Would full vaccination end pandemic?
Not really, but it would be a ‘terrific’ step in taming the coronavirus outbreak, researchers say
“Vaccines alone are not going to end the pandemic, although they will go a long way to making SARS CoV-2 a much, much less important public and personal health issue.” — Dr. John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at UC Berkeley’s school of public health
With coronavirus infections spiking just as millions of school kids return to classrooms, Gov. Gavin Newsom in recent days has declared that unvaccinated Californians could end the deadly pandemic in four weeks — simply by rolling up their sleeves for the jab.
“If we want to end this pandemic and disease, we can do it in a month,” Newsom said at an Oakland elementary school last week, echoing remarks he’d made the week before in San Bernardino.
“This disease, now a choice,” Newsom continued, directing his remarks at the one in five eligible Californians who’ve yet to get the shots. “The one thing that could end this pandemic once and for all is available in abundance to everybody that wants it, regardless of your ability to pay, regardless of your immigration status, it’s available today, and that’s a vaccine.”
Is he right? Alas, health experts say it’s not that simple, though they applaud Newsom’s exhortation for holdouts to get the shots and say universal vaccination would do wonders in taming the nasty virus known as SARS CoV-2.
“The pandemic won’t be over in 30 days no matter what we do,” said Andrew Noymer, associate professor of population health and disease prevention at UC Irvine. “But we can vaccinate better, vaccinate more people.”
He and other health experts cut Newsom some slack for what they understood to be political hyperbole, given the importance
of increasing immunization as the highly contagious delta variant spikes infections despite California’s relatively high vaccination rate, with 77.4% of those eligible having at least one shot.
“The governor’s remarks are more a homily about the value of vaccination than a declaration of science,” Noymer said. “He’s saying something to impress on his constituents the values of vaccination.”
Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but Newsom’s political troubles — or his tenure itself — could end in about a month when voters decide on Sept. 14 whether to recall the governor.
Alex Stack, Newsom’s deputy communications director, said the governor was just “trying to get across the fact that vaccines are the way out of the pandemic.” The state is making progress on vaccinations, which began to tumble in April but have risen since early July.
After Newsom dropped most pandemic restrictions in June when infections hit a low, the rapid rise in cases since has led him to recommend masks indoors statewide and to require immunization for health workers and either vaccination or weekly coronavirus testing for state workers and school staff.
There are a number of reasons why even a sudden rush to California’s vaccine clinics won’t heave the pandemic into history’s dustbin in a month.
For starters, the vaccines need time to take effect. Though the single Johnson & Johnson shot Newsom got in April delivers protection in two weeks, the more widely used Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two shots, three or four weeks apart, then an additional two weeks to deliver full protection.
And the pandemic is global, with the coronavirus spreading like wildfire in many parts of the world where vaccines are scarce. Even countries whose whole populations have relatively high full-vaccination rates like Israel (59.7%), the United Kingdom (59.6%) and the U.S. (50.9%) are seeing awful summer case surges, mostly among their unvaccinated.
All that viral spread is expected to continue producing variants like delta that devastated India in the spring and is now fueling outbreaks across the United States and around the world. Future mutations of the virus may be more transmissible, more virulent, or more vaccineresistant.
“The problem is California isn’t an island,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at UC Berkeley’s school of public health. “You have to vaccinate the world.”
Vaccination also isn’t a choice for some 5.8 million California kids under age 12 for whom the vaccines haven’t been authorized even for emergency use. That’s about 15% of California’s 40 million residents. So until they can get the shots, at best 85% of Californians could be vaccinated.
That would be an enviable immunization rate. Right now, 53.7% of all Californians are fully vaccinated. But no one really knows what percentage of the population would need to be immunized to reach “herd immunity,” where enough people have protection from the virus that it can’t easily spread. The highly transmissible delta variant has led health experts to back away from the idea mass immunity is even achievable.
In fact, experts now concede the virus is likely to remain with us. But they say the combination of vaccines and natural immunity after recovery from infection can render it more of an inconvenience than a menace.
“Vaccines alone are not going to end the pandemic, although they will go a long way to making SARS CoV-2 a much, much less important public and personal health issue,” Swartzberg said. “With our current understanding, this virus will not be eradicated or eliminated. But, it will become manageable. Vaccines will protect us from hospitalization and death, but we will still see people getting infected and sick.”
Dr. Bob Wachter, who chairs the medical department at UC San Francisco, agreed.
“With the growing evidence of lower efficacy of the vaccines against delta and the likelihood that vaccinated people can spread the virus, I don’t believe that full vaccination would ‘end the pandemic,'” Wachter said. “It would be terrific though — it would markedly drop the number of cases and bring the number of people with severe cases down to a small fraction of their current number.
“Think about where we were in June,” Wachter added. “The pandemic wasn’t ‘over,’ but the numbers and risk were low enough that people were beginning to return to their old lives without much worry. That’s the state we could achieve.”