Read This Before You Go Out For Your Covid Vaccine Celebratory Drink

It’s the latest trend on social media: post a pic of yourself gleefully maskless, cheers-ing the camera with a colorful cocktail and your Covid vaccine card, ink barely dry. I love the sentiment: You’ve done something that you believe is for the greater good of humanity and it’s your glimpse at a brighter, mask-free future for all. What I don’t love about it is the monumental biochemistry fail.

If you understand how that Covid vaccine works, why are you drinking alcohol (and a sugary mixer) immediately after receiving the Covid vaccine? Whether you received the inactivated virus jab or the mRNA shot, the journey toward immunity is only beginning for you upon receiving the Covid vaccine. This means the coming hours, days, and weeks are the most important for your immune system to build a formidable response to the contents of the Covid vaccine. The Covid vaccine isn’t a magical potion that instantly gives you Covid antibodies. The idea behind a vaccine is that it challenges your immune system to do exactly what it was designed or evolved to do: create antibodies.

The very basic idea behind a vaccine is this: artificially introduce the virus or components of the virus to your body, triggering your immune system to go about its natural, brilliant response to a foreign invader. First, your innate immune system strikes. This is a quick and dirty, general response. It is not specific to Covid, but helpful against pretty much any potentially dangerous foreign entity in your body. This is just to get the immunity ball rolling. After days to weeks, depending on the invader, your adaptive immunity kicks into gear and mounts a specific response. In the case of Covid, this takes 6 to 8 days after infection. Your adaptive immune system creates antibodies specific to the Covid spike protein. (This is where the mRNA vaccine begins its journey. You mount no innate immune response to the mRNA vaccine because the whole point of this vaccine is to bypass the innate immune response and start building specific Covid antibodies immediately following the Covid vaccine.)

Your body still must do all the work of creating antibodies. It’s no small task. Your immune system is brilliant but our lifestyle choices have a monumental impact on how effective a vaccine will be on us as individuals. For example, it is well documented in peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals that obese and overweight individuals have poorer responses to vaccines. They do not create the same amount of antibodies as lean individuals. Additionally, in the case of attenuated and live virus vaccines, they shed the virus for longer than lean individuals. (Shedding is the term for releasing the virus or viral components from someone's system, allowing for transmission of the virus that they acquired from the vaccine to other people.)

Even if you are not obese or overweight, the principle remains the same that our lifestyle choices affect the ultimate outcome of our immune response to any vaccine. Think about mounting an immune attack against the Covid vaccine as a UFC match against Conor McGregor. You wouldn’t show up to the fight after a few cocktails and a poor night’s sleep. You would workout everyday for months in advance; you would stick to your chiropractic adjustment schedule; and you would eat meticulously chosen food to fuel your muscles, brain, and nervous system to have strong punches and quick reflexes. So, why show up to your Covid vaccine with a slacker attitude? If you treat your body like the fighting machine that it is, you will have a better fighting chance against any vaccine or natural exposure to a pathogen.

The political and public health officials implementing this global vaccine push purport that the whole point of this is to artificially create herd immunity (versus the natural way to create herd immunity, which is to expose everyone to Covid as it moves through the population at its own rate). The operative word in that sentence is “immunity.” Each individual, ideally, mounts their own immune response to the Covid vaccine so that eventually we have enough immune individuals in the population that those who have not been exposed more likely will not be exposed. A risk in this plan is if the population is so unhealthy that the Covid vaccine-induced response is so poor that we end up with millions of people with inadequate immunity. So, you want to do something for the greater good? Simple: do something for your own health and immunity by staying as healthy as possible at all times and especially leading up to and following any medical intervention, including vaccines. Stay away from obviously unhealthy and immune-weakening activities like drinking alcohol and consuming sugar in the weeks leading up to and following your Covid vaccine.

Here are 5 things you can do instead of drinking alcohol to celebrate and perpetuate a message of good health online:

1. Do a no- or low-sugar challenge for the weeks leading up to and following your vaccine, if you choose to get a jab. This is not about looking good or following a silly Instagram challenge. This is basic immunology. Sugar is terrible for your immune system.
2. Do a low-intensity workout. Keep motion in your body to help bring nutrition into your cells and flush out the toxins. Remember the whole point of a vaccine is to get your white blood cells working overtime. Once they have done their job, you want to get their dead bodies out of your body! Don’t let those toxins build up inside you.
3. Cheers with water/sparkling water/fruit and herb infused water. Hydrate your cells. They need the water to detox.
4. If you and a friend went to get a shot together, hug one another! Hug for so long it makes you both laugh. The oxytocin and endorphin rush will make you feel much better than an alcoholic buzz.
5. Visit your chiropractor. The vagus nerve is the connection between your brain and immune system. The vagus nerve sits directly beside your first cervical vertebra. An upper cervical adjustment may stimulate the vagus nerve. This may be how a chiropractic adjustment can impact your immune system.
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Sources:

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/26/eaaz6893

https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/risk-comms-updates/update-34-immunity-2nd.pdf?sfvrsn=8a488cb6_2#:~:text=Most%20COVID%2D19%20patients%20develop,3%20weeks%20after%20symptoms%20start.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7130453/

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