Mutations occur whether vaccinations are going on or not; vaccinating the public doesn’t speed up the pace of mutation.
I wouldn’t give CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, too much grief over his recent public-service announcement with Daveed Diggs, encouraging people to get vaccinated. It’s a little silly perhaps, but harmless.
No, if you’re going to give Gupta grief, do it over this exchange with Jake Tapper yesterday:
TAPPER: Let’s talk about the facts here, Sanjay. If somebody has gotten both vaccines for Moderna and Pfizer or just the one for J&J, and two weeks have passed, why does that person need to wear a mask if they go in public?
GUPTA: Well, you know, if you look at the science overall, you know, you have to sort of determine what level of evidence are you willing to sort of make these decisions on?
It makes a lot of sense, I think, that if it’s just the virus that’s circulating that we’ve been talking about the last year, you take the vaccine, it should reduce the viral load that you could potentially carry, make it unlikely you’re infected and less likely that you could transmit it to others.
But I think it’s two points keep coming up. One, there’s still a lot of virus out there. So, when you have that much virus out there, could you still actually be exposed? Even though it’s unlikely, become an inadvertent carrier?
But the other — at some point when we get to a low enough level, a few thousand cases a day, not 40,000 or 50,000 cases per day, you can say at that point, the likelihood of someone being exposed is so small, we could start to not worry about masks. There’s another point quickly, Jake. People who are vaccinated, they get exposed to the virus. The virus learns then how to sort of adapt and mutate now to a vaccinated person. So, in some ways, by exposing vaccinated people to the virus, you could start to inspire more and more mutations, which is something you don’t want to do.
Er, no. Vaccinations do not “inspire more and more mutations.” First, mutations happen all the time, and the vast majority do not make a significant difference in how the virus works. Mutations occur whether vaccinations are going on or not; vaccinating the public doesn’t speed up the pace of mutation. It might slow the pace down, because a vaccinated person’s immune system fights off and eliminates the virus quicker, giving it fewer opportunities to mutate.
Tapper’s question is more than fair. Yes, those who are fully vaccinated could become a “silent carrier,” but the evidence we have so far is that the vaccine dramatically reduces how much virus is shed by an infected person. The American Association of Medical Colleges recently spotlighted the assessment of Dr. Monica Gandhi, professor of medicine and associate division chief of the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco:
First, when the vaccines were studied in macaque monkeys (during preclinical testing), they did eliminate asymptomatic infection — researchers swabbed the vaccinated macaques’ noses and found little or no virus. Second, the types of antibodies that are stimulated by most systemic vaccines (IgG and IgA) do tend to block viral infection in the nose (and no viral load in the nose most likely translates to no transmission). Finally, when monoclonal antibodies are given to COVID-19 patients, those antibodies reduce the viral load throughout the respiratory tract, including the nose.
What’s more, the latest studies of the Pfizer vaccine in Israel indicate it is 94 percent effective at preventing asymptomatic infections — and perhaps even more effective at preventing symptomatic infections. If you’re vaccinated, your body will fight off the virus quickly, and while you’re infected, you’ll be shedding considerably fewer viruses. No, vaccination doesn’t completely eliminate the risk of being a “silent carrier,” but as the percentage of the population that is vaccinated increases, at some point the risk becomes so minimal, it makes sense to rethink the necessity of protective measures like masks. The virus is probably going to exist, in one form or another, for years, maybe decades. Are people supposed to wear masks in public through the 2030s?
Gupta is appearing in a public campaign to encourage vaccinations . . . and then declaring on CNN that vaccinated people “inspire more and more mutations” — with the implication that these mutations will be more dangerous than the original virus.
Gee, why is there so much vaccine hesitancy out there?