Increasingly some of the social media conversations about vaccines have drifted away from the science into the realm of magic bullet philosophy.
Yes, Covid vaccines will reduce the severity of the disease and their risks are statistically small, and therefore having them is a wise choice, but they do little to stop transmission and the effective protection they offer wanes very quickly.
These last pose a serious problem for the course of the pandemic. As the vaccines allow transmission, the vaccinated population (along with the unvaccinated population) remains a breeding ground for new variants.
In the case of the vaccinated, continuing transmission automatically selects for vaccine immune variants. This is a rapidly ticking time bomb.
As a result, vaccination is NOT a stand alone solution.
Covid particularly affects those with weak immune systems (although not exclusively), it progresses by driving the inflammatory, autoimmune response of the body into hyperdrive.
The association of inflammation with modern human diseases (e.g. obesity, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes mellitus, cancer, arthritis, asthma, and now Covid) remains an unsolved mystery of current biology and medicine.
Inflammation is by far the number one cause of death and its incidence is growing rapidly.
If we are to beat Covid, as a minimum, vaccination has to be paired with effective treatments.
More importantly, research has to be undertaken to understand why some people get very sick with Covid and others do not. 86% of people will get Covid relatively mildly.
Their resilience is not random, what is it about their diet, lifestyle, and physiology that is protecting them?
What is it about our environment that is exacerbating inflammation?
Little is being done to research and understand the healthy escapees.
If a big effort is not made in this direction, we are in for a continuing surprises and big challenges as Covid evolves its strategies to exploit our number one vulnerability.
So yes the vaccine helps, but it is not an end game.
The potential pitfalls of Covid are still being vastly underestimated by governments, ‘back to normal’ policies predicated on the ‘security’ of a vaccinated population are not based on science.
