The real news is vaccines are safe
One of my esteemed Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital colleagues, Dr. Monica Gandhi, recently tweeted, “Does anyone besides me feel that the messaging over the last month in the US has basically served to terrify the vaccinated and make unvaccinated eligible adults doubt the effectiveness of the vaccines?”
These 30 or so words encapsulate the frustration I have felt as an emergency physician, as a volunteer vaccinator in Marin County and as someone who has helped to provide reliable information to the vaccine hesitant. Reading headlines from major newspapers and press releases from federal health agencies, I could easily be convinced that the delta variant has put us in some doomsday scenario, no closer to normalcy than we were back in 2020.
This could not be further from the truth.
Given the amount of attention they have given the delta variant, the media would appear to have us believe that breakthrough cases of COVID in vaccinated people are surging. I had a mother tell me recently that she didn’t plan to expose her teenage children to the vaccine because she’d heard a news report about vaccinated people getting COVID. Why bother getting the vaccine if you’re going to get sick anyway?
In fact, recent data suggests that the risk of getting COVID as a vaccinated person is less than 1 in 5,000 per day and likely closer to 1 in 10,000 in widely vaccinated regions like the Bay Area. This is 5 to 10 times lower than the risk an unvaccinated person faces.
With headlines warning “Delta is Bad News for Kids” or “Delta Brings Alarm for Parents,” the news media would have us think that children are dying in droves from the delta variant.
In fact, recent data suggests that delta, though more infectious than previous variants, is not more severe in children. In communities with poor vaccination rates, greater numbers of children too young to be vaccinated are getting COVID. But while the absolute number of kids getting hospitalized is higher than during previous surges, the percentage of children becoming seriously ill remains the same. The overwhelming majority of young people get an extremely mild version of the disease, if they have any symptoms at all.
Since March 2020, fewer than 500 children in the U.S. have died of COVID out of more than 655,000 deaths across the country. And most of these deaths have been among older children with serious diseases who have compromised their immune systems. Compare this to the thousands of kids who die in motor vehicle accidents each year.
Furthermore, disinformation spread rampant via social media and the internet has many parents believing that schools are dangerous. Parents of several of my young patients have admitted tearfully that they have kept their children home from school because they fear COVID more than the educational consequences.
In fact, due to simple mitigation measures (primarily universal indoor masking and hand washing) along with vaccination of eligible staff and students, recent data from the Bay Area indicates that since school began in mid-August, rates of COVID among those 5 to 17 years old have actually declined. These numbers would suggest that kids, even unvaccinated ones, are safer in school than in their own community.
More screaming headlines like “Hospitalizations and Deaths of Young People Soar” and “Virus Claims More Young Victims as Deaths Climb Yet Again” make it sound as if becoming seriously ill or dying of COVID in your 20s or 30s is the norm, rather than the exception. But all our hospital data tells us that COVID remains a disease that primarily kills the old and the infirm.
The underlying tenor to all these stories is truly one of hopelessness and dread.
But, unlike 2020, we now have a magic bullet to prevent these horrible losses: vaccination.
The development of vaccines that virtually eliminate the possibility of hospitalization and death has been nothing short of a miracle. Moreover, prolonged symptoms from COVID (so called long COVID) is half as likely in vaccinated individuals who get breakthrough infections than in the unvaccinated, according to a study published recently in a highly regarded scientific journal, the Lancet.
Despite mutations and variants, vaccines have remained highly protective against the worst outcomes of COVID. The vaccines never promised to eliminate all disease, just the serious cases. Most experts predict that COVID is here to stay, but with vaccination it will become just another virus that can give us a runny nose or a fever, and a runny nose never shut down our society, our economy or our lives.
So, I implore the news media to stop the fearmongering and highlight the optimism and hope that such effective vaccines have brought us. Vaccinations are the bright light that will guide us to the end of this pandemic tunnel.