Are they talking about spreading it through breathing, or through touching?
Pfizer chairman: We're not sure if someone can transmit Covid after vaccination
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Re: Pfizer chairman: We're not sure if someone can transmit Covid after vaccination
#12I would expect once you get your vaccination this to be a non-issue. Like any other viruses that I'm vaccinated against, if I catch it my immune system would destroy it before I become a source myself. I mean isn't that the whole purpose of a vaccine? Also I do understand that is only 90% efficacy, which means if I am among the unlucky 10% then I'll become infected and become both a spreader and most likely develop t…
I'd be very interested in getting vaccinated against the virus once it's been released. I'd prefer, however, to just get the vaccine so that if I catch it my immune system would destroy it before I become a source myself. I wish they'd make an option (perhaps at a significantly higher cost) so that you can get the vaccine injection without miscellaneous non-vaccine compounds injected in the solution as well.
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Re: Pfizer chairman: We're not sure if someone can transmit Covid after vaccination
#13The analogy I like to use is shoes. We wear shoes and walk in muddy patches. Your feet are fine. But wherever you go, you shed the mud. Now imagine the mud is the virus. Shoes are antibodies (vaccine). Not an exact comparison, but helps explain.
If the vaccine is only useful for reducing COVID severity and doesn't help prevent spread, then I see no reason why it should be required for anyone for whom an infection is unlikely to result in hospitalization, i.e. anyone outside the well known high risk groups.
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Re: Pfizer chairman: We're not sure if someone can transmit Covid after vaccination
#14I certainly intend to stay masked up post-jab(s). I think a month or so after the final dose it will be at the point where any viral load i might be spreading would be pretty much trustable to be at trivial levels, so that's my minimum duration. After that, I'll continue to follow public guidance from local health folks.
I don't mind masking up for flights/travel for a bit, or whatever, either, if it shakes out that way. If i could trade "wear a mask because it works and lots of people died" for "take off your shoes to fly because it's theater, one guy tried it 15 years ago and it didn't work", I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Re: Pfizer chairman: We're not sure if someone can transmit Covid after vaccination
#15The analogy I like to use is shoes. We wear shoes and walk in muddy patches. Your feet are fine. But wherever you go, you shed the mud. Now imagine the mud is the virus. Shoes are antibodies (vaccine). Not an exact comparison, but helps explain.
Does the time during which you are contagious change if you are vaccinated?
The short answer: we don't know.
The longer answer: contagion is caused by the emission of viral particles, which have been mass-produced by infected cells in your body. The question is if your immune system will suppress the viral infection before there is enough viral matter produced to cause further infection. Whether or not this happen is heavily influenced by specific details of how your immune system has kicked into gear, and immune systems are unfortunately one of the biological systems that varies most from individual to individual.
Re: Pfizer chairman: We're not sure if someone can transmit Covid after vaccination
#16This is a perfectly reasonable statement that is being blown out of proportion. He is speaking in a scientifically accurate and narrow way - they don't know that yet, those studies have not been completed. That doesn't mean you can, or that it is even likely or probable that you can, just that they don't have results saying you can't yet. That is because those results inherently take longer than studying the effecicacy of the vaccine...because people have to get the vaccine, get exposed, and then the difficult task of tracking any potential infections that they transmit. That science is even harder than what has happened through the vaccine trials. They are studying and will know the answer to it.
The headline is click bait and I'm disappointed in HN here...'we don't know' is a statement that we should laud and appreciate scientists for making, not use as a form of propaganda.
Re: Pfizer chairman: We're not sure if someone can transmit Covid after vaccination
#17This needs to stop being sensationalized. Vaccine studies target something simple and easy to measure... whether it prevents Covid symptoms. That’s the hypothesis being tested. It is very likely that it also builds up your immune system to fight the virus such that you don’t spread it. But testing that hypothesis is very hard and not practical. He’s not saying you will spread it, just that strictly speaking, the trials didn’t test for that. We’ll have a better sense of it once the vaccine is widely used though.
Re: Pfizer chairman: We're not sure if someone can transmit Covid after vaccination
#18I would expect once you get your vaccination this to be a non-issue. Like any other viruses that I'm vaccinated against, if I catch it my immune system would destroy it before I become a source myself. I mean isn't that the whole purpose of a vaccine? Also I do understand that is only 90% efficacy, which means if I am among the unlucky 10% then I'll become infected and become both a spreader and most likely develop t…
Until now the line I have kept hearing is that there is no such thing as herd immunity except that which is realized through universal immunization. Now that we're not sure the vaccine will actually work in this way, the new line of reasoning is "well it's just supposed to protect you individually from the disease, not stop it from spreading."
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Re: Pfizer chairman: We're not sure if someone can transmit Covid after vaccination
#19The analogy I like to use is shoes. We wear shoes and walk in muddy patches. Your feet are fine. But wherever you go, you shed the mud. Now imagine the mud is the virus. Shoes are antibodies (vaccine). Not an exact comparison, but helps explain.
If the vaccine is only useful for reducing COVID severity and doesn't help prevent spread, then I see no reason why it should be required for anyone for whom an infection is unlikely to result in hospitalization, i.e. anyone outside the well known high risk groups.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. I think your logic is sound. Typically vaccinations don't work this way though. AFAIK contagion is proportional to viral load which is inversely proportional to immune response (via some complex function over time from initial infection).
Re: Pfizer chairman: We're not sure if someone can transmit Covid after vaccination
#20I would expect once you get your vaccination this to be a non-issue. Like any other viruses that I'm vaccinated against, if I catch it my immune system would destroy it before I become a source myself. I mean isn't that the whole purpose of a vaccine? Also I do understand that is only 90% efficacy, which means if I am among the unlucky 10% then I'll become infected and become both a spreader and most likely develop t…
Until now the line I have kept hearing is that there is no such thing as herd immunity except that which is realized through universal immunization. Now that we're not sure the vaccine will actually work in this way, the new line of reasoning is "well it's just supposed to protect you individually from the disease, not stop it from spreading."
> Until now the line I have kept hearing is that there is no such thing as herd immunity except that which is realized through universal immunization.
You were either hearing the wrong information or misunderstanding it. Herd immunity is absolutely real, and can occur if a virus infects enough people (or enough people are vaccinated). When more people are immune, it will be harder for the virus to spread to a new host. When enough are immune, the virus dies out.
But since the death rate of COVID is so high, encouraging people to go outside and get infected in the name of achieving herd immunity (an approach often spread by the right wing) would likely cause millions of deaths, especially because the US has limited hospital capacity. This isn't even mentioning that we don't know the long-term effects of the hundreds of millions of others who would have recovered from COVID.
Herd immunity through vaccination will kill or harm very few people in comparison, given that only 1 in a million suffer side effects from vaccines on average.