Covid-19 vaccine resource

As of now, we have the COVID vaccine available from 2 different manufacturers. There’s one made by Pfizer BioNTech and one made by Moderna. The aim of these vaccines is to give your immune system a heads up to be prepared should you ever get exposed to the actual virus. These vaccines are giving your body a little piece of RNA which the immune cells need to make tiny little fragments of this coronavirus. This is purely a technological advance. It doesn’t change human DNA in any form whatsoever because the body just gets the code to make the spike proteins of the COVID virus. In the meantime, the RNA that was injected into you, it disappears quite quickly as it is very fragile.

Safety was not compromised. Speed was related to the breathtaking scientific advances that had been made over the previous 10 or more years. Secondly, when trying to prove that a vaccine works with only a few infections here and there in society it could take several years. The Moderna trial of covid vaccine was with 30,400 people and the Pfizer trial was with 44,000 people, and these took place in the middle of a ferocious outbreak. There were so many infections that it was possible to get the genetic sequence of the virus and manufacture the vaccine in less than a year. These phase 3 trials found that these vaccines are around 94 to 95% efficacious which was more than expected. Also, the funds to make all these studies possible were ample, and no corners were cut in that area either. This vaccine in fact is proof of what can be achieved if you have international collaboration and tens of billions of dollars thrown at a problem.

On the arm where you got the shot you could get pain and swelling. Throughout the rest of your body, you can get fever, tiredness, chills, and headache. You might even have to take off work the next day because of this. In some cases, severe allergic reaction has also been reported. But these side effects are common with any vaccine that you receive. The flip side is that every single time someone has an allergic reaction to the COVID vaccine, it becomes a big headline. A few million people at this point have received the vaccine and less than a dozen have developed an allergic reaction, and timely treatment was given to those people. This is why, after you get any vaccine, you are asked to stay in the waiting room for next 15 to 30 minutes in case you have any reaction.

The chances of that happening are very low. The 90 plus percent of the side-effects of any vaccine occur between 30 and 45 days after the vaccine trial ends. That is why FDA said that in order to make an emergency use authorization, you had to wait 60 days from the time 50% of the people in the trial got their last dose. So, if you wait 60 days, you are already beyond when essentially all of the long-term effects occur.

The list of ingredients in these vaccines is publicly available online on the official website of the manufacturers. It is highly recommended you go through it before getting the vaccine in order to identify any ingredient you might be allergic to beforehand. But to say the very least, there is no aluminum or mercury in them.

Because you are not making the full virus, you cannot acquire COVID -19 by getting the vaccine. Also, these newer vaccines do not contain any portion of live, weakened or dead virus so it is impossible to contract virus from them.

Yes, you could still get infected even though you had the vaccine. The vaccines reduce the likelihood of a person becoming sick from the vaccine that is the chances are that you will be asymptomatic as your body will have appropriate antibodies to fight the virus. So, although the vaccine did not essentially reduce the chance of one contracting the virus, it will however, save you from getting sick and being symptomatic. And because you did become infected with the virus, and you may even not know that you are infected, you still can spread it to somebody else who isn’t vaccinated. Which is why, it is heavily recommended that as much as 70 to 85% or more of the population needs to be vaccinated to get herd immunity.

Depending on which manufacturer vaccine you get; you have to go back in 3 weeks (21 days with Pfizer) or 4 weeks (28 days with Moderna) to get the booster dose. Anywhere from 10 to 14 days following booster is when the body develops immunity that is going to protect you from getting sick.

The new variant has a mutation that is causing the virus to be much more easily transmissible from person to person. The mutation does not make people sicker or cause even more people dying, nor does it seem to interfere with the protection that’s afforded by the vaccine. The only thing that is functionally different between the strains is the ability to spread more easily.

Yes, they can. The only time that the immunosuppressed cannot take a vaccine is when it’s live-attenuated vaccines which, fortunately, the COVID vaccine isn’t.

The reason that it is only being recommended to ages 16 plus in Pfizer and 18 plus in Moderna is not because there is evidence that it’s harmful to those under 16, but simply because there isn’t full efficacy and that there isn’t clinical trial data from children. Because it hasn’t been tested for people under the age of 16, it is hard to say what one should do for children at large.

As aforementioned, almost 70 to 85%, that is 3 out of 4 people need to get the vaccine for us to achieve that herd immunity. By April, it is expected that this vaccine will be available for all and there shall be no restrictions. President Biden has made the announcement that he is going to try and get 1 million doses per day for the first 100 days. If we continue to administer vaccines at such a good rate then by the end of summer, we will have reached that percentage of herd immunity. This means by fall, we will start approaching a degree of normality. That doesn’t mean nobody wears a mask, but that does mean children can feel secure at school, we can go to a sporting event, go to a restaurant and have dinner, enjoy a movie at the theatre, and things like that.