Category Archives: Lock-down

The Pandemic Will Likely End In One Of These Four Ways; Social Media and More About Vaccines.

Leave a reply

I am getting really frustrated having to try to convince friends and patients of the value of vaccinations for Covip-19. Vaccinations promise an end to the coronavirus pandemic in the US. What kind of ending, though, is up to us?

I “loved” the excuse that she knew that the GOVERNMENT was putting tracers in the vaccines to track our every move and racist thoughts.

And with the cases and deaths due to COVID increasing in such very high numbers, while Israel as a country is the only country that has reached herd immunity. Their vaccinations are over 80% of their population and their new cases are so very low.

Reporter Dan Vergano noted that if the White House’s vision goes according to plan, vaccinations will end the pandemic in the US in time for 4th of July fireworks. Or the pandemic won’t end, and these shots will be the first of many we’ll get for years. Or they’ll offer a brief summer respite — before a more severe version of the coronavirus catches fire.

A return to a life resembling normalcy looks closer than ever now that, as of Monday, vaccines are available to every adult in America. Around 80 million people are already fully vaccinated, and President Joe Biden said on Wednesday that the US has already reached his goal of 200 million shots in the first 100 days of his administration, eight days early.

But with half of the population still unvaccinated and COVID-19 cases once more rising, just how close are we to the pandemic ending, both in the US and across the world?

Whether the pandemic ends in the US by Independence Day — or much further in the future — will depend on the vaccines, the virus, and decisions people make, experts say. The big questions include how long the vaccines’ protection lasts, how well they fight off new coronavirus variants, and whether the entire globe can hold off these emerging threats. Then there’s the X factor of how many people will be willing to get shots.

The benchmark for a successful vaccination campaign has long been considered to be “herd immunity” — having enough people vaccinated to keep sick ones from sparking outbreaks. That might require 80% of US adults getting vaccinated, according to infectious disease researcher William Schaffner of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

Other experts have urged Americans to not obsess over herd immunity. “I can’t say it’s going to be ‘this’ percent,” Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said this month, although he has previously floated percentages ranging from 70% to 85%. “We’ll know it when we see it. It’ll be obvious.”

Getting to that turning point could take very different routes, experts told BuzzFeed News. Although the summer everyone hopes for is within reach, worse outcomes are also possible. At this pivotal moment in the crisis, a lot depends on how willing people are to help themselves by continuing to wear masks and isolating until they are fully vaccinated — and to help people around the world get vaccinated too.

“It depends on decisions we make,” Lauren Ancel Meyers, a University of Texas epidemiologist, said this month at a Stanford University symposium about herd immunity.

Here are four ways that the pandemic could end in the US.

1. The Better Ending: Vaccination Returns Life Close to “Normal”

By June, most US adults get vaccinated. The shots halt the spread of SARS-CoV-2, even the more transmissible variants. And people feel safe shopping, traveling, and visiting each other, almost like they did before the pandemic.

This is the best outcome — and it isn’t completely far-fetched. Half of US adults have received at least one shot. Even with Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine paused, more than 3 million shots are being administered a day; at that rate, every adult American could receive one by late June.

Israel offers a glimpse of this future. There, a fast-paced campaign had immunized more than half of the population by mid-April. The results have been striking in the country of 9 million, with new cases falling to around 200 a day, 2% of the January peak. Starting this weekend, an outdoor mask mandate will be lifted.

White House / Via whitehouse.gov

White House COVID-19 briefing slide, showing case drop with 62% vaccination

Similarly, in the US, new cases among nursing home residents dropped by 96% and deaths by 91% between December, when vaccinations started, and March. After a slow start, more than 4.8 million people in nursing facilities have received at least one shot.

Although case numbers have increased in recent weeks, Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, predicts “a smaller bump over the next couple months that should by the summer settle down to a pretty low level of cases.”

That doesn’t mean that masking would stop. It’s worth noting that the declines in both Israel and nursing homes happened while restrictions were maintained. Under current US plans, young teens won’t start getting shots until the fall and elementary school–age children in the winter of 2022, meaning that their schools will likely keep face coverings, some virtual classes, and other restrictions for the foreseeable future.

But most partial or full closures of shops, restaurants, universities, and bars could end this summer if US cases fall like they did in Israel.

The bottom line is that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which make up the great majority of US shots, have proven 90% effective in real-world studies against COVID-19. Although some people have gotten infected despite vaccination, their numbers are small: about 6,000 cases out of 84 million fully vaccinated people, or .007%, according to CDC data.

“It is not unexpected — the vaccine is not 100% protective,” Scott Lindquist, a Washington state health department official, said in a recent press briefing about “breakthrough” infections there. “But what we saw were mostly very mild symptoms, if any at all.”

And existing vaccines appear to protect against new coronavirus variants, such as the B.1.1.7 strain, according to CDC data. “If you lose a little bit of protection to a variant, but the vaccine still keeps you safe, that’s still a good result,” Bhattacharya said. Vaccines aside, he noted that a sizable chunk of the population — more than 1 in 5 Americans by one recent estimate — also has some natural immunity from past infections, though studies suggest that this protection likely isn’t as long-lasting or robust as vaccination.

“I do think we’ll be OK by the summer,” said the immunologist, who is personally planning to travel to see his family in cities across the country. “Tickets booked for early July!”

In this future, the coronavirus cools down enough to be managed like the measles: a virus tamed by a vaccine that is added to childhood shot regimens, with occasional outbreaks in unvaccinated communities.

2. A Mixed Ending: Defanging, Not Defeating, the Virus

Mass vaccination delivers yet another future: the death rate from COVID-19 drops drastically, because the shots prevent severe and fatal illness, but outbreaks continue, largely among pockets of unvaccinated people, including younger people who are less targeted for vaccines or less worried about getting sick in the first place.

“A more realistic scenario is that older, more vulnerable individuals will receive a disproportionate number of doses,” said infectious disease modeler Jack Buckner of the University of California, Davis, by email. “Under these conditions additional outbreaks are more likely but the case fatality rate would be lower.”

Last month, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky was asked whether a sharp decline in death rates, with case numbers remaining high over the summer, might lessen the public’s urgency to get vaccinated. She called it a concern, but noted that children are dying of COVID-19, albeit very rarely, and that long-term complications from infections, also known as “long COVID,” plague even people with mild cases. A recent study from Sweden, for example, found 1 in 10 healthcare workers who had mild cases have felt effects, like loss of smell and taste, fatigue, and breathing problems, for months after.

“We’re going to defang the virus rather than defeat it.”

In this mixed scenario, we dodge a summer surge of deaths, but outbreaks occur in some counties or states. Herd immunity is also never quite reached in this future, because variants circle the globe every year like variations of the seasonal flu. Post–mass vaccination, the coronavirus would then enter a “mild endemic state,” where SARS-CoV-2 is reduced to a childhood cold, said Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch at the recent Stanford symposium about herd immunity. “We’re going to defang the virus rather than defeat it,” he said. “We’ll make it a nuisance that makes people a bit ill, rather than something that kills people in large numbers and causes the hospital system to groan under the weight.”

A related possibility is that vaccination only delivers immunity for a year or two and requires regular booster shots for older and younger people alike, which the heads of Pfizer and Moderna have told investors might be the case. (On Sunday, Fauci said on NBC’s Meet the Press that the FDA and CDC — not vaccine makers — will decide by fall about boosters.)

“Even if we reach the herd immunity threshold in the US or in rich countries, this virus is going to continue to circulate,” said Lipsitch.

Right now, doses are only promised on the order of hundreds of millions, and the planet is home to 7.8 billion people. The World Health Organization has warned that global under vaccination would be a catastrophic moral failure, prolonging coronavirus transmission around the world.

3. A Worse Ending: A Fourth Surge for the Summer

The better outcomes are far from inevitable. White House officials regularly say that the US is in a race between vaccination and more contagious coronavirus variants. In this scenario, we lose the race. The result: a fourth surge.

The reasons for worry are plain in case numbers that have stopped declining and are instead trending upward again, now averaging around 67,000 newly-reported infections a day. The more transmissible and dangerous B.1.1.7 coronavirus strain is quickly becoming the predominant one nationwide, now accounting for 26% of all new cases.

“We remain in a complicated stage,” the CDC’s Walensky said Monday. “On the one hand, more people in the United States are being vaccinated every single day and at an accelerated pace. On the other hand, cases and hospitalizations are increasing in some areas of the country, and cases among younger people who have not yet been vaccinated are also increasing.”

If the US falls behind on vaccinations, then a second lockdown period might result. Rising hospital admissions could lead governors and mayors to shutter bars, restaurants, and stores once again.

“We are in real risk of throwing away all the gains we have made, and losing another summer,” Debra Furr-Holden, a Michigan State University epidemiologist, told BuzzFeed News.

Her state, as well as the rest of the Upper Midwest and the Northeast, is in the thick of massive outbreaks right now. Some counties reopened bars, gyms, and restaurants too early, Furr-Holden believes, which in her view should serve as a warning to the rest of the country.

Although 74% of US adults say they want a shot, up from half in September, that’s still not enough to achieve herd immunity, some suggest. “We have to get about 80% of adults vaccinated,” said Schaffner, the infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt. “We’ve never done that with any vaccine in the United States.”

Some areas of the country are also much more resistant to vaccination than others. In states like Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Mississippi, as many as 37% of people tell pollsters they don’t want a shot. Politics clearly plays a role. Older, rural conservatives express the most hesitation, and their fears are reinforced by misinformation and fearmongering on right-wing cable channels.

“We are running into people who have expressed some hesitancy, so we have to listen to them and address their concerns,” said Schaffner, who is based in Nashville. Walensky acknowledged this week that “the administration of vaccines across the country is not uniform.”

But Andy Slavitt, the senior White House COVID-19 adviser, said he was unwilling to entertain the idea of the federal vaccination campaign shifting doses to parts of the country clamoring for shots and sending less to ones in areas where they go unused. “We are not going to quote-unquote ‘punish’ less-ready areas,” Slavitt told BuzzFeed News during a briefing this week. The key, he said, is to convey to people that while vaccines were hard to get during the initial rollout, there are now more than 60,000 vaccination sites nationwide, and at least one of them is within 5 miles of where 95% of the population lives.

Whether enough Americans will take that message to heart remains to be seen. If not, we may only reach herd immunity after another painful surge.

4. The Bad Ending: After the Summer, Global Variants Revive the Pandemic

Then there’s the worst-case scenario. In a mostly unvaccinated world, a new and more deadly coronavirus variant — or variants — overpowers vaccines and restarts the global pandemic all over again. The US, along with everyone else, has to begin again with new vaccines.

“Coronavirus mutates a lot — they can do it in humans, they can do it in animals — and the question is how important are these mutants going to be,” Stanford University infectious disease expert Julie Parsonnet said at the herd immunity symposium held at her university. “We don’t live just in Palo Alto, or just in California, or just in the United States. We live in a world where there are a lot of unvaccinated people, and as long as we don’t focus on the world more globally, we’re going to have problems.”

For now, the available vaccines are effective against the variants circulating in the US. But experts are surprised at the speed at which more transmissible ones have arisen, said Bhattacharya of the University of Arizona. Their arrival reflects just how widely the coronavirus has spread from host to host, each acting as a lab for new mutations to emerge.

“The places where the variants are growing, they’re not growing because they are evading the immune system, they are going nuts because there aren’t enough people that are immune,” Bhattacharya said. “Obviously this isn’t the best situation, because the longer you let this go, the better the odds that you will get some weird thing that will eventually start to grow out because it can evade the immune system.”

Last week, the White House announced a $1.7 billion effort to detect such new strains. Pfizer, Moderna, and other vaccine makers are already testing prototype booster shots that are designed explicitly against variants, such as the B.1.1.7 strain.

In the face of this threat, a recent risk analysis led by George Ioannou, an expert on veteran care at the University of Washington, offers a framework for who should get prioritized for vaccines. To prevent deaths as much as possible, people with the most severe risk factors, such as diabetes, heart failure, or kidney failure, should be given shots first, this work suggests. At the same time, if there is enough supply, vaccines should be administered as quickly and widely as possible to combat the new variants.

“You really don’t want that threat just hanging around,” Bhattacharya said.

But even in this worst case, the silver lining is that the coronavirus has nevertheless proven amenable to vaccination, he and other experts noted, unlike HIV, which for decades has thwarted vaccines. A coronavirus strain that evades the current vaccines will almost certainly be susceptible to shots that have yet to be designed.

That means vaccines will at some point deliver an end to the pandemic, no matter how many changes in work, school, and daily life it leaves behind, said Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis, author of Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live.

“Eventually it will return to normal,” Christakis told BuzzFeed News. “Plagues end — they just do.”

Social Media: A Parasite on Our Pandemic Mental Health

Doctor Vinay Prasad reported that recently, a physician colleague of mine, someone whom I’ve met in person and with whom I’ve shared a laugh, began to tweet increasingly hostile barbs about me. In a certain respect, it was a typical social media interaction — an uncharitable reading of one’s point of view and a scornful reply. But it was also unusual, as we have met in person, face to face.

In my experience, online anger like this is summoned only when the other person has been depersonalized — just a face dissociated from a person. I’d rarely experienced it from someone who I knew in real life. Just as I started to wonder what might be going on, a mutual friend called to say they had seen the out-of-character barbs. Apparently, this colleague has been suffering from a serious medical illness and was going through a hard time. By the end of the call, I was left feeling sympathetic.

Later that day, I noticed that a professor whose tweets I greatly enjoyed had shut down their account. Poof! They, and their astute comments, were gone entirely. I sent them a note, mostly to let them know that I had been affected by their sharp thinking over the years, and was sorry to see them go. The person wrote back that the growing hostility had driven them away. Every time they said anything, they felt mobbed by a sea of increasingly angry voices. They didn’t need the stress.

Finally, the same day, a colleague from another university called me to ask for some advice. She had been on Twitter, and was troubled by increasingly hostile and negative feedback. The specifics were ugly, and I could tell from the tone in her voice that my colleague was pained. I gave the few tips I know and went for a long run to think.

What Is Going On?

In the best of times, social media is a double-edged sword. It is a great way to get a message to many people, but it is de-personal, and driven by the economy of attention. Anger, disgust, and outrage are the emotions that engage and addict the users. People, good people, can become disinhibited and say things they don’t truly mean, or would never say in real life. Of course, this is during the best of times.

We are not in the best of times. People have been cut off from friends, family, and co-workers, and many are living in isolation. In fact, it is the loneliest year in human history. The largest number of people in history (billions) have deprived themselves of, at least some, social interactions. Mental health is suffering, and physicians, healthcare workers, researchers are suffering alongside everyone else. When we are tired and angry we are not our best selves, and paired with the algorithms of social media, it is a recipe for disaster.

Where Are We Now?

Every day people go online and the difficulties of the last year loom large in our minds — over 500,000 dead Americans, disjointed and often incoherent policy responses, the list goes on. Some are angry that we didn’t do more, sooner. Others are angry about interventions and restrictions that were broadly implemented that might not have helped, and even hurt. Both groups might be right: we were unwilling to do some things that might have helped, and simultaneously pursued other interventions that didn’t, and unfortunately hurt less-fortunate Americans. It will take years to tease these apart, as I have written. Regardless, we are angry. So, we go online looking to vent that anger. If we felt the bigger error was not enough restrictions, we get angry when someone is critical of restrictions. And if vice versa, we find a different scapegoat. A philosopher recently told me, we get most angry when other people don’t follow restrictions that we are able to follow.

The angry train goes off the rails when we invent motivations for others. Folks who share our point of view are always good people who want to save lives, and folks who disagree with us are people indifferent to human beings, grifters, ideologues, or attention-seekers. But, if one steps back, how can that possibly be? Surely people on all sides of an issue — whether that be school reopening or best vaccination practices — have varied reasons for holding their view. A tiny fraction may have some ulterior motive, but surely the vast majority hold their view for the same reason folks who disagree hold their view — an alternative interpretation of facts and values. I suspect a year from now the idea that the world is full of strictly good and bad people will look particularly ridiculous.

How Can We Make It Better?

I don’t know how we can improve the situation on social media, and more critically, reverse the anguish so many are facing in real life — but I do have some tips about how we might help ourselves.

1. Get offline. The professor who deleted their account had the right idea. Each of us has to decide if social media serves our purposes and makes us better informed or happier, but probably all of us should use it less. Read it less, and post less.

2. Mute all notifications. I did this a few years ago, and I quickly found more joy in my life. Say what you have to say, and let it go. No need to reply to anyone, and the easiest way is to set the accounts to never disturb you again.

3. Don’t reply to others. If you read a point of view you disagree with, what value is there in replying to the other person? Just state your point of view in your terms on your feed. No need to pick a fight. Just make your point on your terms.

4. If you are having a hard time at home or work, don’t use social media. It is hard enough to manage when you wake up in a good mood, but when you are feeling tired, scared, afraid or sick, it is too much. Corollary: If you love someone, and they are hurting, suggest they do the same.

5. Meet or call someone every day. Social media thrives from our loneliness — it’s a cheap way to feel less lonely in the loneliest year of human history. But it is a neon light to the sun. Call someone. Visit someone. Interact more in real life.

6. Tell someone you don’t know you appreciate their thoughts. Perhaps the best thing we can do to combat negative emotions is to give some positive feedback to folks we appreciate. I have sent some emails to people, but perhaps I am not thinking big enough. I plan to go on social media and talk openly about people whose thinking delighted me over this last year. It is the least I can do to combat the animosity.

Toward More Productive Dialogue

When we are feeling powerless, getting angry at someone is seductive. It is a way to channel and reorient your energy. Unfortunately, it leaves all involved worse off. Instead, consider using your energy to articulate or refine your perspective, to push for positive change. That doesn’t mean that there are not real errors — but jumping on a single tweet by a minor character in a drama is unlikely to be the change-maker. My tips are just suggestions, but all meant to re-orient the compass toward productive dialogue.

Scientists Reveal How the AstraZeneca Vaccine Causes Unusual Clots

Brenda Goodman reported that scientists in Germany say they’ve worked out the two-step mechanism by which the AstraZeneca vaccine causes rare but devastating blood clots that gobble up the body’s supply of platelets.

So far, European regulators have reported more than 220 cases of unusual blood clots and low levels of platelets in patients who received the vaccine, called Vaxzevria, which was developed with funding from Operation Warp Speed as part of the race to develop a suite of vaccines to protect people from COVID-19. Vaxzevria has not yet been authorized for use in the United States.

“This is, in my opinion, rock-solid evidence,” said Andreas Greinacher, MD, head of the Institute of Immunology and Transfusion Medicine, University Hospital Greifswald, Germany, who was among the first scientists in the world to link the rare clots to antibodies against the platelet factor 4 protein.

Greinacher said he found the same mechanism using three different technologies to gather evidence: dynamic light scattering, super-resolution microscopy, and electron microscopy.

“This is what scientists usually think is confirmatory evidence,” he said in a call with reporters hours after publishing his study as a preprint ahead of peer review on the Research Square server.

Greinacher said he felt an urgent need to get the information out as soon as possible. He said his team had worked around the clock for 5 weeks to get answers, “because we are in the middle of the vaccination campaign. This was the driving force for us and the big motivation to provide these data as fast as any other possible,” he told reporters on the call.

Greinacher said that he believes the mechanism linking the vaccine with the rare clotting reactions is likely to apply to other vaccines that also use adenoviruses to ferry instructions for making the virus’s spike protein into cells.

“My assumption is, and that’s a hypothesis, that this is a class effect of vaccines using adenovirus,” he said. He added that he could not be certain because he only studied reactions to the Vaxzevria vaccine. But previous studies have shown that adenoviruses can cause the type of platelet activation he saw in the reactions he studied.

Greinacher said that he had worked out an agreement with Johnson & Johnson about an hour before the call to collaborate on studying its COVID-19 vaccine. The company had previously been unwilling to share information, he said.

At least seven cases of the same pattern of unusual clots have been documented in people who received the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which also uses an adenovirus as its delivery vehicle. Over 7 million Johnson & Johnson vaccines have been given in the United States so far.

While the reactions are extremely rare, they can be serious. One person, a 45-year-old woman in Virginia, has died. That led the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Food and Drug Administration to call for a pause on administering the Johnson & Johnson vaccine last week. The company also announced that it would hold clinical trials to get more answers about the reactions.

In his new study, Greinacher and colleagues describe a cascade of events that has to happen in the body before the vaccines broker these large clots. He explained that while everyone has the basic immune machinery that leads to the unusual clots, it is almost always kept in balance. The body uses a series of checks to prevent any step in the process from getting out of control.

In some cases, however, there’s a perfect storm where each stage progresses to the next and the end result is very hard to control. That autoimmune attack, which causes the body to go into a hyper-clotting state, typically burns itself out after a few weeks. So if patients can get rapid treatment, the condition nearly always goes away.

He said he only knew of one case of an autoimmune syndrome like this lasting 10 years, but that was in a patient who had taken the blood thinner heparin, which can cause a nearly identical syndrome.

Two-Step Process Leads to Clots

In the first step, the adenovirus shell in the vaccine, along with proteins from the cells where the vaccine is grown, come into contact with platelets from the blood.

Platelets are best known as colorless cell fragments that rush to the site of an infection or injury, helping the blood congeal to stop bleeding; they also play a key role in the body’s immune response.

When activated, they surround invaders like bacteria and change shape to release chemical signals they store in granules.

When platelets are activated en masse, as can happen rarely after a person takes the blood thinner heparin or gets the Vaxzevria vaccine, they release a flood of these signals, Greinacher explained. These blaring signals recruit an ancient and hard-to-control branch of the immune response.

“Imagine this is like a dragon in the cave who was sleeping for a long time [but] which now got alerted by someone’s throwing a stone on it,” he said. The chemical signals awaken B-cells that then produce massive amounts of antibodies against the platelet factor 4 protein, which helps coordinate blood clotting.

The body erroneously thinks it is reacting to massive amounts of pathogens in the body, so the immune system overshoots. The antibodies bind the platelets, the platelets recruit white blood cells, and “then the whole thing is exploding,” he said.

The second key step in these reactions is caused by EDTA, a calcium-binding agent and stabilizer that is added to the Vaxzevria vaccine.

EDTA is not listed as an ingredient in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

EDTA opens junctions between cells that form the walls of blood vessels, causing them to become leaky. This allows the giant complexes formed by proteins and platelets to enter the blood circulation, where they — on very rare occasions — trigger that bodywide alarm.

Asked if he thought there was anything that could be done to make the vaccine safer, Greinacher said his first thought would be to try to get rid of the EDTA, which causes the second step in the process. But he said he was not a vaccine developer and didn’t know how important it might be to its formulation.

Why might the Johnson & Johnson vaccine lead to similar types of clots, even though it doesn’t contain EDTA? Greinacher speculated that size might play a role.

When this reaction occurs in patients who have taken heparin, the size of the heparin molecule matters. With unfractionated heparin, the longest kind of molecule, the reaction is 10 times more common than when patients take smaller low-molecular weight heparins.

Other vaccines might form smaller antibody-protein complexes that generate smaller warning signals, making the reaction less likely.

As for why the reaction appeared to be more common in women, Greinacher said he was growing skeptical that there is a large gender bias. He pointed out that most of the first vaccine recipients in Europe had been healthcare workers, who are disproportionately women.

He noted that women might be slightly more susceptible because of hormones and because women are more likely to develop autoimmune diseases, but that the risk was probably more balanced between men and women than it first seemed.

“It’s not a disease of young women,” he said.

Several European countries have changed or abandoned their use of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Last week, Denmark said it would no longer include Vaxzevria as part of its vaccination program. Italy has recommended that AstraZeneca vaccine only be used in people over age 60. UK officials said people under age 30 should be offered an alternative.

Meanwhile, the European Medicines Agency said a warning about the risk of blood clots and low platelets should be added to product information for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

ACIP Green-Lights J&J Vax for All Adults

Finally, Molly Walker reported that the pause is lifted, and Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine is once again recommended for adults, according to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

In a 10-4 vote, with one abstention, ACIP said in updated interim guidance that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is recommended under FDA emergency use authorization (EUA) for all adults.

They ultimately decided that including a separate warning on the vaccine, as well as in an FDA EUA fact sheet and materials on the CDC website, was sufficient. One choice the committee chose not to vote on would have added language that women under age 50 should be aware of the increased risks of rare clotting events, and may opt for a different authorized COVID-19 vaccine. The committee agreed that any further qualifiers would be too cumbersome for local jurisdictions to implement and might contribute to vaccine hesitancy.

Johnson & Johnson researchers unveiled a proposed warning that the FDA agreed to add to the vaccine’s current EUA. It warns about the risks of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), and recommends that clinicians consult with the published American Society of Hematology guidance for diagnosis and treatment of the condition.

ACIP member Grace Lee, MD, of Stanford University School of Medicine, said that putting a qualifier for any demographic group would be “extremely confusing,” because every ACIP recommendation “is a benefit/risk balance.”

The committee believed that the benefits of one-dose vaccination outweighed the risks, as it makes this vaccine available for vulnerable populations, including people experiencing homelessness, incarcerated populations, and home-bound populations.

The “no” votes came from members who felt that younger women would not be adequately informed about the risks of this rare adverse event by a warning label and EUA fact sheet.

“I did not object to the recommendation. I objected to the absence of any kind of guidance from us,” said ACIP member, Sarah Long, MD, of Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia. “This is an age group that is most at risk and is getting the vaccine predominantly to save other people’s lives. I’m very sorry we haven’t chosen to put up front the knowledge we have that … there are options.”

ACIP chair, José Romero, MD, ultimately voted yes, but added that he thought there was a bit of a “selective interpretation” in terms of how much younger women would be informed. He urged vaccination sites to have a second vaccine available so that younger women are not forced to shop for vaccines.

“These events are rare, but they are serious,” Romero said.

The American Medical Association (AMA) reiterated their support for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and pledged to help inform patients about the rare adverse events.

“The AMA will continue to work with the FDA and the [CDC] to ensure physicians and patients are aware of the rare, but increased risk of [TTS] in women under the age of 50, as well as the appropriate treatment, so they can act quickly,” said AMA president Susan Bailey, MD, in a statement.

On April 13, CDC and FDA agreed to a “pause” on use of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine out of an abundance of caution. At that point, there were six cases of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) with thrombocytopenia, one fatal. ACIP met on April 14, but agreed to wait to vote until more data accrued on the available cases, including potential risk factors.

As of April 21, the number of cases rose to 15, with three deaths. Seven patients remain hospitalized, including four in the ICU, while five were discharged home.

Thirteen of these cases were in women ages 18-49, with two in women older than 50. Based on these data, Tom Shimabukuro, MD, of the CDC, estimated that the rate of TTS was 7.0 per million doses in younger women, and 0.9 per million in older women. Seven cases of 15 were among women ages 30-39.

While all cases were in women, Shimabukuro noted that some data were still under review, “including potentially male cases,” although as of now, there were no cases reported in men.

Median patient age was 37, with a median time to onset of 8 days following vaccination. While 12 cases were CVST, three were other forms of thrombosis. Seven patients had obesity, while two patients apiece reported oral contraceptive use, hypothyroidism, or hypertension. No patients had established coagulation disorders.

All patients had thrombocytopenia, with 10 patients having severe thrombocytopenia, or platelet levels under 50,000. Of the 11 patients where a platelet factor 4 heparin-induced thrombocytopenia ELISA antibody test was performed, all were positive. Four patients did not have available results. Seven patients with CVST experienced intracerebral hemorrhage.

Non-heparin anticoagulants were used to treat 12 patients and intravenous immunoglobulin to treat eight patients, while platelet transfusion was used for seven patients and heparin for six patients. Shimabukuro noted that the six patients received heparin prior to the CDC Health Alert about treating this condition.

Shimabukuro said that cases under investigation may increase, as researchers plan to broaden their case definition to harmonize with the draft Brighton Collaboration case definition for TTS. This could include other thrombotic events, including venous thromboembolism, deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, ischemic stroke, and acute myocardial infarction.

As I try to conquer my depression in my interaction with some of my patients who refuse to get vaccinated, I wonder if we, our country will ever reach herd immunity as Israel has accomplished. I am trying to figure out whether it is worth keeping these patients in my practice due to my concern for my staff, my other patients and our families.

Please get vaccinated!!

The conspiracy theorists are wrong: Doctors are not inflating America’s COVID-19 death toll for cash. What about Herd Immunity and Oh, those Ignorant College Students!

Leave a reply

As the terrible fires continue to burn and Nancy Pelosi says that Mother Nature is angry with us and the political atmosphere is all about hate, I sometimes don’t know who to believe, especially when it comes to the media. Andrew Romano reported that earlier this week, Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst became the first member of “the world’s greatest deliberative body” to embrace a false online conspiracy theory that seeks to minimize the danger of COVID-19 by claiming only a few thousand Americans have died from the virus — not the 185,000 reported by state and local health agencies and hospitals. 

Ernst, who described herself as “so skeptical” of the official death toll, even went so far as to echo the nonsense argument spread by QAnon and other right-wing conspiracy-mongers that medical providers who have risked their own lives and health to treat COVID-19 patients have been attributing non-COVID deaths to the virus to rake in extra cash from the federal government. 

“These health-care providers and others are reimbursed at a higher rate if COVID is tied to it, so what do you think they’re doing?” Ernst, who is facing a tight reelection race, said Monday at a campaign stop near Waterloo, Iowa, according to a report by the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier.

“They’re thinking there may be 10,000 or less deaths that were actually singularly COVID-19,” Ernst added in an interview with the paper. “I’m just really curious. It would be interesting to know that.”

Since Ernst is “really curious,” here are the facts.

Yes, Medicare pays hospitals more for treating COVID-19 patients — 20 percent more than its designated rate, to be exact. Incidentally, this additional payment was approved 96-0 in the U.S. Senate — including by Joni Ernst. The reason Ernst (and all of her Senate colleagues) voted for it is simple: It helped keep U.S. hospitals open and operating during a worldwide emergency.

“This is no scandal,” Joseph Antos, a scholar in health care at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, explained in a recent PolitiFact fact-check. “The 20 percent was added by Congress because hospitals have lost revenue from routine care and elective surgeries that they can’t provide during this crisis, and because the cost of providing even routine services to COVID patients has jumped.”

In other words, no one is getting rich by misclassifying COVID-19 deaths.

It’s also fair to say that fewer than 185,000 Americans have died “singularly,” as Ernst put it, from COVID-19. According to a recent update by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 94 percent of patients whose primary cause of death was listed as COVID-19 were also judged to have comorbidities — secondary conditions like diabetes that often exacerbate the virus’s effects. For the remaining 6 percent, COVID-19 was the only cause listed in conjunction with their deaths.

On Sunday, President Trump retweeted a QAnon backer who falsely claimed this meant that only 6 percent of reported COVID-19 deaths — that is, 10,000 or so — were actually caused by the virus. Perhaps this “report” is what Ernst was referring to when she agreed Monday with an audience member who theorized that COVID-19 deaths had been overcounted. “I heard the same thing on the news,” she said.

Yet Twitter quickly removed the tweet for spreading false information, and for good reason.   

Despite all the innuendo, there’s nothing unusual about the way the government is counting coronavirus deaths, as we have previously explained. In any crisis — whether it’s a pandemic or a hurricane — people with preexisting conditions will die. The standard for attributing such deaths to the pandemic is to determine whether those people would have died when they did if the current crisis had never happened.

When it comes to the coronavirus, the data is clear: COVID-19 is much more likely to kill you if your system has already been compromised by some other ailment, such as asthma, HIV, diabetes mellitus, chronic lung disease or cardiovascular disease. But that doesn’t mean patients with those health problems would have died this week (or last week, or next month) no matter what. The vast majority of them probably wouldn’t have. COVID-19 was the cause of death — the disease that killed them now, and not later.

A closer look at the CDC data, meanwhile, reveals that many of the comorbidities listed by medical providers are complications caused by COVID-19 rather than chronic conditions that predated infection: heart failure, renal failure, respiratory failure, sepsis and so on.

Feverishly creating a baseless fiction from two threads of unrelated information — the additional Medicare payments and the CDC update about comorbidities — is a classic conspiracy-theorist move. But that doesn’t make it true.

“Let there not be any confusion,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said Tuesday. “It’s not 9,000 deaths from COVID-19. It’s 180,000-plus deaths.”

“The point that the CDC was trying to make was that a certain percentage of [deaths] had nothing else but COVID,” Fauci continued. “That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of COVID didn’t die of COVID-19. They did.”

In reality, it’s more likely that the U.S. is undercounting rather than overcounting COVID-19 deaths. According to a recent New York Times analysis of CDC estimates, at least 200,000 more people than usual died in the U.S. between March and early August — meaning that the official COVID-19 death count, which hit 140,000 over the same period, is probably too low. 

In the Hawkeye State, COVID-19 had killed at least 1,125 as of Wednesday afternoon. Over the past week, the state has reported an average of 1,177 cases per day, an increase of 124 percent from the average two weeks earlier. Its positive testing rate has risen from 10 percent to 18.5 percent since then. 

So while Republican lawmakers such as Ernst seek to downplay the lethality of the virus, Theresa Greenfield, Iowa’s Democratic Senate candidate, seized on her opponent’s baseless claim to underscore the gravity of the situation in one of the only states in America where the pandemic is getting worse.    

“It’s appalling for you to say you’re ‘so skeptical’ of the toll this pandemic has on our families and communities across Iowa,” Greenfield tweeted Tuesday, addressing the senator. “We need leaders who will take this seriously.”

Why a herd immunity approach to COVID-19 could be a deadly disaster

Reporter Rebecca Corey noted that since the coronavirus pandemic began, herd immunity has been floated by some experts as a possible solution to the deadly virus that has so far killed over 865,000 people worldwide. 

Herd immunity is possible when enough people have contracted and become immune to a virus, providing community-wide protection by limiting the number of people who can spread it. And while the strategy is considered controversial and even downright dangerous by many public health experts, it is also reportedly gaining momentum in the White House.    

According to a report by the Washington Post, herd immunity is a strategy being pushed by Dr. Scott Atlas — a neuroradiologist with no background in infectious diseases or epidemiology who recently joined the White House as a pandemic adviser. 

Atlas denied that he had encouraged the White House to adopt a herd immunity strategy, and on Wednesday White House coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx and top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci dismissed the idea that herd immunity was under consideration. An administration official, however, told CNN that the policies being promoted by Atlas are indeed akin to a herd immunity approach.   

Ordinarily, herd immunity would be acquired through a majority of the population being vaccinated — not through immunity acquired by natural infection. 

“Normally, when we talk about herd immunity, we talk about how much of the population needs to be vaccinated,” World Health Organization (WHO) COVID-19 technical lead Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove said on Aug. 27. “If we think about herd immunity in a natural sense of just letting a virus run, it’s very dangerous because you would need a lot of people to be infected.” 

It’s still uncertain what percentage of a population would need to be immune to the virus in order to attain herd immunity. According to Johns Hopkins University, in general, the answer is 70 to 90 percent of a population, depending on how contagious the infection is. But a model published last month in the magazine Science found that the threshold needed for coronavirus herd immunity could be as low as 43 percent. 

Proponents of herd immunity have looked to emulate Sweden’s more hands-off approach; unlike most countries in Europe, the Nordic country opted out of a nationwide lockdown and kept most businesses open. 

But Sweden’s strategy didn’t entail a total return to normalcy. The Swedish government implemented a ban on gatherings of 50 people or more, and many Swedes voluntarily followed social distancing guidelines. 

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb noted in an op-ed published on Aug. 30 that in addition to being much larger than Sweden (a country with a population the same size as North Carolina’s), the U.S. has a high rate of citizens with preexisting conditions, which can lead to a higher rate of COVID-19 complications; about 10 percent of Americans have diabetes, and 40 percent are considered obese. 

Moreover, Sweden’s pursuit of natural herd immunity doesn’t appear to be working. A study released in June by the country’s Health Agency showed that only 6 percent of Swedes had developed antibodies to the coronavirus — though a recent study from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and Karolinska University Hospital suggests that immunity in Sweden may be higher than antibody tests indicate. 

The role of antibodies and how much of an impact they have on long-term immunity is still questionable. A U.K. study, which had not yet been peer-reviewed, found that antibodies may start to decline 20 to 30 days after the onset of COVID-19 symptoms. And a Chinese study found that antibody levels in patients who had recovered from COVID-19 fell sharply within two to three months after infection. 

Falling antibody counts may not necessarily mean waning immunity; other immune responses such as T-cells could also affect how long immunity lasts. But the case for natural herd immunity is made even more improbable by reports of coronavirus reinfections in Hong Kong, Europe and the U.S. If natural immunity is as short-lived as a few months, that wouldn’t be stable enough to provide community or nationwide protection.    

Yahoo News Medical Correspondent Dr. Dara Kass says waiting to reach the minimal number of infections needed for natural herd immunity to work would not only take longer than waiting for a vaccine (which could come before the end of the year, according to the CDC) but would also likely cost more lives. Even if only 40 percent of the U.S. population needed to contract and recover from COVID-19 to reach natural herd immunity, Kass argues, that would mean another 126 million more Americans would still need to be infected.  

“It’s taken us six months to get to 6 million infections,” Kass says. “What if we just said, let’s live life like normal? Let’s not wear masks, let’s not socially distance, let’s ride the subways and go to work. How fast could we get to 126 million infections? One year? Two years? Three years? We don’t know. But what we know is, the faster we infect people, the more people will die.” 

“We’ve seen so far 185,000 Americans die of this coronavirus with 6 million people infected,” Kass continues. “If we want to intentionally infect another 126 million Americans, that means that over 1 million more Americans would die of this virus before we infected enough people to get to any possible natural herd immunity.” 

According to a Gallup poll conducted in late July, 35 percent of Americans said they would not get a coronavirus vaccine even if it were FDA-approved and available to them at no cost. But Kass says a vaccine will likely be the key to any workable herd immunity strategy.

“The bottom line is, will herd immunity be the answer to this coronavirus pandemic? And the answer will be yes — but not natural herd immunity. We will get to herd immunity hopefully with the development of a safe, effective vaccine,” Kass says.  

“Until we have a safe and effective vaccine that is available to the hundreds of millions of Americans that still need to be exposed and recovered from this virus, we just need to continue to do the hard work, which means wear a mask, be socially distanced from people you don’t know, wash your hands multiple times a day and listen to the science.”

College Students Are Already Itching to Sue Frats Over COVID-19

So, is anyone surprised at the stupidity of college students returning to campus after this long imposed “lock-down?” Are you surprised at the number of positive COVID-19 tested students after all of their large parties?

Emily Shugerman reported that across the country, as college students return to campus with masks and hand sanitizer, fraternities and sororities are doing what they’ve always done: drinking and partying. 

At the University of Washington this summer, 137 students living in frat houses tested positive for the coronavirus after hosting raucous parties that violated their own internal guidelines. At the University of Alabama, students completed an entirely virtual rush process that ended with new members showing up in person to sorority houses, packing themselves together to take photos and then crowding the neighboring bars. The next week, the university announced more than 500 cases on campus.

For responsible students and their families, who could fall ill or have their classes canceled due to their classmates’ Greek Life antics, it all seems ripe for a lawsuit, right?

Not necessarily.

Two attorneys who specialize in litigation against frats told The Daily Beast they have received multiple inquiries from concerned students or parents wondering what their legal rights are when it comes to potential super-spreader events on their campus.

Attorney Douglas Fierberg said filing a lawsuit is absolutely an option, arguing that violating public health rules around coronavirus is no different than violating other safety rules, like a speed limit. 

“The violation of [safety rules] by someone with no excuse or justification renders them responsible for the harm that’s caused,” he told The Daily Beast. “That precedent has been around since the dawn of American jurisprudence.”

But David Bianchi, an attorney who helped draft Florida’s anti-hazing law, said it isn’t so simple. In order to win such a suit, the plaintiff would have to prove not only that the defendant acted negligently, but that the negligent behavior directly caused them harm. And in a pandemic—where the virus could be picked up anywhere from a frat house to a grocery store parking lot—that could be difficult to prove. 

“The defense lawyer will have a field day asking questions of the plaintiff about every single place they went for the seven days before the fraternity party, the seven days after the fraternity party, and they’re going to come up with a list of 50 places,” he said. “How do you prove that that’s not where they got it from?”

Bianchi said half a dozen parents called his office asking about the possibility of filing a lawsuit, and he told them not to bother.

“I call ’em like I see ’em, and I just don’t see it here,” he said.

Lawsuits against Greek organizations, for everything from wrongful death to sexual assault, are big business for personal injury attorneys. (In 2018, the parents of a freshman at Northern Illinois University won a historic $14 million settlement after their son died at a fraternity party.) 

And there’s no question that some are bracing for suits against fraternal organizations: Holmes Murphy, an independent insurance brokerage with a specialty in frats, wrote a blog post on how clients could avoid trouble.

“We’ve received many questions about whether or not a house corporation has a duty to do anything,” the post said. “This is a question that will ultimately be tested after a case and spread within a house occurs. There is certainly no shortage of lawsuits as a result of the pandemic. Ultimately, doing the right thing comes first. Start with the basics. That may be all you can do. But it is better than doing nothing.”

What’s hazier is the prospect for coronavirus lawsuits in general. Thousands of suits have been filed since the pandemic started—against schools, businesses, prisons, and pretty much anywhere else you can pick up a virus—but few have been decided. Some legislators have also pushed for laws giving businesses widespread legal immunity, in hopes of getting the economy back up and running. 

On college campuses, Fierberg said, legal actions may not happen right away—classes have only just started, and it takes time for someone to get infected, suffer a grievous injury, and find a lawyer. He predicted a rash of such suits in the next six months to a year.

“The time period that this is incubating is now,” he said. “What’s gonna happen in that experiment is yet to entirely show itself. If it comes out as Frankenstein then that’s one thing. If it comes out as something nice… well that’s a different thing.”

Why a Vaccine Won’t Be a Quick Fix for COVID-19

Medscape’s Brenda Goodman noted that nine months into the COVID-19 pandemic, we are all exhausted, stressed out, and looking for the exit, so hopes for a vaccine are high. Not only are we all stressed out but with the election only weeks away there is pressure to have a vaccine so that President Trump sees a bump in his numbers for re-election possibilities.

Numerous efforts are underway around the world to test, manufacture, and distribute billions of doses. A table maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO) lists 33 vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, currently being tested in people, with another 143 candidates in preclinical testing and I just reviewed an article which noted that there were actually 210 vaccines being studied.

The effort is so critical, the U.S. government is spending billions to make doses of vaccine that may be wasted if clinical trials don’t show them to be safe and effective. The goal of this massive operation, dubbed Warp Speed, is to deliver 300 million doses of safe and effective vaccines by January 2021.

As important as a vaccine will be, some experts are already trying to temper expectations for how much it will be able to do.

“We all hope to have a number of effective vaccines that can help prevent people from infection,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said at an Aug. 3 news briefing. “However, there is no silver bullet at the moment, and there might never be.”

Barry Bloom, PhD, an expert in infectious diseases and immunology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is even more direct: The idea that a vaccine will end the pandemic just isn’t realistic.

“That’s not going to happen,” he says. First, not enough people will get the vaccine. Second, for those who do take it, the vaccine may only offer partial protection from the virus.

“I am worried about incomplete availability, incomplete protection, unwillingness of a portion of a country to be vaccinated,” Bloom says.

At least at first, not enough people will get the vaccine for the world to achieve herd immunity, or community protection. Community protection robs the virus of the chance to spread easily. It occurs when enough people become immune, either because they’ve recovered from the infection or been vaccinated against it. This high level of immunity in a population cuts the chances that someone without immunity ― say an infant or someone who can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons ― will be exposed to the virus and get sick.

Typically, the herd immunity threshold for an infection is somewhere between 70% and 90% of the population. We don’t yet know where the threshold is for COVID-19 because there are still big unanswered questions about how our bodies respond to the virus or a vaccine against it: Do most people respond in a way that protects them in the future? If so, how long does that protection typically last?

Even at the low end of the typical range for community protection ― 70% ― we’re still far short of that mark.

Recent studies checking blood samples submitted to commercial labs suggest that 5% to 10% of the population has recovered from a COVID-19 infection in the U.S. That’s just an average. The real number varies widely across the U.S., ranging from a low of about 1% in San Francisco to a high of about 20% in New York City, according to CDC data. Most of the country is still in the 3%-5% range ― still a long way from community protection against the virus.

So, most of the immunity needed to reach a level that would provide community protection would have to come from a vaccine.

“It’s not just getting a vaccine. It’s using it and using it appropriately,” Bloom says. “Vaccines don’t prevent anything. Vaccination does.”

Getting enough doses to enough people will take a while, even after a vaccine becomes available, for several reasons.

When vaccines against COVID are first approved, supplies will be tight. Initially, there may be enough doses for 10 million to 15 million people in the U.S. The first shots will be reserved for the people who need them most.

Just this week, the National Academy of Sciences came up with a draft plan for how to fairly distribute the vaccine, which would unfold in four phases. Those phases will take time to execute.

The first phase recommends that the first doses go to health care workers and first responders, with the next batch going to people with health conditions that put them at highest risk of dying from COVID, and to seniors living in group homes. Those groups make up just 15% of the population, according to the report.

Phase two, which covers about 30% of the population, calls for vaccination of essential workers at “substantially high risk of exposure,” teachers, people with health conditions that put them at moderate risk from the disease, people living in close contact with others (like prisoners and those staying in homeless shelters), and seniors who weren’t covered in phase one.

The largest chunk of the population, including children, who can be infected but may show few signs of illness, aren’t a priority until phase three, which also includes other essential workers. Phase three accounts for about 40% of the population. The last phase, everyone else, makes up about 5%.

Among those who are eligible for vaccination, not everyone is likely to agree to get one.

A recent poll by Gallup found that 35% of Americans ― or about one in three ― don’t plan on getting a COVID-19 vaccine, even if it’s free. Among the two-thirds of Americans who say they will be immunized, a large number plan to wait. A recent survey by STAT found that 71% will wait at least 9 months to get their shots.

Those numbers align with a recent poll by WebMD, which found that 73% of readers said they would wait at least 3 months to get a vaccine when one becomes available.

“I don’t find that shocking. I would think for people who are rational, wouldn’t you want to see what the data are on safety and efficacy before you made a decision?” Bloom says. “I’m worried about the 25% who, no matter what happens, won’t take the vaccine. Those are the people who really worry me.”

Vaccine hesitancy ― fear of getting any vaccine ― is growing. The WHO recently listed it as one of the top threats to global health, pointing to the recent resurgence in measles. Many countries have recently seen large outbreaks of measles. These outbreaks have been caused by an increasing number of parents refusing to vaccinate their kids.

Experts are worried that vaccine hesitancy will play a large role in whether the U.S. and other countries reach herd immunity thresholds. The Gallup poll found Republicans are less likely to be vaccinated than Democrats, and nonwhite Americans ― the group being disproportionately affected by COVID-19 infections ― are less likely to be vaccinated than whites.

Bloom and others believe that right now, we should be working on a way to overcome vaccine hesitancy.

“Policymakers have to start focusing on this,” says Robert Litan, PhD, JD, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institute.

He thinks we shouldn’t try to overcome hesitancy by forcing people to take the vaccine. Instead, he wants the government to pay people to take it ― $1,000 each, or $4,000 for a family of four.

“That’s a lot of money,” especially now with the economy sagging and so many people out of work, Litan says. “I think a thousand dollars would get a lot of people to take the shot who would otherwise not take it.”

Litan ran the numbers, looking at various scenarios of how many people would take it and how effective the vaccine might be. He says he realized not enough people would be protected to fully reopen the country.

He says he’s not sure $1,000 is the right sum, but it should be generous because if people think the amount could go up, they will wait until it does, which would defeat the purpose of the incentive.

“I can’t think of anything else,” he says. “You either have carrots or sticks, and we can’t use sticks. It won’t work.” How Well Will It Work?

Getting enough people to take it is only one piece of the puzzle. We still don’t know how well any of the shots might work, or for how long that protection lasts.

Researchers have now confirmed at least four cases of COVID-19 reinfection, proving that the virus infected the same person twice.

We still don’t know how common reinfection is, but these cases suggest that some people may need a booster dose of vaccine before they’re fully protected against the virus, says Gregory Poland, MD, an expert in immunity and vaccine responses at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.

That’s similar to the way we dole out vaccines for seasonal flu, with people urged to get the shot every year, he says.

That’s another reason it could take a while to reach herd immunity.

It’s also not clear how effective a vaccine may be.

The FDA and WHO have said that a vaccine should be at least 50% more effective than a placebo to be approved. But that could mean that a shot merely decreases how bad an infection is but doesn’t stop it. That would be an important effect, Bloom says, but it could mean that even vaccinated people would continue to spread the infection.

“If it prevents disease, but doesn’t prevent growth in the upper respiratory tract, there is a possibility there will be a group of people who will be infected and not get sick because of the vaccine but still have the virus in their respiratory tract and be able to transit,” Bloom says. “That would not be the ideal for a vaccine, but it would protect against disease and death.”

He says the first studies will probably measure how sick vaccinated people get and whether or not they need to be hospitalized.

Longer studies will be required to see if vaccinated people are still able to pass the virus to others.

How effective any vaccine may be will also depend on age. In general, older adults ― the ones who most need protection against COVID-19 ― don’t respond as well to vaccines.

Our immune systems get weaker as we get older, a phenomenon called immunosenescence.

Seniors may need specially formulated vaccines ― with added ingredients, called adjuvants ― to get the same response to vaccines that a younger person might have.

Lastly, there’s the problem of reintroduction. As long as the virus continues to spread anywhere in the world, there’s a risk that it could reenter the U.S. and reignite infections here.

That’s what happens every year with measles. In most states, more than 90% of people are vaccinated against measles. The measles vaccine is one of the most effective ever made. It gives people substantial and long-lasting protection against a highly contagious virus that can stay in the air for long periods. You can catch it by walking through the same room an infected person was in hours before.

Every year, travelers come to the U.S. carrying measles. If they go to a crowded place, like a theme park, it increases the chances that initial infection will touch off many more. As vaccine hesitancy has increased in the U.S. and around the world, those imported cases have sparked outbreaks that have been harder and harder for public health officials to extinguish, raising the risk that the measles virus could become endemic again in countries like the U.S.

For the world to be rid of COVID-19, most of the world has to be vaccinated against it. There’s an effort underway ― called COVAX ― to pay for vaccinations for poorer countries. So far, 76 of the world’s wealthier countries have chipped in to fund the effort. The U.S. has not. The Trump administration says it won’t join because of the WHO’s involvement in the effort, a move that may place the plan in jeopardy.

For all these reasons, it will probably be necessary to continue to spread out, wear masks, and be vigilant with hand hygiene to protect yourself and others for the foreseeable future.

“For now, stopping outbreaks comes down to the basics of public health and disease control,” Tedros said.

We may get a vaccine, but we will still need to be able to test enough people for the virus, warn their contacts, and isolate those who are infectious to keep the epidemic under control, or, as Tedros has urged, “Do it all.”