Dear Editor,
Vaccination is the long-term tool to get out of the pandemic and eventually beat COVID-19. Most of us know this by now. Scientists, health professionals, governments and science communicators all over the world have undertaken significant campaigns to convince people that it is in their best interest to get vaccinated. However there are still many who choose not to and surprisingly (to me) this hesitant group has a significant number of young people. So this letter, Editor, is to urge everyone, particularly this demographic, to get vaccinated, not because you are being told to do so but because evidence coming out of current vaccination campaigns unambiguously shows that vaccines work (see data from the UK, Israel, US, Canada); by not getting vaccinated you are choosing to put yourself at high risk of severe illness, hospitalisation and death which all approved vaccines prevent.
Editor, what I want to mainly highlight is recent data published by Public Health England (who have been meticulously tracking SARS-CoV-2 variants with genomic surveillance) that shows the variant first detected in India (B.1.617.2) is becoming dominant in the UK (up to 75% of cases could be due to it) and this of course is worrisome as it is even more transmissible. However, for me, the crux of their report is that severe illness, hospitalisation rates and death from Coronavirus infection depends on vaccination status. They showed that over 70% of infections from COVID-19 and hospital admissions as well as about 67% death occurred in unvaccinated people. Even more striking is that very few people who received two vaccine doses, who were infected with this variant, were admitted to the hospital. A similar trend is being seen in other parts of the world where the unvaccinated are struggling a great deal more than people who are vaccinated. For example, in Washington DC (in the US where vaccination rates are overall at a high with about 50% of the population having received one vaccine dose) the rate of COVID-19 infections, hospitalisation and death rates in the unvaccinated is as high as it was during peak infection rates in January. So COVID-19 cases are heavily concentrated in the unvaccinated. This for me is more than enough evidence to support that vaccines very much work and that getting vaccinated is a no brainer compared to risking severe infections, hospitalization and death from COVID-19.
Approved vaccines to date show protection against the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 and protection against variants (with two vaccine doses) first detected in Brazil, UK and India. There is a significant reduction in protection, from vaccines, against the variant first detected in South African (B.1.351) however vaccine companies are working to adjust vaccines to fight this variant (as well as others) so booster shots are likely in the future; in South Africa the main vaccine is the one-shot Johnson and Johnson which was trialed there and shows high efficacy against B.1351 (dominant there). The point is that protecting yourself is a continuous process and waiting for some magic end to SARS-CoV-2 is not realistic, it’s not going to disappear just like that and it is likely endemic (will circulate in sections of the world for many years to come with a risk of outbreaks in regions where it has been eliminated or there will be seasonal outbreaks). So, I urge you to get vaccinated and stay on top of the situation since it is a dynamic one as its likely we’re going to be chasing variants for a while – with high levels of unvaccinated people in the world emergence of more variants is likely as the virus naturally evolves. Once again, I urge the Government of Guyana to implement genomic surveillance in its COVID-19 response strategy since tracking variants becomes a necessity as it has implications for vaccine policies (because you know what you’re specifically dealing with). Bangladesh (one of the most densely populated countries in the world) improved their genomic surveillance during this pandemic in time to show that there was a correlation between the rise in COVID-19 cases there and increasing detection of the B.1.351 variant. So, I think systematic tracking is a must with an endemic virus that is not just going to go away anytime soon.
Finally, I want to reiterate that it takes a collective effort to get out of the pandemic with a combination of vaccination (a long-term tool) and public health control measures. The more people vaccinated, the less opportunity the virus has to spread and change into worse forms. Further, the end of the pandemic doesn’t mean the end of SARS-CoV-2. Like, other endemic coronaviruses (currently we have four that infect humans causing the common cold), it will eventually become weakened but that’s only going to happen when a significant proportion of the population is immunised. So, get vaccinated and keep cooperating with public health measures. Getting out of the pandemic is a gradual process where everyone needs to pull their weight.
Sincerely,
Jacquelyn Jhingree PhD