- Joined
- Jan 19, 2017
- Messages
- 2,939
- Reaction Score
- 21,808
Prevention of severe disease is nice, but we ABSOLUTELY need a vaccine that prevents transmission/new infection to break the chain of contagion, so to speak.Nice bit of real world data.
I was more impressed with a 80% effectiveness two weeks after first dose for both Moderna and Pfizer. That alone is much better than flue vaccines.
Biggest thing for me isn't virus prevention, it is reducing hospitalizations and deaths.
Gimme a vaccine that means infection results in a couple of days on the couch to let body fight it off and I'm plenty happy. Anything beyond that is gravy.
The problem with SARS-CoV-2 is that, if we don't/can't get an effective way to effectively extinguish the transmission to mitigate this $^!$#^%!$# pandemic, we run the very real risk of having a variant emerge that the vaccines won't protect us against, and/or a variant that is even more contagious/severe disease causing. We're already seeing it with the B1117 and other variants.
Emergence of a SARS-CoV2--MERS hybrid variant would be a horrible disaster and would make the current pandemic look like a pandemic of the common cold. A highly-contagious, 35% mortality infection? We're talking end of civilization...