When first released, the COVID-19 vaccines were preventing symptomatic disease. If you took the vaccine, you had upwards of 90% chance of not becoming clinically sick. I’ve had conversations with many of you about the fact that we’ve never made a coronavirus vaccine in human or animal health that consistently produces lasting protection. Coronaviruses love to mutate and mammals just do not maintain effective neutralizing antibodies to them long-term, and lasting immunologic memory seems to be difficult to achieve. As expected, we’re seeing the same with these vaccines. HOWEVER, what we have seen is that the vaccines do drastically reduce your chance of becoming critically ill and dying. This is still super helpful to prevent crippling our healthcare system. Who doesn’t want to prevent suffering and death?
Published scientific literature is showing that protection from the vaccine starts to wane at 6 months, and further decreases by 8 months, hence the booster recommendations you are now hearing. Seeing this, in my opinion, it is not impossible to wall this disease off to a season, like flu season. With enough folks carrying around antibodies from the vaccine or antibodies developed from surviving infection, it is plausible that we could have 6-8 month period of protection. It starts to look something like the flu season – the way flu vaccines are marketed in October to get some protection in the population through early spring. As we go along over time, deaths and serious illness numbers level off to some reasonable expected normal each season.
The effect on the long term “memory” portion of the immune system is not fully known just yet. There should be some protection to prevent severe illness over a long period, but we just do not have those numbers yet. We also know that there is variability between individuals, particularly those that are immunocompromised. You are seeing booster recommendations for these individuals first.
I hate mandates and government interference in personal decisions. I’m also trained in science and deal with herd epidemiology and have made an effort to keep up with what we are learning with coronavirus. Coronavirus is here to stay, but we’ve got to get serious about considering vaccination and what we are trying to achieve with it in order to get back to normal life with less need for restrictions.
A mask lowers how many folks we might infect while we try to get enough immunity to prevent unvaccinated and immunologically “naive” people from becoming critical. No agenda, no bull, it’s just what we know from years of history with respiratory pathogens hitting a population for the first time.
On the flip side, if you do get moderately ill, your doctors are likely to give you an infusion of laboratory-created antibodies (that’s the monoclonal antibody infusions you’re hearing about), or maybe plasma from a donor who survived Covid and developed antibodies. The other treatments include an antiviral and steroids and/or other drugs to dampen your immune system from causing complete chaos. Coupled with oxygen, the remaining treatment is all to improve your lung function. This is the current standard of care options published by the National Institue of Health, our government’s medical research agency, who developed the Moderna vaccine. (US DHHS)
If you opted not to make your own antibodies through a vaccine or have medical issues that prevent you from taking a vaccine, you’ll likely get some made in a lab or from a donor. It’ll just cost a lot more and you might occupy a hospital bed and feel terrible for a few days until the antibodies start to help fight the infection.
The vaccine just helps your body make your own antibodies. The vaccine itself is in your body just long enough to be noticed by your immune system, destroyed, and lead to your immune system to create antibodies that it will remember and protect you for some time (6-8 months), and also trigger the memory portion of immune system for some time period we’ll fully understand in time.
Sure, the few number of vaccine-related reactions have gotten some press. There are some real risks with any vaccine and there are some people who have issues that make it unsafe to be vaccinated. However, for those who are eligible, it is likely at this point that you know more people who have died from this disease than those that needed a doctor for a vaccine reaction.
We’ve debunked hydroxychloroquin, it didn’t change outcomes (no significant difference in those who died, or how long they were hospitalized) (NIH). We need more solid evidence on ivermectin before we can rely on it, evidence is mixed right now, and it is being investigated.
These are some facts as I know them, as well as some opinion about the future of coronavirus, delivered in the most common sense way that I can. It is a choice on what you do, it just so happens that your choice has consequences that can impact others in this case. Millions of doses of vaccines have hit arms, but not enough within a 6-8 month period to make the difference we need. We can’t have a kids chicken pox party and get sick at once because the risk of severe illness and having the space to treat everyone. Vaccination is the one, preferred, safe way to get enough protection in the population without huge risks to others.
Extend yourself and others some grace. No one alive has had to manage something exactly like this. We’re using the expertise of folks who have studied population health, medicine, and scientists finding useful tools. These folks understand the principles that can be applied to any new illness that emerges on earth and help us adapt to overcome. We really do learn something new each day, discover trends, and make recommendations to do the best using information as we currently understand it. It can be frustrating, especially when it affects your daily life, or delivers loss to your family and community. We will get through it, but it will take some action on everyone’s part.
Hypothetically, if SARS-Coronoavirus-2 affected my veterinary patients – that is, if it was in a dairy barn, a herd of horses, a house of swine or poultry – knowing what we know now, these animals would be vaccinated, and likely boostered again in the 6-8 month period.
We’ll follow the guidance of the human medical experts for ourselves, but it does appear we will need a booster to give this our best effort.
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