Vaccines are not perfect but are working

Sep 02, 2021 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News – In Guyana, more than 313,000 adults have been fully vaccinated. Only first doses have been administered to children since their inoculation started a few days ago.
Two fully vaccinated persons died yesterday. This is neither unusual nor unexpected.
Vaccines are not 100 percent effective. The best vaccines will tend to prevent seven to eight out of every 10 persons from being infected but it will prevent a much higher number from being seriously sick or killed.
The two deaths of fully vaccinated persons yesterday were elderly persons. They were both said to have serious co-morbidities, and certain underlying conditions are known to weaken a person’s immune response.
The vaccine’s work by priming your body’s immune response mechanism. Persons with compromised immune systems will not respond as well as other persons. As such, even though vaccines do protect, in the case of persons with compromised immune systems, it will not work as well.
However, these numbers tend to be small. A recent survey done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the United States found that 99.99 percent of fully vaccinated persons have NOT had what is called a breakthrough case, which requires hospitalisation of which results in deaths.
The elderly are particularly at risk for breakthrough cases. The survey found that almost three-quarters (74 percent) of all reported breakthrough cases were among seniors, age 65 or older. And of those who died, about 20 percent died from something other than COVID-19 even though they were infected after vaccination.
The United States has fully vaccinated more than 171 million persons. And of the fully vaccinated only 2,063 have died as a resulted of being infected with the virus. This means that for every 83,000 persons who have been vaccinated fully, only one would have died since being fully vaccinated. This is marginal when compared with the one death for every 61 infected cases.
The bottom line is that vaccinations are not perfect but they work and have been working. The bottom line also is that you have far less a chance of getting sick and dying from being vaccinated than if you refused to be vaccinated.
The recent deaths of two fully vaccinated elderly patients in Guyana should therefore not discourage the elderly from being vaccinated. It should do the opposite. It is better for the elderly to be vaccinated since their immune systems tend to be weaker and the elderly are the most vulnerable.
The Regional Administrations and Neighbourhood Democratic Councils should take the lead in trying to save their elderly population. In every village, town and neighbourhood, field workers should be deployed to do a census of the elderly and to determine who is vaccinated and who is not. And from the list of those not vaccinated, a special effort should be made to encourage them to become vaccinated.
Children are leading by example. And perhaps as a science SBA project, the seniors can be utilised to go house-to-house to compile a list of the 18 percent of the over 62 year-old population that are not vaccinated. This targeted intervention will go a long way towards reducing deaths.
The development of vaccines for children will go a long way towards reaching as close as possible to herd immunity because children constitute a large chunk of the population. It is for this reason that it is downright reckless of the Ministry of Education to be proceeding with the opening of schools when only a small number of students are being vaccinated, notwithstanding the controlled opening process.
It would not do irreparable harm for the Ministry to have delayed vaccination until at least 70 percent of students aged 12-17 years have been vaccinated. At the rate at which students are turning up to be vaccinated, this should not take more than a month.
Ironically of course, schools are being reopened at a time when the Minister of Health says the country is in a third wave. The bell-shaped curve however, establishes that this is no third wave but part of a continuing fourth wave. The Ministry of Health should advise against the opening of schools and should have not permitted the recent actions of allowing snacks to be on sale at cinemas, regardless of how powerful is the lobby by friends of the government.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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