You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login
While CDC director Redfield has a checkered history when it comes to messaging on covid, I'm glad today was not one of those days. He is one of the few people in public health that is trying to set the proper expectations for a vaccine. He made two points today. One, the general public shouldn't expect a vaccine before the summer of 2021. Two, a vaccine will not work as well as masks. That's the big one. The expectation is that a vaccine will be the magic bullet. It will take care of the problem. It won't. Masks work better than a vaccine in preventing spread. A vaccine is a welcome addition on top of masks. A vaccine doesn't mean that people should stop wearing masks.That's the most frustrating part. People are waiting for a vaccine to save us. The fact is, we've had all the tools that we needed to control the pandemic all along. We just didn't use them properly. The initial recommendation from public health in the US that the general public didn't need to wear masks has been a critical blow that's haunted us ever since. That wasn't done for any medical reason but due to logistics. It was an attempt to save masks for health care providers. From the start, public health should have said that wearing a mask is the single most important thing that people can do. Now they are but they are fighting a resistance they themselves started.
Normal everyday masks do protect the wearer. That's been known since long before covid. There was a study done comparing surgical masks to N95s in preventing flu infection to the wearer. It was determined that a surgical mask is just as good as a N95. It is true that the main point of wearing a mask is to prevent someone infected from spreading it, but that doesn't mean that it's ineffective in protecting a wearer from being infected.It's like the public health authorities in the US threw out everything we knew about respiratory illnesses when addressing covid. Whether it's a cold, the flu or covid it spreads the same way. Something else they gave the wrong messaging on was asymptomatic transmission. Early on they said if someone wasn't coughing or sneezing that we didn't need to worry about it. It's been known since before covid that simple respiration is enough to spread a respiratory illness.Now it's like we are rediscovering everything we already knew. The messaging has evolve to masks also protect the wearer and breathing is enough to spread it with no symptoms. We were even given plenty of reminders about this. Back when Italy was out of control and they called on the Chinese CDC for help, the first thing they said when they stepped off the plane was something like "This is a respiratory illness, why aren't you wearing masks?" This was before things really took off here.
On another note, the president of Moderna said something very interesting today. He said the most likely outcome of their vaccine is that it will not prevent infection, it will reduce the severity. So a vaccinated person will still get sick, but not severely ill. He mention making covid like the common cold.That complicates things.