got way more kind of fighters to fight off that infection. So you can kind of do it much more quickly so that you never have to get sick.

Karl Deenick (06:28):

So is it kind of like, I don't know, searching, searching your computer for a file. And then once you found that you suddenly print off like a whole lot of copies or something like that, is that sort of what it's like?

Elissa Deenick (06:38):

Yeah. It's like that. So particularly vaccines, actually work by getting your body to generate something which you may have heard of because people have been talking about them quite a lot called antibodies. And these are these little Y shaped molecules, which kind of are able to grab onto a virus or bacteria, but they're all different. So they all grab onto different bacteria or viruses. So part of what when you get that vaccine and you activate your immune cells is that you pump out a whole lot of these little Y shaped antibodies, which are then floating around your blood. And so as soon as that virus or that bacteria comes into your body, they, they grab onto that and kind of coat the virus or the bacteria and kind of stop it from doing any damage. So yeah, like in the way you print off lots of pages, you print off lots of these antibodies and they're circulating all around your body.

Karl Deenick (07:36):

So how is it different then to have a vaccine than it is to not have a vaccine? Like, yo...

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