The new vaccines are "safe and effective." What does that mean? What is the definition of safe? Define effective.
Let's start with "Safe."
From CHI Memorial Hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Tiffany Dover was one of the first frontline workers there to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Around 15 minutes after her injection, Dover felt dizzy and fainted. She later recovered and spoke to reporters. She said, "It just hit me all of a sudden; I could feel it coming on. I felt a little disoriented, but I feel fine now, and the pain in my arm is gone."
Tiffany told reporters she has a condition that often causes her to faint when she experiences pain. What condition she had was not disclosed. She explained that as she was not surprised that she had fainted after receiving the vaccine. Tiffany explained, "I have a history of having an over-reactive vagal response, and so with that if I have pain from anything—hangnail or if I stub my toe—I can just pass out."
Why was she chosen to be filmed being vaccinated if she has a tendency to faint and passes out easily? Was the shot that painful? Let's go to the videotape, shall we?
According to the Sun Sentinel, two weeks after getting a first dose of a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, a 56-year-old doctor in South Florida died this week, possibly the nation’s first death linked to the vaccine.
Health officials from Florida and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are investigating what role, if any, the vaccine played in the death of Dr. Gregory Michael, a Miami-Beach obstetrician who, his family says, was in otherwise good health.
Michael received his first dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine on Dec. 18 at Mount Sinai Medical Center, according to a Facebook post from his wife, Heidi Neckelmann.
In Alaska, a Juneau health care worker was hospitalized and treated for a severe allergic reaction after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.
The worker felt flush ten minutes after taking it. She took an antihistamine, felt short of breath, and was transferred to the emergency room. When she arrived, the worker had an elevated heart rate and a red rash on her face and torso. They began treating her for anaphylaxis (a life-threatening allergic reaction) with epinephrine and more antihistamines.
She responded well, but her symptoms began to re-emerge, and she was treated with more epinephrine and steroids. When providers tried to wean the worker off the epinephrine, her symptoms re-emerged before resolving once again. She moved to the intensive care unit for observation overnight.
The worker was described as middle age and did not have a history of allergic reactions, and is not allergic to certain vaccines.
The same hospital reported that another worker received a vaccine at the hospital that day. They received brief emergency treatment as well but did not experience anaphylaxis.
A Chicago area suburban hospital is temporarily pausing coronavirus vaccinations after workers reported feeling adverse reactions on Friday December 18th.
Four employees at Advocate Condell Medical Center in Libertyville experienced reactions shortly after receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination. Their symptoms included tingling and elevated heartrates. Three of the team members are now home and doing well and one employee is receiving additional treatment.
Out of an abundance of caution, the hospital said it is temporarily pausing vaccinations. This will allow them time to better understand what may have caused the reactions.
This is what has been reported and I have seen so far.
This is safe?
Safe and effective. Effective at doing what?
There is a distinction between vaccines that prevent disease development and vaccines that prevent viral transmission.
A typical vaccine contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism. The agent stimulates the body's immune system to recognize the agent as a threat, destroy it, and to recognize further and destroy any of the microorganisms associated with that agent that it may encounter in the future.
When someone is vaccinated, they are supposed to be very likely protected against a targeted disease. When many people in a community are vaccinated, a pathogen has a hard time circulating because most of the people it encounters are supposed to be immune.
No single vaccine provides 100% protection. But, according to the CDC:
A vaccine stimulates your immune system to produce antibodies, exactly like it would if you were exposed to the disease. After getting vaccinated, you develop immunity to that disease without having to get the disease first. This is what makes vaccines such powerful medicine. Unlike most medicines, which treat or cure diseases, vaccines prevent them.
At this point, we still don't know if the current vaccines prevent COVID-19. It's also unknown if they prevent people from transmitting the virus from an infected person to a healthy one. This wasn't an endpoint nor an outcome measure of the vaccine trials, and they weren't designed to find this out.
There is an early indication that the new Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine may reduce person-to-person transmission of the virus—a good development.
It is also too early to know how well the COVID-19 vaccines work in different populations. People with certain health conditions, pregnant women, the elderly, children, and racially and ethnically diverse people were not a significant part of or even involved in the clinical trials. Furthermore, we still have no clue how long the immunity developed from the COVID-19 vaccines will last.
What is clear is that these vaccines protect you from getting sicker once you are infected. That's still good, as severe COVID-19 can send people to intensive care. The more infected people who experience milder symptoms and recover at home, the less burden there is on the healthcare system. There will be less exposure healthcare workers will have to the virus, all of which contribute to better control over the pandemic.
We have seen an observed reduction in asymptomatic infections among the vaccine recipients, but it's still not certain to what extent asymptomatic people can transmit the coronavirus. Questions remain about how much of a reduction in person-to-person transmission could be attributed to these new vaccines. Further analysis is needed to confirm this hypothesis.
Researchers are still studying whether vaccinated people and never experience symptoms can even spread the disease to others. However, because the vaccines do not necessarily protect against infection, we won't be abandoning public health measures. Many in the media say it's best to keep up the behaviors that have attempted to impede the spread of COVID-19. Advocates for the new vaccines suggest that everyone — even vaccinated people — will need to think of themselves as possible silent spreaders and continue to wear a mask.
Has anyone, in the history of vaccines, who have been effectively vaccinated against a particular disease, ever been shown to be a subsequent "silent spreader" of that disease? It may be theoretically possible, but has it ever happened? And if so, how common is it?
If a vaccine prevented asymptomatic infections and curbed viral transmission, it could hasten the end of the coronavirus pandemic if enough people get vaccinated. That's great, but shouldn't the research be completed first? Why wasn't the focus from researchers on preventing transmission of the virus and preventing disease development? It appears as if these new vaccines help make people feel better. It's akin to reducing pneumonia symptoms to the common cold instead of ridding the world of this deadly pathogen.
If a vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious disease, these new drugs being rushed to the public to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic do not qualify. Rather than preventing a person from getting infected, these shots appear to keep people from getting dangerously sick. At this point, efficacy does not refer to these vaccines' ability to prevent infection with the virus but rather to their ability to reduce the disease's symptoms.
I might be better off with a bottle of Robitusson and a nap instead of injecting myself with this new vaccine. Does anyone have a bottle of cough syrup and a jar of Vicks VapoRub lying around? At least I know what those drugs can do for me.
To assess information about the vaccine's efficacy, pharmaceutical companies, public health agencies, and scientific researchers will need to coordinate with one another, gather data, and report it once the vaccine is disseminated into the community.
It's real-time disease surveillance and data collection. In other words, the general population is in a large scale experiment. People are being monitored over time, and the data will be collected by comparing those who have and those who haven't been injected.
Moreover, these new vaccines have not been tested on the elderly, the immune-compromised, or kids. There is no data on the impact on the continued spread. We have zero data on the effects on future hospitalizations from the immunized. There is no information on the impact on deaths.
There certainly needs to be a lot more honesty and transparency regarding what is unknown about the vaccine.
There are too many known unknowns. The words of the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, Donald Rumsfeld, sums it up:
Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me because, as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult one.
Is this drug useful? From what I'm reading, these COVID vaccines seem to reduce the likelihood a person will develop symptoms if they are infected and the severity of illness.
What was the goal all along? Do people know what these vaccines actually accomplish? The public often views vaccines effectively as cure-alls. That isn’t the case here.
There are good reasons not to jump on the vaccine bandwagon. Here are a few good reasons for most to hold off with the injection:
1. No one knows the long-term consequences (3-year, 5-year, 10-year, etc.) of the vaccines. This in itself is a serious concern and reason to wait.
2. The vaccine's effectiveness might be short-lived because the COVID virus has already been known to mutate.
3. The COVID vaccines are not like the measles or polio vaccine that has been around for decades and has withstood the test of time.
Historically, vaccines have taken years to develop. The mumps vaccine took four years. It was the fastest to be approved for humans. These new vaccines took ten months. It's understandable why people are hesitant to get jabbed in the arm.
Is it all virtue signaling in a hypodermic format?
Speaking of virtue signaling and arm jabbing—was there anything in this needle?
If COVID vaccines start killing people at a prodigious rate, how would we even know? Is the FDA & CDC collecting the data? Will the media report their findings? If deaths from vaccines happen inside nursing homes, will the reporting agencies tell us if people die from the vaccine or COVID? Maybe they will gloss over both facts and say they were just old. Why is a vaccine that was never tested on the elderly being initially widely administered to them?
Maybe not a single death will be attributed to the vaccine. We may have a third and fourth wave. It will all be because of COVID according to the media.
I’m hoping these vaccines will work well enough to end this catastrophic period in human history. But jubilant optimism shouldn’t blind us to the crushing reality of the lingering questions regarding a vaccine produced at Warp Speed.
Clayton Craddock is an independent thinker, father of two beautiful children in New York City. He is the drummer of the hit broadway musical Ain't Too Proud. He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration from Howard University's School of Business and is a 28 year veteran of the fast-paced New York City music scene. He has played drums in several hit broadway and off-broadway musicals, including "Tick, tick…BOOM!, Altar Boyz, Memphis The Musical, and Lady Day At Emerson's Bar and Grill. Also, Clayton has worked on: Footloose, Motown, The Color Purple, Rent, Little Shop of Horrors, Spongebob Squarepants The Musical, Evita, Cats, and Avenue Q.