Sorry for long post. It's great news that a Covid vaccine is in the pipeline, but aren’t we forgetting that there already exists a potent means of providing immunity against the disease - catching the disease itself? The government was, rightly, quickly discouraged from its initial ‘herd immunity’ plan, with ‘immunity certificates’ for survivors, but when they changed tack, they went to the opposite extreme and declared that those of us who'd had it were to be treated no differently from those who hadn't.
Consider this: if the Pfizer vaccine were to be given to health & social care workers tomorrow, we’d have 3 million people, 90% of whom would be protected against Covid for an unknown time period - and we don’t yet know if they wouldn’t transmit the disease, only that they wouldn’t suffer the symptoms - and 10% who wouldn't.
But we already have in the UK at least 6.5 million survivors of Covid-19 who, judging by the tiny numbers proven to have contracted Covid twice, are a lot better than 90% protected, and who, once they’ve had it, don’t seem to be still able to transmit the disease: how would the huge dip in Covid infection rates over the summer have been achieved if there'd been 6.5 million active infectors?
I look at it this way: if I were running a care home, I would be very interested indeed in which of my staff had had Covid. In fact, I’d pay for them all to have blood tests, so that I could deploy those with positive antibody tests to look after my most vulnerable clients. I know having had Covid doesn't make a person zero risk; but government and workplace regulations make no risk distinction at all between those who have had Covid and those who haven’t. My staff would all still be urged to use the NHS Covid app, and self-isolate on being notified, regardless of whether they have had Covid or not, on the basis that ‘it’s not known if having antibodies stops you getting the virus again’. No wonder there are compliance issues with track & trace.
So the advent of a large, Pfizer-vaccinated group of people should, under current health advice, make no difference whatsoever. They would, as a group, be LESS protected than the naturally immunised. The government has to not only deliver the vaccine; it's got to change its tune on what the immunised are allowed to do, and admit that they have been mismanaging that risk.
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Covid
Will the government let the vaccine make any difference at all?
42 replies
Furtwangler · 15/11/2020 11:45
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