Get your COVID-19 shot; live your life
Marc A. Thiessen says the Biden administration’s precautions are ridiculous when immunity sets in four weeks after the first dose.
WASHINGTON — With more than 2 million Americans getting COVID-19 vaccination shots each day, many are asking a simple question: When can we resume normal life? The answer should be pretty simple as well — as soon as your immunity kicks in.
But the Biden administration is telling the COVID-weary country: Not so fast. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released complex guidelines, full of conditions and stipulations, listing what vaccinated people can and cannot do. You can “visit with other fully vaccinated people indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing” and “visit with unvaccinated people from a single household who are at low risk.” But “all people, regardless of vaccination status, should adhere to current guidance to avoid medium- and large-sized in-person gatherings.”
So, no church services, sporting events, concerts or long-delayed weddings. Even more absurdly, the CDC advises after getting the vaccine, you should continue to “delay travel and stay home.”
How long will these restrictions persist? In his address to the nation last week, President Joe Biden said if we are on our best behavior for the next four months, then by the Fourth of July “small groups will be able to get together” for backyard cookouts, but “that doesn’t mean large events with lots of people together.”
This is ridiculous. I asked Marty Makary, a physician and professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, what the guidance should be. “After you have a first dose, give it four weeks for the vaccine to kick in, and then live a normal life,” he told me. “It’s that simple.”
He’s right. Studies show that the Pfizer vaccine has a 94.8 percent efficacy in preventing COVID infection after the second dose. But writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Canadian researchers found that “even before the second dose, (the Pfizer vaccine) was highly efficacious, with a vaccine efficacy of 92.6 percent, a finding similar to the first-dose efficacy of 92.1 percent reported for the (Moderna) vaccine.” And that is the efficacy rate in preventing any COVID infection whatsoever. “It’s 100 percent effective in preventing death after four weeks,” Makary says. The booster shot is essential for longer-term immunity, but “you get incredible protection from the first dose in the short term.” If you’re around unvaccinated people at risk of bad outcomes, use precautions. Wear a mask indoors for a few more weeks or months just to be on the safe side. But a new study by the Israeli Health Ministry found that the Pfizer vaccine reduces asymptomatic transmission by 94 percent. “The Israeli study showed that you really don’t transmit it once you get the vaccine,” Makary says.
As more Americans get their shots, the combination of vaccinated immunity with natural immunity from prior infection will help us reach herd immunity this spring. “We’ve already hit herd immunity for health care workers,” he says, because so many have either been vaccinated, infected or both. The same will soon be true in nursing homes, and then in the general population.
Suzanne Judd, an epidemiologist in the School of Public Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, agrees that based on the vaccination rates and the number of people already infected, the nation may reach herd immunity by May.
As that happens, Makary says that “hospitalizations are going to plummet to almost nothing, deaths are going to plummet … over the next two months.”
Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist and professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, is similarly confident. “Data point after data point shows that countries with a rapid vaccine rollout are seeing the expected, but still thrilling, decline in cases and hospitalizations,” she writes in the Atlantic. “At this point, the end of the pandemic is not just a glimmer in our eye, but a reality coming closer and closer.”
Makary expects that even when hospitalizations and deaths plunge “some cases are going to linger,” but the vast majority will be young people who are “last in the vaccine line” and will have mild or asymptomatic infections. And continued COVID lockdowns pose a greater danger to these young people than COVID. According to one recent study, cases of intentional self-harm among kids ages 13 to 18 in the Northeast increased more than 300 percent from August 2019 to August 2020. Other studies found that young people are experiencing an epidemic of loneliness, with almost half of Americans 18 to 24 showing symptoms of depression and over a third reporting thoughts of death and suicide.
The CDC guidance says, “The risks of SARS-CoV-2 infection in fully vaccinated people cannot be completely eliminated.” But that is true of other diseases as well. “If somebody asks me, ‘Hey, if I leave my home, can I get bacterial meningitis?’ the answer will always be, yes,” Makary says. “But the risk is so minuscule. It’s low enough that the risk of profound isolation and loneliness is far more likely to kill you.”
There’s light at the end of the tunnel, but many in the public health establishment seem to want to keep us in darkness. Perhaps that’s because experts like Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, got it so wrong at the start of the pandemic — on detection, on testing, on masking — that they are afraid they will get it wrong again at the pandemic’s end. Fortunately, Makary is willing to say what they won’t: “Get your vaccine. Give it four weeks. Live your life.”