COVID-19 vaccination sign. FREDERIC J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
Cline R.Gounder, a writer for The Atlantic, writes that COVID-19 vaccines will not eliminate the coronavirus "no matter what booster shots the United States give." However, this is no reason to panic about them or lose faith in them.
Grounder is an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine and Bellevue Hospital. He believes that public health messaging was out of control during the vaccination drive. This was especially true when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released real-world evidence showing that Moderna and Pfizer vaccines were 90% effective in preventing infection, rather than just disease. People believed that only very few people could get the disease or be infected by full vaccination. There is a lot more anxiety now that the efficacy seems to be lower.
Grounder attempted to alleviate that by explaining that vaccines are more effective in protecting against infection when fighting viruses with longer incubation times, such as smallpox and measles. In these cases, the body has been trained to eliminate the virus before it can establish itself. The coronavirus or influenza can start reproducing much faster than the flu and can be reproduced before a vaccine activates. The virus is often blocked in the lungs, causing severe damage and not having much space to reproduce once it has.
Grounder suggests that Americans need to "recalibrate their expectations about what makes vaccines successful." She argues that while "public discussion about the pandemic is being distorted by the presumption vaccines can and should eradicate COVID-19 completely," it's not an achievable standard. It makes each breakthrough infection look like evidence that vaccines aren't working, even though they're doing "extremely well" in reducing serious infections to milder or asymptomatic. Read Grounder's entire piece at The Atlantic.
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