Are COVID-19 Vaccines Safe and Effective?
“We are emerging from one of the darkest years in our nation’s history into a summer of hope and joy, hopefully,” declared President Joe Biden at a press conference on July 6, 2021. “We’re closer than ever to declaring our independence from this deadly virus.” The cause for his optimism was the fact that more than 182 million Americans had received at least one shot of the new COVID-19 vaccines, including nearly 90 percent of seniors and 70 percent of adults over the age of 27.
That 70 percent figure was significant because early in the pandemic many epidemiologists had suggested that was immunological threshold at which a population might achieve herd immunity. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficiently large portion of a population is immune to a disease either via vaccination or infection, making it difficult for the disease to continue to spread.
Biden did cautiously note the emergence of the new more highly infectious Delta variant of the coronavirus but asserted that “the good news is that our vaccinations are highly effective.” He added, “If you’re vaccinated, you’re protected.”
Biden was speaking nearly a year and a half after his predecessor, Donald Trump, had declared a national state of emergency over the novel coronavirus outbreak on March 13, 2020. Three days later, Trump’s White House issued the President’s Coronavirus Guidelines for America that, among other things, advised governors in states with evidence of community transmission to close schools, bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues. On May 15, 2020, Trump launched Operation Warp Speed to rapidly produce COVID-19 vaccines. Relying on the amazing success of Operation Warp Speed, Biden was calling for the end of pandemic lockdowns and hailing the advent of a “summer of freedom.”
In earlier articles on the fifth anniversary of Trump’s national emergency, we have considered whether face masks worked, the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as COVID-19 treatments, and how many Americans died of the infection. Sticking to recent peer-reviewed science and setting aside the political question of what the government should do with the information, let’s turn now to the question: What have researchers learned about the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines?
Initial phase III trial results from November 2020 suggested that, after two doses, new mRNA vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer were about 95 percent effective in protecting against infection from COVID-19. A March 2021 real-world study involving health care, first responders, and essential workers bolstered those findings.
Herd Immunity
Just as the national inoculation campaign began in December 2020, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci, was predicting that the U.S. could achieve herd immunity by “the end of the second quarter of 2021.”
Achieving herd immunity depends upon vaccines and natural infection creating durable long-term protection against reinfection (e.g., measles, smallpox, and polio). The clinical trials showed that the initial protection afforded by the new COVID-19 vaccines was outstanding but being short-term the trials did not have the power to determine how long that protection against infection might last.
Early on, some other researchers questioned the possibility of achieving COVID-19 herd immunity via vaccination and/or natural infection. In a September 2020 preprint(subsequently published in Nature in January 2021), a team of Australian immunologists sought to determine how COVID-19 immunity might evolve. Noting that protective antibodies waned in the first 2–3 months following infection by four known common cold coronaviruses, they suspected that that would also be the case for the novel COVID-19 coronavirus.
Article from Reason.com
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