Vaccine best course, 4 doctors say
Delta ‘different beast,’ shots way to avoid hospital, they say
Dale Adams of Gentry wasn’t concerned when he developed some mild seasonal allergy symptoms in June, especially since he and his wife, Pat Adams, each received two doses of the Moderna vaccine two months earlier.
But a few days later Adams grew worried after he noticed that he had lost all sense of taste and smell. He visited his doctor that afternoon and tested positive for covid-19. Meanwhile, his wife tested negative.
When the couple got home, they stayed on opposite ends of the house, and Pat Adams never got sick.
“For about four days, I couldn’t taste or smell anything, but I felt fine — never ran a fever, never got chills,” Adams said.
At 70, Adams is convinced that the outcome would have been very different if they hadn’t been vaccinated. Although he’s in good health, hasn’t smoked in 15 years and walks every day, he said his doctor agreed that he would have been in the hospital if he hadn’t gotten the shots.
Since Feb. 1, 90.4% of cases, 92.3% of hospitalizations and 90.7% of deaths in Arkansas have been among people not fully vaccinated, according to Dr. Jennifer Dillaha.
However, since the delta variant became prominent in Arkansas, the state has seen a higher proportion of “breakthrough cases” — people who get covid-19 despite being fully vaccinated, she said.
ly vaccinated, she said.
Last week, about 15% of active covid-19 cases in Arkansas were among fully vaccinated people, Dillaha said.
Studies from the United Kingdom show that the Pfizer vaccine is about 80% effective in keeping people from getting sick and 90% effective in keeping infected people out of the hospital, Dillaha said.
On Friday, 90% of the 166 people hospitalized with covid-19 in Northwest Arkansas were not vaccinated, according to Martine Pollard, a spokeswoman for Mercy Hospital.
Breakthrough cases are happening for a combination of reasons, according to Dr. Marti Sharkey, Fayetteville health officer.
No vaccine is 100% effective, Sharkey said. In addition, immunity from immunizations wanes a little over time, she said.
Clinical trials and real-world conditions show that mRNA covid-19 vaccines, such as those produced by Pfizer and Moderna, reduce the risks from covid-19 by at least 90%, according to the federal Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Most of the current data is related to the mRNA vaccines, and information about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine will be shared when it becomes available, the CDC website states.
Another factor is that the delta variant is more transmissible than the original strain of the virus, Sharkey said. For example, a person with the delta strain releases 1,260 times more viral particles into the air, she said. As a result, a person with the original strain would infect an average of two to three other people, while people with the delta variant infect an average of six to nine individuals, she said.
“It’s a different beast,” Sharkey said.
Dr. Kevin Davis, infectious disease specialist at Mercy Hospital in Fort Smith, said he’s seeing some breakthrough cases, but they are more common in older patients or in patients with immunosuppressed conditions.
Vaccination is by far the best way to protect people from serious illness and death, and people should also be encouraged to wear masks in indoor and in congested settings, he said.
Dr. Joe Thompson, president and CEO of the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement, said: “I’m confident in saying, as the spread of the delta variant has dramatically increased, the number of breakthrough cases has also increased, however the individuals who are vaccinated have better outcomes than unprotected individuals.”
Sharkey said, a small percentage of vaccinated patients hospitalized with the virus are immunocompromised for a variety of reasons such as age, conditions such as cancer, or because they are taking immune suppressing medications due to organ transplant.
Because their immune systems don’t respond well and don’t make antibodies, vaccines have a lower efficacy for them, Sharkey said.
While the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement is still analyzing data, Thompson said he thinks individuals whose immune systems are compromised may not have received enough protection from the vaccine originally, or their protection may have waned more quickly.
“We know that some people, because of their health conditions, do not respond as robustly to the vaccines as other people who don’t have those conditions. That may, in a sense, affect the ability of the vaccine to protect them from hospitalizations or deaths compared to someone who does not have those conditions,” Dillaha said.
Consequently, on Thursday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced a change in the emergency use authorizations for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to allow booster doses for organ transplant recipients or people who have equivalent levels of immunocompromise, according to a news release.
And on Friday, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended covid-19 booster shots for people who are immunocompromised, the release states.
MISCONCEPTIONS
A study on vaccine hesitancy by the Northwest Arkansas Council released in July shows that questions about side effects, safety and the speed at which immunizations were developed are among the top reasons people in Northwest Arkansas hesitate to get vaccinated.
For Adams, the risk calculation was simple. He figured the odds of him getting a serious case of covid were much higher than the odds of him experiencing serious side effects from the vaccine.
Vaccines “are how we beat polio and everything else,” he said.
With rare exceptions, researchers aren’t seeing side effects from covid-19 vaccines, Thompson said. The rare side effects have included allergic reactions, blood clots and very mild pericarditis in teenagers, he said.
Fear of side effects “is a major piece of misinformation that is dissuading the public from taking the steps to become protected,” he said.
Davis said he is not aware of a single person who has been admitted to Mercy Hospital in Fort Smith because of an adverse reaction to the vaccine.
“People are not dying from the vaccine,” Sharkey said. “There are no long-term side effects from the vaccine.”
Another widespread misconception is that people who are fully vaccinated can spread covid-19 as easily as people who are not vaccinated, Dillaha said.
Eight out of 1o people who are fully vaccinated will not become ill with covid-19, but the people who do become ill can spread it in the same way that unvaccinated people do, she said.
“The more people who are vaccinated, the lower the amount of spread we will see in the community, and the lower the spread of covid in the community, the fewer breakthrough cases there will be,” Dillaha said.
Also, because there is still a chance that vaccinated people can get infected or spread the disease, they need to take precautions such as wear masks in public, hand sanitize and social distance, all four doctors said.
It’s also important for vaccinated and unvaccinated people to get tested if they show symptoms, they said.
Even though vaccinated people may be only mildly ill, there is a chance they could spread covid to unvaccinated people, Sharkey said.
People should also get tested if they show symptoms because they may be eligible for preventative treatment with monoclonal antibodies, which work to keep people out of the hospital, Dillaha said.
“If you go to a grocery store, a retail space, a movie theater, you should presume the virus is in the enclosed space with you,” Thompson said.
Also, the longer the covid-19 spread continues, the more likely it is that vaccines will lose their ability to protect against it, Thompson said.
“Vaccines are our answer and our way out of this, but unless we get many more people taking the vaccines, it will continue to spread and be a risk to us all,” Thompson said.
Each time the virus infects someone it reproduces itself, which increases the opportunity for a new variant to develop, Dillaha said. The delta variant could mutate to become an even worse virus, she said.