The race to vaccination

Forget the Tokyo Olympics. We are all in a race to save our lives in this covid19 pandemic. Vaccines are our biggest hope to stop the spread of the virus. Statistics show that most vaccinated people are able to avoid hospitalisation or death if they do get covid19.

In the US, the Washington Post has been reporting some sobering graphs and statistics which show how the Delta variant is ravaging the unvaccinated population. The latest article I saw by Dan Keating and Leslie Shapiro on July 21 says, “ (In the state of) Missouri the case rate among unvaccinated people is as high as (the state’s) overall case rate in mid-January, near the state’s peak of coronavirus infections.”

It is the same story in all the states where the unvaccinated population is low.

William Powderly, an infectious-disease specialist and director of the Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St Louis, said, “With the arrival of delta, we will have two very different epidemics – one a mild cold in vaccinated individuals, and then we continue to have deadly infections in unvaccinated individuals.”

For those who fear covid19 vaccinations, there is much information for you to consider.

In the book Influenza: The Hundred Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic, published in 2018, Dr Jeremy Brown says, “One hundred years after the pandemic of 1918, we have learned an enormous amount about influenza. We know the genetic code, how it mutates and how it makes us sick.

“A virus is a box of chemicals, without the structures of a basic cell. It cannot metabolize or replicate on its own. In order to reproduce it must invade living cells…The virus is simply an envelope containing a bundle of genes that exist only to make copies of themselves…Their singular purpose is to hijack a cell and use it as a copying machine.”

By now, we’ve all seen pictures of what the virus looks like with those protein spikes and we’ve heard that the problem with a zoonotic virus – one that comes from birds, swine or in the case of covid19, most likely a bat – is that our immune systems haven’t been programmed to recognise those protein spikes attached to the virus.

So the covid19 virus enters our body and in many cases wreaks havoc. The more people it enters, the more it reproduces, and the more it reproduces, the more chances there are for one of those glitches in its copying machine.

“Once the virus enters our body and once it undergoes a process of reproduction by tricking our cells, it can change so that we get new strains of viruses,” says Brown.

The copying takes place millions of times, and as you can imagine, the process is not perfect.

“Reading or manufacturing errors occur…”

Brown says, “Influenza throws a wrench into our elegant system of defenses because it is a shape-shifter. As it changes the shape of those proteins on the surface, our bodies struggle to recognise it.”

The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic killed tens of millions of people.

We know a massive vaccination programme was being considered over a century ago. Doctors worried the public would not understand that many deaths which occurred after vaccinations could not be linked to the vaccination.

They noted back then that two days after getting a flu shot, about 2,300 people would have a stroke, 7,000 would have a heart attack, 9,000 would contract pneumonia and 900 of those people who came down with pneumonia would die. They knew those deaths would be blamed on a vaccination.

“These (deaths) would certainly occur after a flu shot, but not as a consequence of it,” writes Brown.

These deaths would have occurred even if people did not have a flu shot.

The same holds true for covid19 vaccinations.

For those who say there has not been enough time to make a vaccine, remember that technology is more advanced now and doctors know far more about viruses than they did a century ago.

For those who worry about reported side effects like blood clots, remember that many of the medications we take for other diseases have side effects including blood clots. This isn’t stopping people from taking their medication. That’s because we’ve already established that the benefits outweigh the risks for most medications.

The only way we’re going to save lives in this pandemic is to get vaccinated so we can stop the virus from mutating to more virulent strains.

Don’t take a chance with your life. Get vaccinated.