In This Episode: Now that the coronavirus vaccine is rolling out, there are several important things to watch out for, which may take a little Uncommon Sense to fully get past the scare-mongers.
086: Beating the Vaccine Scare-Mongers
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Show Notes
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* Recent (21 October) journal discussion of herd immunity: Nature.
* The CDC’s “v-safe” program information is here, and I urge you to participate.
* The CDC’s list of the Top 10 Causes of Death for the latest year all stats have been processed (2018), and the number of deaths for each (Source):
* Heart disease: 655,381
* Cancer: 599,274
* Accidents (unintentional injuries): 167,127
* Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 159,486
* Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 147,810
* Alzheimer’s disease: 122,019
* Diabetes: 84,946
* Influenza and Pneumonia: 59,120
* Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis: 51,386
* Intentional self-harm (suicide): 48,344
TOTAL: 2,094,893 in the Top 10 (of the Grand Total of 2,839,205).
Transcript
Welcome to Uncommon Sense. I’m Randy Cassingham.
It’s practically a miracle that the Covid-19 vaccine is already being administered. That was certainly made possible by the application of Uncommon Sense, but that’s a story for another day. Meanwhile, there are some things to watch out for.
First, when you get the vaccine you’ll probably feel pretty icky for the next 24-48 hours, but that’s not just OK, that’s preferable: it means your body is quickly ramping up defenses against Covid. But no, it’s not possible to get Covid from the shot.
With more than one vaccine being approved, it looks like we could get as many as 100 million people vaccinated by the end of March. If we’re really lucky, more. But even if we do, that’s nowhere near enough to reach the “herd immunity” we’ve been hearing about. That’s when enough people have the antibodies to the virus to keep it from spreading wildly, which is what it’s doing right now.
To get to herd immunity we need as much as 70 percent of the population to be immune, either because they’ve recovered from Covid-19, or had the vaccine. So even getting 200 million vaccinated isn’t quite enough.
Because there’s another problem: medical science has had long enough to study Covid to know that the natural immunity brought by recovering from the disease lasts somewhere from 2 to 9 months. So as that immunity goes away over time, others have to become immune to keep to the 70 percent needed for herd immunity. Pretty much, that would be impossible without a vaccine, no matter what some politicians and other uninformed people might say.
