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Dr. Robin’s Covid-19 Updates
My Covid Ode to Science Teachers
Vaccines and Variants and Career Arcs
Vaccines and Safety
Last week 10 million Covid vaccines had been given. Today it’s 20 million.
There’s been no changes in safety issues. We see a serious allergic reaction maybe six times in a million doses; and many people are getting (as expected and welcomed) mild to moderate reactions of sore arms and sometimes fevers and discomfort.
So so far, so good with safety. Now we just need to rebuild a mass vaccination program out of thin air with no public health infrastructure. It’ll happen, but unfortunately not overnight.
As soon as the vaccine program gets seriously underway I’m going to feel increasingly optimistic:
- It’s quite possible post-vaccination transmission will be low. We don’t have the data yet (and we have to stay careful until we do), but we do have history to go on: several vaccines like the polio and rotavirus vaccines didn’t eliminate asymptomatic transmission, but the diseases still ended up being vanquished.
- It’s possible we’ll see cases go down as we move into warmer weather.
- We may see cases decline because so many people have already had Covid (knowingly or not) and are immune.
- Everybody vaccinated will be incredibly safer!
Some scientists even feel optimistic about having things get significantly better by the summer.
The wild card here is the variants.
Variants
The variants could turn out to be no big deal. Viruses change all the time and mutations usually don’t have much impact.
But some could be impactful, we just don’t know how yet. In the US, we only recently started to look for these variants through a fancy technique called “genomic sequencing.” The more we look, the more we’ll find. I personally don’t doubt the variants are already all here as well as others we haven’t discovered yet.
We don’t yet know much about any of them except that they exist. They could be no big deal, or they could be a bad development causing real setbacks.
