I can tell you, in Saskatchewan, we’re gearing up for April 1st. At that point, the potential bottleneck is no longer anticipated to be production, it’ll be distribution and uptake.
It’ll be all hands on deck, getting HCWs to give shots and organize people to get them.
What this means is for the next six weeks, the most important thing is to hold the line. We can not let variants go uncontrolled. We can’t give grounds for new variants. We need to choke out virus expansion.
Then come April, it’s a mad dash for shots in arms. Go go go!
Which means, what to do now? (Aside from all the masking, distancing, staying at home wherever possible and not eating inside restaurants we’re doing)
Now’s the time to talk to your doctor if you have any Qs about the vaccine. If you have Qs about safety. Get ready.
To this end: are you or any one you know hesitant about the vaccine? What questions do you have?
How can I or my colleagues in healthcare help address your concerns?
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This is an awesome question. (Incoming big thread!)
The vaccine studies looked for symptoms of COVID. So it was easy to say from the trials that the vaccines prevented symptoms & hospitalizations. They didn’t directly test for asymptomatic spread. So we couldn’t say for sure. 1/
Now, if you’re not getting sick, and your immune system is primed to attack the asshole protein & destroy the virus quickly, logically you’d expect to spread the virus ‘less’ or ‘not at all’. But until you have evidence of that, you can’t say for sure. 2/
The Moderna trials tested everyone at the time of their 2nd dose. People who got the vaccine were less likely to have asymptomatic COVID. So that’s some evidence the vaccines also prevent getting asymptomatic COVID, not just symptoms. 3/
So far I’ve seen separate arguments that healthcare workers, urban First Nations, teachers, Uber drivers & retail workers should get priority vaccination.
So I don’t think we should be surprised when it’s revealed it’ll mostly be hockey players. :)
In all honesty, I don’t envy the people making these decisions. There’s a lot of groups with legit arguments for priority vaccination, but you add them up and it’s not really priority vaccination any more.
HCWs, police, fire fighters, teachers, marginalized populations, essential workers, immunocompromised, caregivers, low-income individuals without sick leave... arguments for all of them and more.
The first 20% & the last 20% are easier to figure out than the 60% in the middle.
I wrote a thread on this topic last week. I focused on anorexia, but @AyishaKurji is right: most eating disorders are not anorexia and we’re seeing a rise in many types.
Also, Dr. Hinz is right. I kind of talked a lot about a step-down unit in the article but a specialized inpatient unit, a step-down unit, and a outpatient treatment program would be a standard of care that allows you to progress patients through a course of treatment.
Also, yes, the Novavax vaccine works via the asshole protein. This time, instead of mRNA or viral vectors, they just made the asshole protein itself. But how they did that was kind of cool.
They took the gene code for the asshole protein and put it in a different virus. Then they made that virus infect a bunch of moth cells in a lab.
So now you’ve got a ton of infected moth cells that are producing asshole proteins.
Not all are approved yet but it looks like we’ll have at least a half dozen vaccines going around in various parts of the world soon enough.
As expected, each has their own pluses and minuses.
Pfizer & Moderna (mRNA): best efficacy results so far, but need 2 doses, transport at low temps. Won’t have enough for the world (like all the vaccines). Pfizer with 2 billion & Moderna with 1 billion doses or so by the end of 2021.
AstraZenica (viral vector): So far studies suggest not as effective as the mRNA ones but still very good. Two doses. Don’t need super low temps. Said they’d have 3 billion doses in 2021, not sure if that’s still true.