It appears that the light at the end of the covid tunnel is getting just that little bit brighter. We are not out of the crisis yet but things are definitely getting better.
The R rate, the number that measures the ability of a virus to reproduce and spread has dropped slightly and is now in the range of 0.8 – 1. This is a drop from a few weeks ago where the R rate was 0.8 to 1.1.
The fact that this number is dropping at a time when the economy is being opened up to a degree not seen since the crisis started, shows us that the vaccines against covid are working. Whilst the current vaccines do not give total protection against infection, a phenomenon that the covid vaccines share with some other vaccines, they are preventing some infections and most importantly preventing serious adverse health outcomes among those who contract a variant of Covid that the vaccine struggles to create immunity against.
Those of us who are currently reading old medical textbooks to establish just how far medical science and medicine in general have come, have seen in the covid vaccine rollout results that to previous generations would have looked miraculous. One of these books, the New People’s Physician which I believe was published in the early to mid 1940’s, readily accepts the science of vaccination and indeed mentions that vaccines were mandatory for those working in certain fields of nursing and didn’t see any moral or ethical problem with that mandate, after all these vaccinations were to protect both the nurse and the patient from infection that at the time might easily have led to a horrible death. But I very much doubt that the authors of this book would have predicted that medical and biochemical science would have advanced so much that a novel disease can arise and be at least partially vanquished in a two year period.
Back then the creation of a new vaccine was a long and laborious process hampered by lack of biochemical knowledge and primitive vaccine manufacturing techniques. Reading this book, which is part of a series that I am collecting whenever I see them in second hand bookshops, puts me in mind of the scene in Star Trek the Voyage Home where one of Captain Kirk’s crew is hospitalised in 1984 USA and Dr McCoy is horrified at the, to him, primitive nature of Earth’s medical treatment.
The world of science and medicine has indeed moved on and now, in an era where we can create vaccines by means of messenger RNA that were unimaginable back in the 1940’s, we can look back on that time with a similar sense of horror as that expressed by Dr McCoy. We no longer have to wait untold years for vaccines for killer diseases and watch millions of people die from preventable afflictions, we can engineer the weapons needed to stop the deaths and those weapons are vaccines.
We are fortunate to live in the times we do where a covid vaccine and indeed vaccines for influenza and a whole host of other diseases are available. We do not have to watch our best and brightest drown in their own lung fluids because of influenza which is what the post World War One generation had to do,. We can save our best and brightest and everyone we love by way of easily administered and remarkably safe vaccines. I can’t help but wonder at what wonders of art, literature, music, science, engineering and civil society might have been created had the 1918 flu generation lived instead of dying of influenza? Vaccinations prevent these unnecessary and tragic losses, vaccinations that were not available to the 1918 flu generation. Let as many of us who are able get vaccinated against all possible killer diseases, including Covid and send these diseases where they belong, which is to the history books.
i am in favour of vaccines and I myself am fully vaccinated however if you see what is happening in Isreal, its telling a different story. A massively vaccinated country is going through 4th wave.
The Israel situation is much more complex than some make it out to be. Whilst it is indeed true that a large proportion of its population (65% IIRC) are vaccinated against covid, the fact that not all vaccines can be guaranteed to give 100% protection for ever and rise of the Delta Variant, covid still poses challenges to Israel, challenges that are magnified by the up coming High Holy Days when there will be a lot of crowds and mixing. What’s important to know about the Israel situation is that although some vaccines may only be giving 40% protection against infection, those who get infected are in considerably less danger of death or serious illness than they would be if they were not vaccinated. I found this piece from the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz pretty illuminating and although Israel has some ongoing problems with covid they are nothing like as bad as they would be without the vaccines. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/the-israeli-graphs-that-prove-covid-vaccines-are-working-1.10101640 I was moderately sceptical about the covid vaccines until I looked into the background to them and the research that led to them,which has been going for decades rather than mere months.
Vaccines have had a wonderful impact on human health outcomes. I, too am fully vaccinated, but feel that we should be cautious about universal shots. I’m not sure if I can advocate for all youngsters getting the jab.
According to the Daily Mail https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-9821295/Why-British-experts-oppose-jabbing-18s-against-Covid-19.html
“But crucially the JCVI hesitated on a full rollout for under-18s. It said: ‘At this time, our view is that the health benefits of universal vaccination in children and young people below the age of 18 years do not outweigh the potential risks.’
A key reason for the JCVI’s caution is the emergence of a rare side effect: a risk of heart inflammation in about one in 20,000 after a dose of Pfizer’s vaccine. Young men are said to be at a slight increased risk of this. And only the Pfizer jab is approved at present for use in children aged 12 to 17.”
Myocarditis, the heart inflammation mentioned, can be very serious. The article makes scant mention of now serious the heart inflammation effects are.
A one in 20,000 risk for under-18s is quite an issue given their chances of dying from the virus.
The simple truth is that many vaccines are more beneficial to society as a whole than they are to some individuals or groups of individuals.
Mass vaccination plans and programmes need to be proportional to the disease threat. That was certainly the case with Smallpox and TB and and also because the vast majority of people have never come up against this particular covid virus and its variants and therefore have no defence against it.
Although the risk of covid to children is less than with older people, it is not non existent. I believe that 500 children in the USA have died from covid. Low risk does not correlate to no risk. The question is is the risk of covid in for example a very young cohort worth the risk of vaccinating? At present there are some covid vaccines suitable for children in the late stage of testing but they will not come on stream until 2022/2023. As the risk to children is relatively low when compared to older individuals taking a more cautious approach with regards vaccines for the young is probably prudent.
As regards the heart issues. From what I can gather its a relatively small number of people who get this issue. It would be good to be absolutely sure that the number of myocarditis cases is linked to the vaccine and not merely coming to light as more people are,because of the vaccination programme, being more closely medically scrutinised. Sudden, undiagnosed and sadly sometimes lethal heart defects do afflict the young 1:50k of under 35’s can have cardiac conditions that are never discovered until the person drops down dead. The question is are myocardial conditions being caused or merely triggred into identification by the vaccine?
You are right to say that there are some vaccinations that are there for the benefit of society and less to the individual. There’s nothing wrong with that vaccine approach in my view,it’s what we do with measles vaccination. In Western lands a child with measles might well survive and avoid many of the complications from it, but we vaccinate all or at least as many as we can in order to protect those who would get serious complications or who may die from it or who can’t be vaccinated because of medical reasons. We live in difficult times for mass vaccination as society is much more atomised now. Now previously you would have had people queuing round the block to get a Smallpox vaccine now we have a divided society where one group readily accepts vaccines and there is another group of natural health freaks waving placards saying ‘Save the Variola Major’.
BTW have you looked at what is coming out about the ‘Us For Them’ group that was heavily promoted on Conservative Woman? I got the impression that this was a grass roots group and treated it as such and accepted that they were a group trying to save some sort of normality for our children in our schools during covid. Turns out that they may not be so grass roots after all, but are likely to be an astroturf group with links to various covid denialist grifters, snake oil or rather Ivermectin salesmen along with anti vaccination extremists etc. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1420040653434675206.html