COVID-19 Vaccines Where Do We Go From Here?
As we have watched the story of the COVID-19 vaccine development unfold these last few months, I think it would be a fair assessment to say that what we are witnessing is nothing short of a miracle. We now have three vaccines available via emergency use authorization (EUA) from the FDA: the two shot Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA-based vaccines, and the one-shot Johnson & Johnson adenovirus vector DNA-based vaccine. The miracle part may not have been the speed of the rollout, at least not in our country, but rather that all three are 100% effective at preventing death and hospitalization due to COVID-19, and all three have been found to be amazingly safe.
As you peruse the table below, developed by Dr. Monica Gandhi, MD, MPH, Professor of Infectious Disease at UCSF, showing a comparative analysis of these three vaccines as well as others in the pipeline, keep a couple of things in mind:
Cutting out hospitalization and death is what “defangs” COVID-19. If COVID-19 becomes more similar to, or less lethal than seasonal influenza, then we should be able to return to life as normal.
If one keeps in mind that people with asymptomatic COVID-19 transmit only 0.7% of the time in their own household and the Pfizer vaccine has been found to prevent asymptomatic cases 86% of the time after the second dose (0.14 Σ 0.007) = < 0.1%, there is less than a 0.1% chance a fully vaccinated person will transmit the virus; generally, even less of a chance outside of their home.
