I was on my phone when I shared this, so I couldn't really quote any of it, so here is a quote from the beginning and then a bit more from a later portion. I think it's particularly relevant here for two reasons. I often see people act as if the Covid vaccine is a total failure because it isn't 100% effective. I had this discussion with an anti-vax friend of mine (was anti-vax even before covid), who said it wasn't a vaccine at all like the polio vaccine. His reason - he thought the polio vaccine worked in one dose to completely eradicate the disease. He's wrong. Kids get 4 doses and adults 3 doses of the polio vaccine to get close to 100% efficacy.
Secondly, I like the fact that this writer documents the fact that post-vaccine covid is both less serious and less infectious (statistically speaking). I'm getting pretty sick of people acting like the vaccine is worthless, when we know from the records that it works and works well.
Quote:
Boghuma Kabisen Titanji was just 8 years old when the hyper-contagious virus swept through her classroom. Days later, she started to feel feverish, and developed a sparse, rosy rash. Three years after being fully dosed with the measles vaccine, one of the most durably effective immunizations in our roster, Titanji fell ill with the very pathogen her shots were designed to prevent.
Her parents rushed her to a pediatrician, worried that her first inoculations had failed to take. But the doctor allayed their fears: "It happens. She'll be fine." And she was. Her fever and rash cleared up in just a couple of days; she never sickened anyone else in her family. It was, says Titanji, now an infectious-disease physician and a researcher at Emory University, a textbook case of "modified" measles, a rare post-vaccination illness so mild and unthreatening that it doesn't even deserve the full measles name.
The measles virus is ultra-infectious, much more so than SARS-CoV-2, and kills many of the uninoculated children it afflicts. But for those who have gotten all their shots, it's a less formidable foe, which we've learned to live with long-term. That's the direction that many experts hope we're headed in with SARS-CoV-2 as it becomes endemic, as my colleague Sarah Zhang has written.
Quote:
The experience of having COVID is now poised to splinter further, along immunological boundaries largely defined by vaccines. Inoculated bodies are less hospitable to SARS-CoV-2, making it harder for the pathogen to infect them; when it still manages to, it seems to be purged much faster, affording it less time to cause symptomsespecially the bad onesand fewer opportunities to hop into other hosts. "I think about it as defanging the virus," Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at Emory, told me.
If I’m posting, it’s actually Mrs GeographyAg.
Mr. GeographyAg is a dedicated lurker.
