Publicité

Go vaccinate yourself, please

21 mars 2021, 07:39

Par

Partager cet article

Facebook X WhatsApp

lexpress.mu | Toute l'actualité de l'île Maurice en temps réel.

Why I have taken the vaccine (and everyone in my family who could) and encourage you to do the same as soon as possible.

2020 and 2021 have been transformative years – for the lucky few it has meant working at home safely in a house, possibly with a garden, and a safe job; for the unlucky, a descent from a hard but doable life into absolute poverty; for the unluckiest, death and bereavement. The vaccine offers what I believe to be the best way forward. In term of sheer number of deaths, the vaccine will save lives. Don’t be fooled into thinking that only the old and the sick are dying; several studies have shown an average loss of years lived of between 10-15 years. And the ‘pre-exiting conditions’ which increase your risk of dying include obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and asthma. These conditions should not be a death sentence for a 40 year-old, and lastly, even if you are young and super healthy, death is still possible.

Next, don’t believe the lies too that Covid doesn’t exist or is not serious or that other deaths are being falsely reported as Covid-related. Actuarial death tables (in existence for years and completely apolitical) show the reverse. Covid deaths, measured by excess mortality, exceed what is being reported (and they’re not caused by flu or other causes, they very closely related to rates of Covid-positive tests).

The Actuary reports in the UK alone 50,000 excess deaths in the second wave alone, despite a decrease in mortality from flu and car accidents, and despite stringent lockdowns (without which the number would have been much much bigger). The annual increase in deaths in the UK in 2020 was the highest since the 1930s. Covid is not the Easter Bunny, you don’t have to “believe” in it for it to kill you.

But deaths are only a very small part of the story. It is increasingly clear that Long Covid affects a significant proportion of the survivors (reported rates vary from 15- 80%), (including those who were only mildly ill), and that the effects are DEVASTATING – cardiac muscle dysfunction, extreme tiredness, migraines, sexual dysfunction, hormonal disruption, severely reduced exercise capacity, lung tissue damage, psychological effects, neurological effects including deafness, strokes, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s etc.

And if we can extrapolate from SARS data (another corona virus), we can expect up to 15% of sufferers to still be affected 17 years later (possibly more but SARS only occurred in 2003). There are also many unknowns still – prenatal exposure to influenza has been shown to be associated with an increased risk of schizophrenia for example.

Another consideration, although it is less of a personal protection, but certainly something that worries and moves me, is that this pandemic has already pushed more than 100 million people into absolute poverty (that means not having enough to eat every day). (Source World Bank data). And it will only worsen next year. Mauritius has already endured a catastrophic year due to loss of tourism and cannot sustain another. Vaccinating saves jobs, as well as lives.

Does the vaccine work though? Some people will say that the vaccine is «only» 60% effective. Those figures relate to trial data and include even cases of mild Covid. In the real world AstraZeneca has shown a world beating 94% reduction in hospitalisation in a very vulnerable population in Scotland, and daily deaths in the UK have decreased from over 1500 to less than 100 per day since vaccination started (and the decrease in much more marked in the older vaccinated population than the younger non-vaccinated group). That’s over 1400 lives saved per day in the UK alone.

But what of the “dangers” of the vaccine, I hear you say? I can understand the fear and worry about something that seems so completely new and seems relatively untested and I hope that I can assuage that. Here are some of the common worries I hear.

Worry 1. “The vaccine has sprung out of nowhere.” It hasn’t. There was already work done on a vaccine SARS and MERS, two related viruses, which gave Covid vaccines a huge start. And mRNA vaccines have been in the pipeline for nearly a decade. Viral vector vaccines (such as AstraZeneca/ Covishield) have been around since the 70s. Secondly, there has never, ever been such a concerted global scientific drive ever, for anything. Thousands of scientists across the globe dropped what they were doing and started work on Covid. Thirdly, a lot of money has been thrown at this, which allowed labs to try many new ideas without financial constraints (lab work is expensive). Fourth, the sheer number of people ill has made the vaccine easy to test – it’s hard to see how effective a vaccine is against a relatively rare condition.

Worry 2. “I’ve heard that the vaccine is dangerous.” With over 410 MILLION PEOPLE vaccinated to date, we have huge evidence that this is as safe as a medication can be.

True, no vaccine or medication is 100% safe, but nothing in life is. As few as 8 Efferalgans/Panadol/Doliprane can be lethal, over the counter non steroidal anti-inflammatories are associated with kidney damage and heart disease, antibiotics can kill you and provoke new onset allergies, steroids can give you osteoporosis, sleeping tablets are associated with an increase in all cause mortality… the list goes on. Combining trial data from AstraZeneca and Pfizer (over 67,000 participants), in the placebo group there were seven deaths, and in the vaccine group there were three. This does not mean that the placebo was deadly, it just means that in a trial of that many people we expect some to die of unrelated causes. Causes of deaths were listed as: heart attack, stroke, car accident, blunt force trauma and fungal pneumonia (combined data both groups), so NOT vaccine related.

Now side effects: to start with the current «big» one. Blood clots. The number of blood clots is *lower* in the vaccinated group than you would expect to find in a corresponding group of the same size. The NHS, the WHO and the EMA have all declared the clots to be coincidental and the vaccine to be safe.

As for other side effects in the trials, 168 adverse events were noted in the AZ trial, 79 in the Covid vaccine group and 89 in the control group, showing that a fair number of the “reactions” were nocebo (opposite of placebo) effects.

They are real though and include: headache, transient fever, myalgia (sore muscles), swollen lymph glands, malaise. Still better than Covid. And these effects last only a day or two. In the Pfizer studies famously, there were four cases of Bells Palsy (three in the vaccine group, one in the control group). Again, this matches background rates (about 30/10,000 unvaccinated people per year normally get Bells in the population). There have also been very few cases of severe allergy/anaphylaxis in the mRNA vaccines, but this is now taken into account, and resuscitation facilities are always on hand. Nothing else. In 400 millon jabs!

We do not (and cannot yet) have data on “long term effects”, but I have yet to find any convincing data on a long term effect of ANY vaccine, and there is no reason to suspect that this one is different. There have been rumours that the vaccine affects future fertility. This is just flat-out wrong (and actually Covid has been shown to decrease male fertility).

Worry 3. “The mRNA vaccine changes your genes.” No, just no. I’ll say it again: no, impossible, not a chance. I can understand people’s fear of the unknown here, especially as it seems to have deliberately been stoked by some unscrupulous idiots, but this is just biologically impossible. Humans do not have reverse transcriptase, and the mRNA will quickly be broken down (like the thousands of other strands of mRNA produced daily in our cells). All that remains in the antibody to the spike protein coded for by the mRNA.

Worry 4. “We will be implanted with microchips.” Again no. 1. The technology for something that small that can gather data, produce power and broadcast the data does not exist. 2 why would they bother? If you are on any sort of social media or have a smart phone Big Brother already has a huge treasure trove of your data (did you know that algorithms can guess your IQ and sexual orientation based of your FB likes and posts?).

Worry 5. “Drug companies are making millions from this.” AstraZeneca is being sold at cost price, as a service to the world and, honestly, I think we should be thanking them. Other vaccines are being sold for a profit but why shouldn’t they? It’s a life-saving, job-saving, socialising-saving wonder. And already some of the research done on Covid has lead to advances in a malaria vaccine.

Worry 6. “People at risk can take the vaccine themselves, I can’t be bothered.” As tempting as it may be to freeload off others vaccination status, it is scientifically (and morally) questionable. First, the vaccine is not 100% full proof, so vaccinated people still have some risk. Secondly, there are people who for genuine medical reasons (pregnancy, young children, anaphylaxis (extremely severe allergies) cannot be vaccinated and so have to rely on others being vaccinated to protect them (the so called herd immunity). By not getting vaccinated you are playing with their lives. And the third reason is that the more the virus circulates amongst an unvaccinated population, the greater the risk of mutations that make the virus more transmissible, less susceptible to the vaccine, and more deadly.

Covid is too widespread to ever go away now. We cannot continue with lockdowns and quarantines forever, this is our way forward.

Vaccinate yourself, please.