Vaccine and herd immunity

[Baileysforchristmas]

As I see it the vaccine won’t give herd immunity as it doesn’t get rid or stop the spread of the virus, it just stops you becoming very ill and dying. That’s why it will be an annual vaccine like the flu, is that correct?

No, basically neither of these things are known yet.
We don’t know how long immunity will last, it might be years, it might be short enough to require an annual booster.
We don’t know what the impact will be on spread. The likelihood is it will help lower it but as yet we have no way of knowing.
It’s possible to find out from initial trials whether vaccines are safe and prevent severe disease but not the other things.

So it’s incorrect to say if 95% of the population are vaccinated we will reach herd immunity?

So it’s incorrect to say if 95% of the population are vaccinated we will reach herd immunity?

For a virus whose 'natural' R is about 3, you need 60% of the population to be immune to keep it at bay. There could of course still be clusters of cases, but it should not be able to take hold and become a national epidemic.

We do not yet know if the vaccines will make the recipient immune, or if it will instead render the disease close to harmless for the 70-90% of recipients in whom the vaccine works well.

We do not yet know how long vaccine-induced protection will last (and I don't think there is any appetite to delay mass roll-out until evidence exists).

I think it's a bit soon to be talking about how likely enduring herd immunity will be reached and maintained until at least some of the current unknowns are more fully understood

And we also don’t know how long natural immunity lasts and thus how much that will help us reach herd immunity. And indeed, how many people have already had it since most of the work has been done on finding out how many people have antibodies but it is looking like other parts of the immune system are more important.

We don’t know yet but I hope everyone saying they’re not having the vaccine are aware they are still at risk of getting Covid and won’t be able to rely on herd immunity like people normally can with other illnesses.

The current vaccines are not designed to stop transmission, they’re assessed on symptom reduction. Given how much this virus seems to be spread pre-symptomatically it seems optimistic to assume they’ll seriously impact transmission, but we can always hope.

So if you are in the lower risk of becoming ill there is no benefit of taking the vaccine as it won’t stop the spread? As the vaccine will be annually if your health condition changes you can take it at a later date when it will be beneficial?

@Baileysforchristmas

So if you are in the lower risk of becoming ill there is no benefit of taking the vaccine as it won’t stop the spread? As the vaccine will be annually if your health condition changes you can take it at a later date when it will be beneficial?

Possibly, which is why the U.K. government was considering not vaccinating under 50s.

But young people with mildish cases can still be affected by long covid. And we just don’t know there won’t be an impact on transmission.

We will have to wait and see what happens and who will be entitled to the vaccine.

@Baileysforchristmas

So if you are in the lower risk of becoming ill there is no benefit of taking the vaccine as it won’t stop the spread? As the vaccine will be annually if your health condition changes you can take it at a later date when it will be beneficial?

As previously mentioned, we don’t know yet, there’s not enough data. No-one can tell you, everyone is guessing.

Once we are a few months into the vaccination campaign, it should be possible to deduce whether the vaccine is reducing transmission as well as protecting vaccinated individuals from diastase.

My guess is that this information will feed into the decision about whether/when to roll the vaccine out to under 50’s without any clinical risk factors.

That's what I've read - if you have it, it should reduce the chances of you catching it/if you catch it your symptoms should be milder. They don't know if it does anything for transmission yet.

Sage said they need fifty percent of the population vaccinated to effectively make it totally benign.

I will wait until I will be vaccinated until we know more, to many what if’s. My family and I are not in the vulnerable group, I see no benefit for me to be vaccinated.

“ And we also don’t know how long natural immunity lasts ”

6+ months according to recent studies.

@Baileysforchristmas

I will wait until I will be vaccinated until we know more, to many what if’s. My family and I are not in the vulnerable group, I see no benefit for me to be vaccinated.

The benefit is that if you get the vaccine you are much less likely to get Covid, and crucially you are much less likely to suffer serious and medium-long term ill health.

You may be in a group that’s less likely to have serious or long term effects from Covid, but you cannot possibly know that you will not have serious or long term effects.

The likelihood of serious side effects from the vaccine is minuscule in comparison of the risk of serious effects from the virus.

Neither is entirely risk free, but the vaccine is statistically the safest bet.

Most people I know have not had long term Covid including two 85 year olds. Most of them are a similar age to me with no health issues, they are all back to normal. Yes there is a risk of long term Covid but it looks pretty low to what i’ve seen.

@Baileysforchristmas

Most people I know have not had long term Covid including two 85 year olds. Most of them are a similar age to me with no health issues, they are all back to normal. Yes there is a risk of long term Covid but it looks pretty low to what i’ve seen.

Anecdote =/= data. You do you, OP, but your view is irrational and illogical.

About 1 in 20 people who have the virus get long COVID (although that's a catch all term for a number of different things). So you're looking at a 5% risk.

The problem with waiting til your health condition changes is that you won't necessarily know. Not sure what the stats are in this country, but in the USA, 1 in 4 people who have diabetes are unaware of it, for instance.

There is no diabetes in my family even my parents who are in there 80’s. I had a general blood test check up last year. I don’t have diabetes.

The problem is there isn’t any data on long Covid, who it effects, what age? The only people I know who have had long Covid are on mumsnet, the people personally know day to day have recovered.

The risk of long covid also increases with age and is more likely in people with higher bmi.

My BMI is 23. I don’t think I will be entitled to the vaccine any time soon anyway. It probably won’t be available until 2022 for me at the earliest, so just as well I don’t want it anytime soon.

@Baileysforchristmas

As I see it the vaccine won’t give herd immunity as it doesn’t get rid or stop the spread of the virus, it just stops you becoming very ill and dying. That’s why it will be an annual vaccine like the flu, is that correct?

We don't yet know whether the vaccines stop viral spread because the trials have not been able to rule this out. However, participants on the Oxford vaccine trial were swabbed every week so both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases were detected and case numbers based on these results were clearly much lower following vaccination. Negative swab suggests the vaccine is stopping people from actually catching the virus (rather than just preventing symptoms) so spread should be greatly attenuated. It's very likely that all three vaccines work like this too but I believe the trials for the other two were designed slightly differently so they didn't capture the asymptomatic cases?

@Baileysforchristmas

There is no diabetes in my family even my parents who are in there 80’s. I had a general blood test check up last year. I don’t have diabetes.

I wasn't suggesting you do - it was just an example of one of the risk factor for covid that large numbers of people don't even know they have.