A panel of experts from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended approving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine on Friday, February 26, which means that there will soon be three highly effective vaccines available in the U.S. to combat COVID. And while COVID White House adviser Anthony Fauci, MD, said this is “nothing but good news”, he warns that by having these vaccines at your fingertips are simply not enough. Now we need to put these doses into action at high speed, or else we risk creating more mutations while we wait. Read on to find out how this can pose serious challenges to our containment efforts and for another reason to get vaccinated as soon as possible. The CDC says that you don’t have to do this again after being vaccinated.
While skeptics were angered by the rapid pace of development of COVID vaccines, Fauci warned in a recent interview with Savannah Guthrie this vaccination hesitation can have dire consequences. “This is a race, Savannah, between the virus and the introduction of vaccines in people,” explained Fauci. “The longer you wait to be vaccinated, the more likely the virus is to get a variant or mutation,” he added.
Viral variants from the UK and South Africa have already proven to be more contagious than the original virus and potentially more deadly. This week, two strains grown in California and New York sounded alarms in the research community.
However, despite the continued spread of the virus and the effectiveness of the anticipated vaccine, many Americans prefer to postpone vaccines. According to a January 2021 Pew Research survey, only 47% of the adult American population plans to receive the vaccine as soon as it is available to them. The other 53 percent plan to “wait and see” how the vaccine is working first (31 percent), get it only if necessary (7 percent) or refuse the vaccine altogether (13 percent).
However, these attitudes may soon change. In one of the largest public health education efforts in the history of the United States, more than 300 companies, community groups and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently announced a major joint advertising campaign that will seek to reassure the public about the vaccines. safety and effectiveness. Experts believe that a broader understanding of vaccines will allow our rapid return to normal –before additional variants have the opportunity to find their foundation. Read on for more essential information about COVID vaccines and to get an incentive to get vaccinated that will make you smile, Dr. Fauci says it is safe to do this after being vaccinated.
While it is fair to have questions about the long-term safety of COVID vaccines, it is important to note that they use technology that has been studied for more than two decades for use against other infectious diseases and cancers.
According Ellen Matloff, MS, founder of Yale University’s Genetic Cancer Counseling program and CEO of My Gene Counsel, there are several benefits to using this relatively new technology. “Since mRNA vaccines do not use a live virus, there is no potential risk of infection with the disease,” she explained in a December article for Forbes. “Another benefit of mRNA vaccines is effectiveness. The mRNA is efficient and can be picked up and used by the body quickly. Finally, mRNA vaccines are faster and easier to produce than traditional vaccines, because they are produced in a laboratory instead of an egg or other mammalian cell. Therefore, the production of the mRNA vaccine can be controlled more closely and is cheaper and faster to produce in large quantities, ”he added. And to get the latest COVID news straight to your inbox, sign up for our daily newsletter.
As Fauci points out, the side effects of the COVID vaccine tend to be mild to moderate and last only 24 to 48 hours, if they appear. You can expect to experience pain at the injection site, aches, chills, or other flu-like symptoms, but none of them is likely to cause severe discomfort.
From his own vaccination experience, Fauci told CNN Dana Bash, “The only thing I had was six to 10 hours after the vaccine. I felt a little pain in my arm that lasted for about 24 hours, a little longer, then it went away and, completely differently from that, I didn’t feel any other kind of harmful effects. “And to get up-to-date vaccine news from the CEO of Pfizer, this is how you will need a COVID vaccine frequently.
Deciding whether or not to get a COVID vaccine may seem like a personal choice – and of course this is true to some extent – but that does not mean that your decision exists in a vacuum. In addition to Fauci’s broader concerns about delays in vaccination causing more mutations, other experts suggested that these mutations could start to have more serious consequences for children.
Although pediatric cases of COVID are more likely to be mild or asymptomatic than those affecting adults, there have been hundreds of tragic deaths among children since the beginning of the pandemic. In addition, “more than 2,000 children and adolescents have developed a severe inflammatory syndrome that can cause critical illness and damage organs,” according to the newspaper Science. Vaccines are unlikely to be approved for young children by 2022 (Moderna, for example, expects to have efficacy results in children aged 12 to 17 by mid-2021 and will begin testing for children aged six months to 11 years at the end of the year. ). Until then, it is essential to keep our overall numbers low.
Fauci said that we have achieved herd immunity – the point at which enough people are immune to COVID and cases have difficulty spreading through the community – when 75 to 85 percent of the population has been vaccinated or has recovered from COVID-19 . Once we achieve collective immunity, “even unvaccinated individuals (such as newborns and those with chronic illnesses) receive some protection because the disease has little opportunity to spread in the community,” explains the CDC.
However, according to a 2010 census, children represent 24% of the American population and are largely ineligible for the vaccine at the moment (the Modern vaccine has been approved for people over 16, while Pfizer is available only to adults). This means that we will need to work quickly to vaccinate all eligible adults, or we will risk losing our window before new variants appear. And when you’re ready to make your vaccination plans, the CDC says don’t do it with the second dose of your COVID vaccine.