5 things to know about vaccine
With COVID-19 vaccines produced in record time, hope for a return to normal life is no longer a dream.
Michiganders started receiving the Pfizer vaccine this week.
Dr. Paul Offit, who was on the FDA advisory board that approved the vaccine, called it “an amazing technological accomplishment.”
“Now comes the hard part — mass producing this vaccine, getting it out there, making sure everybody that most benefits it gets it. It’s going to be really, really hard but I’m optimistic we can do this,” Offit said on Monday. “I think by next Thanksgiving we’re going to see a dramatic drop in the number of cases, the number of hospitalizations, the number of deaths and we can get our lives back together again.”
Still there are concerns about the path that will be taken in the next several months. Most Americans should be able to receive the vaccine by late spring.
“My biggest concern is as we roll this out across the country, there will be bumps in the road, there will be people who get vaccinated and shortly thereafter die or get a disease or cancer or something,” said Patsy Stinchfield, president of the National Foundation of Infectious Diseases board of directors.
“Unfortunately, people will jump to cause and effect. There’s always a backdrop of life — people have miscarriages, people die, people have disease — that’s going to keep happening with or without this vaccine.
“I’m concerned there is an element of the anti-vaccine world that is so primed to jump on one of those and turn the conversation. That would be devastating. We cannot let that happen. We need to make sure we are looking at when these events do happen it is determined not to be cause and effect,” Stinchfield said.
Offit, Stinchfield and Dr. Susan Bailey, who is president of the American Medical Association, spoke to journalists during a Poynter Institute webinar on Monday. These are five of the questions they addressed.
Q . What side effects can be expected?
A . You may have arm soreness, fatigue or muscle aches, fever and/or a headache. “Those things are to be expected. What is happening is your immune system is responding, it sees the bad guy, it’s making the good guys. That feeling that something is happening in your body is to be expected and actually when it happens sometimes people feel relieved like there’s something underway that’s going to protect them. It’s a small 1-2 day sense of illness, it usually lasts about a day and is far better than having COVID disease,” Stinchfield said.
Q . Can someone with allergies be vaccinated?
A . “The CDC recommendation is if you have ever had a severe allergic reaction to an injectable product then you should not get this vaccine. However, if you have a severe allergic response otherwise — for instance people have peanut allergies or egg allergies or food allergies — you can still get this vaccine, you just need to wait for 30 minutes in the area where you got the vaccine so if you do have an allergic reaction someone would be able to give you a shot of epinephrine to reduce it. Everyone else should hang around for about 15 minutes to make sure you don’t have severe allergic reactions. One of every million doses of vaccine is complicated by a severe allergic reaction,” Offit said.
Q . Why are there two shots?
A . The second shot, which will be given 21 days after the first Pfizer vaccine shot and 28 days after the first Moderna vaccine shot, acts as a booster. “We know that basically getting a booster shot improves your level of immunity. Sometimes the immune system needs time to work on this, and some time to accept the fact of what’s in the vaccine to process it and develop the immune response. Then if you get the immunization after a certain point in time your immune response is that much more robust and may last longer,” Dr. Bailey said. If your second shot is delayed she said it’s probably not the end of the world but to get it as soon as you can.
Q . What exactly is herd immunity?
A . “Herd immunity originally did come from veterinary medicine, talking about immunizing cattle and you had to have so many cattle immunized to protect that one or two that for some reason didn’t get the vaccine. … For every disease I think the herd immunity thresholds might be different. We think about 70 percent is a good number, obviously the higher the better,” Bailey said. “It’s so important because there are always going to be people who can’t get the vaccine for one reason or another. … We need to have enough people around them in the population that even if they don’t get the vaccine, the vaccine is not running around because everyone else is immunized.”
Q . After being vaccinated must one still wear a mask?
A . “At first you do need to keep wearing a mask and social distancing and washing your hands. The verdict is still out on whether you can transmit the virus to someone else after you’ve had the vaccine. Hopefully not, but we don’t really know that for sure. To really contain the virus it’s going to be important to still continue practicing these important public health safety measures even though you’ve had the vaccine,” Bailey said.