The people who are going to be prioritized to receive the vaccines
are healthcare workers who are on the front lines,
as well as anybody who works in a hospital, and then those who live in skilled nursing facilities.
Skilled nursing facilities account for about 6% of the population, but almost 40% of the deaths
due to COVID. So these are very high-risk individuals for bad outcomes from COVID.
It looks like it's the same kind of side effects that you would get from influenza or a tetanus
shot. You get a sore arm for a day or two, maybe a headache or fatigue, and then that
goes away.
There's no way that you can get COVID from the coronavirus vaccine.
There's absolutely no way. It's just a small fragment of the RNA that encodes
for a small portion of the spike protein.
So it doesn't replicate, it can't replicate, and it can't cause COVID.
We're going to have to be masking and social distancing for the foreseeable future. When we'll
be able to stop masking and social distancing is when we achieve some level of herd immunity within
our communities. That's going to take 60 to 70% of the population to be immune. Right now, through
infection, if people are immune after infection, which we're still not sure, there's been less than
10% of people in the US who have been infected. And then when the vaccine comes out, it's going to
come out in limited quantities, and so we're not going to be able to vaccinate everybody all at once.
So, we anticipate that we will be able to achieve that 60 to 70% immunity either through infection
plus immunization in maybe the middle of 2021, maybe the end of 2021. We'll just have to see.
There's three main vaccines, and two of them are messenger RNA vaccines,
mRNA, and those are the ones produced by Pfizer as well as Moderna. Those vaccines, what they are,
is a fragment of the messenger RNA that encodes for a certain portion of the spike protein of
the coronavirus. That's the vaccine. So when that is given to us, then our own cells make
that protein, just a fragment of that protein, and then we have an immune response to that protein.
That's how they work to develop immunity. The other vaccine is
similar. The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, it's a non replicating adenovirus vector
that again has a fragment of the spike protein, and so then we get an immune response to that.