Most vaccine-preventable diseases are spread from person to person, which means that if one person in a community gets an infectious disease, they can spread it to others. The best way to help stop the spread of certain diseases is through vaccination. If enough people are vaccinated there are fewer chances for a vaccine-preventable disease to spread, keeping everyone healthier.
Understanding Respiratory Viruses
Infectious respiratory diseases such as influenza, COVID-19, and RSV spread from person to person. Learn how your body fights back against these pathogens and some of the common side effects that you may experience as your immune system attacks.
How Vaccines Work
A vaccine works by imitating an infection. It causes your immune system to start producing the same antibodies you would make if you were exposed to the real disease. This helps your body learn to recognize and fight an invasion of that virus or bacteria. Your body gets to develop immunity or learn how to defend itself from that disease without having to get infected from it first.
There are several kinds of vaccines. All vaccines have an active ingredient called an antigen that helps our body produce antibodies. These antigens can be either:
- Weakened or killed bacteria or viruses
- A piece of their exterior surface or genetic material, or
- Bacterial toxin that has been treated so that it is now non-toxic
Vaccines Prevent Respiratory Diseases
What Respiratory Diseases Have Vaccines?
There are vaccines for some infectious respiratory diseases, including:
- COVID-19
- Influenza
- Pneumonia
- Pertussis (Whooping Cough), this is a combination vaccine that protects against tetanus and diphtheria too.
- Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV)
- Tuberculosis (TB), with limited use in the United States
Some infectious respiratory diseases do not yet have a vaccine, including:
Talk to your healthcare provider to see if you are up to date on your vaccinations. Infectious respiratory disease can be unpredictable. It’s always better to prevent serious illness rather than treat it after it occurs.
Why Vaccinations are Important for Adults with Lung Disease
People with lung disease such as asthma or COPD may be at higher risk for serious illness from certain vaccine-preventable diseases. For best protection, it’s important to stay up to date on the following vaccinations:
- COVID-19 – to protect against severe COVID-19 illness
- Influenza – to protect against seasonal flu each year
- Pneumococcal pneumonia – to protect against the most common type of bacterial pneumonia
- RSV – to protect against severe RSV illness in adults ages 60 or older
- Tdap – to protect against tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis (whooping cough)
- Zoster – to protect against shingles
Vaccine-preventable diseases can cause long-term illness, existing chronic health conditions to worsen, hospitalization and death. Talk with your healthcare provider to be sure you are up to date with all recommended vaccinations for you.
A History of Vaccines
Vaccines have a long and impressive history. Well before we understood how infections worked, in the late 1700s an English physician Edward Jenner learned that giving small amounts of infected material from smallpox victims to others provided them protection from the dreaded disease. It was from those learnings that he developed a smallpox vaccine saving countless lives and small-pox has now been eradicated worldwide. Since that first vaccine was developed in 1798, we have used that same principle to produce vaccines to almost eliminate many of the formerly deadly childhood infectious diseases from the U.S. In fact, the greatest vaccine success in the modern era has been the near worldwide elimination of polio.
But it’s not always that simple. Try as we might, we have not yet been able to develop successful vaccines to control other important worldwide infections, such as tuberculosis (TB), malaria and HIV. In addition, controlling influenza also remains a challenge requiring new vaccines each flu season.
How Vaccines Are Approved
Vaccine and new drug testing are overseen by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and are done in a similar way. Below is the typical process that FDA expects vaccine developers to follow to provide safety and effectiveness data of a vaccine.
Once vaccines are approved for use by the FDA, an advisory committee to the CDC made up of medical and public health experts called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP will review all of the data. They then make a recommendation to add a vaccine to the vaccine schedule or not. The CDC Director then decides whether to approve the recommendation.
When vaccines are approved by FDA, they continue to be monitored for safety by several monitoring systems. CDC and ACIP can update their recommendation at any time as they continue to monitor vaccine-related risks and side effects.
Learn more by searching for recent vaccine topics covered in our Each Breath blog.
Ingredients in Vaccines to Protect Against Infectious Respiratory Diseases
Ingredients in vaccines generally fall into five categories, all of which have a specific purpose:
Only necessary ingredients are added to vaccines used today. Vaccines go through extensive clinical trials and testing for safety before they are licensed. Once they become available, they are continuously monitored using several safety monitoring systems. For a complete list of vaccines, their ingredients and more information about each ingredient, please visit the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Vaccine Education Center.
Page last updated: July 15, 2025
