In her Washington Post column this morning Leana S. Wen followed the trail I had blazed, giving her thoughts on what we should expect as people start being inoculated with the Pfizer vaccine. I found her observations pretty superficial compared with mine although she did note that Pfizer had been blowing smoke about overestimated the number of doses it would be able to provide this month. I don’t expect that to be the last miscalculation in this process. There’s good money to be made from overestimations and nothing to be gained from underestimations other than realistic appraisals of the situation that might allow policymakers to make prudent decisions.
Other things she projects are
- Excitement
- Hiccups
- Unexpected side effects
- Heated disagreements
She concludes:
Vaccine authorization is the beginning of the end of the pandemic, but the end itself is a long way away. As we celebrate the incredible scientific achievement, we must also recognize that the road ahead is filled with new challenges, which must be met with patience, vigilance and grace if as many lives as possible are to be saved.
an understatement if anything. There are so many unknowns including unknown unknowns at this point that we shouldn’t be too confident that we’re the “beginning of the end”.
My wife and I are both in our 70’s and in reasonably good health. We’ve decided to let all the essential workers get the vaccines first. Once each the vaccines have been tested on a few million people (100 million?), then we’ll get our shots, too.
Or maybe not.
My wife is immune-compromised so, if the vaccine does indeed prevent transmission, then I will get it when it becomes available to me.
There was a report today that the Moderna vaccine suppressed transmission — about two-third fewer cases of asymptomatic infections after first dose in treatment vs placebo. I didn’t see any details. Probably not reasonable to assume complete suppression or that it merely prevents symptoms, but somewhere in between. Pfizer is studying effect of its vaccine on transmission.
I posted a comment on Moderna’s data earlier.
The gist is Moderna/NIH found that the vaccine arm had 1/3 the asymptotic cases vs the placebo arm — as detected by PCR.
From that, the inference is the vaccine prevents asymptotic infection. Then deduce if one does not get infected, then one cannot spread it.
It holds much hope, but inferences are doing a lot of work.