If you take a vaccine that has, say, 90-95% efficacy but are surrounded by people with virus, you are actually LESS safe than if you are unvaccinated but are surrounded by people who have all taken that vaccine.
That’s herd immunity.
The idea here is that taking a vaccine is only in part about individual risk/benefit. The other part is whether you contribute to the “herd”. The vaccinated people who protect those susceptible.
Which leads to the obvious question: who are these susceptible people?
Some of them are people who may, for whatever reason, choose not to get vaccinated. And you could argue that that is an individual risk they take. Why should I be concerned? And that’s a fair argument.
But there are other categories of susceptible people.
One is people who are not yet ‘able’ to take the vaccine. Right now, that includes children and adolescents. Their risk is thankfully lower than adults. But also not zero. And greater protection from a vaccinated community, protects them.
Another is people for whom the vaccine is ‘less’ effective for. Immunocompromised and elderly for instance. For these people, the vaccine will likely help, but be less effective. Their protection also comes from the herd. And we choose to get vaccinated, we choose to protect them
Now, we are in a truly fortunate position. These vaccines appear to be remarkably effective, especially at preventing serious illness. Maybe it’ll be enough even for our most elderly & immunocompromised to keep them from getting seriously ill. The early data is promising.
We won’t know the full extent til later. What remains the most effective way to protect the vulnerable? Having less COVID around. Which means having more vaccinated people. Which means me being a part of that shield.
Which is why I’m getting jabbed with a needle the second I can
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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/
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!
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.