Dr Anthony Fauci is confident that by doing a lot of sequencing and testing of asymptomatic carriers, we will be able to find it out if the vaccines can also prevent infection and transmission.
administering the vaccine
Each of these 3 vaccines require 2 vaccine doses to be given at specified intervals of time. Dr Sarah Schlesinger elaborates that "None of the approved vaccines have the possibility to give you COVID-19, but it is possible to get COVID-19 after getting vaccinated, before the body fully makes an immune response. It takes two weeks after any vaccination to mount a peak immune response. So you will be vulnerable for 6 weeks after taking the 1st shot, provided you take the second shot after 4 weeks. The vulnerability goes down after about 12 days of taking the 1st shot. There simply is not data at this time to say what happens if you do not get the second shot. But almost certainly a single shot confers some level of protection. However it is critical for the durability of the response to get the second shot."
new variants of the virus
Dr Helen Rees voices concerns around the emergence of new mutations of the virus. "New global variants have already emerged in UK, South Africa, and Brazil. They will go on emerging as long as we have large number of infections because the push for new mutations to occur will continue if we do not get the vaccines out to everybody," she says.
One of the major concerns is if the vaccines will work as efficaciously against these new strains. In the event that we need to change vaccines, if not for these variants, but for those in the future, one technology that makes it much easier to do are the mRNA vaccines, which can be modified rapidly.
vaccine hesitancy and scepticism
Science has designated the COVID-19 vaccines as the breakthrough of the year 2020, but there is still a considerable degree of vaccine hesitancy and scepticism. Dr Fauci lists basically two reasons for this:
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