Dr. Joshua Gentges talked recently with local podcaster Scott Townsend of The Scott Townsend Show about COVID-19 vaccines. Following is an excerpt from that conversation. Listen to this podcast in its entirety here. Townsend serves on City’s COVID-19 Public Information Campaign Advisory Committee.
Can I choose my vaccine?
It’s kind of difficult right now to choose the vaccine, depending on where you want to go. You can call around and try to find the places that have a particular vaccine, but the message from the CDC right now is that the best vaccine for anybody is whichever one they can get first.
What about side effects?
Side effects are fairly common with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines and, to a lesser extent, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. But they’re not, in general, severe. Most people have mild side effects, such as a sore arm.
Can the vaccine give you COVID?
You can’t get COVID from the vaccine.
Do I need to continue wearing a mask if I’ve been vaccinated?
I think that people can start to back down from some of the restrictions that that the CDC has been recommending as we become more vaccinated. So, for example, if you’re vaccinated and it’s been two weeks since your second shot, it’s okay for you to congregate with other people in settings like immediate family or slightly extended family settings. If you’re in the public it’s better to still wear your mask and socially distance until we get to baseline levels that are very low, where contact tracing and tracking can help contain different outbreaks.
What about people at higher risk of serious illness from the virus?
Since the vaccines aren’t perfect, if you’re a high risk individual, I would certainly still recommend that people mask and social distance in those categories. And the CDC still says that you should mask and social distance until they take off that recommendation.
If I’ve had COVID, do I still need to be vaccinated?
Yes. The current recommendation, I believe, is that you should you should wait 90 days after active COVID infection to receive the vaccination.
Can you explain herd immunity?
Each person who gets COVID will transmit it to, on average, somewhere between six and eight people. So for herd immunity to work, you need each generation that the virus reproduces for it to infect less than one person for each person that gets infected. So if I’m infected and I would normally transmit it to seven people, for example, I need more than six on average of those people to be immunized. For that number you would say herd immunity for that is about 80, 85 percent, somewhere around there. And so what happens then is the virus can’t grow. It can’t spread to larger numbers of people because most of the time when it tries to infect someone else, they’re already immune.
How many of us need to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity?
In Oklahoma, and also pretty much for the entire country, roughly a quarter to a third of people, depending on where you live, have been fully vaccinated. But there is not a great answer because no one 100 percent knows exactly the number we need to get to to reach herd immunity. It depends crucially on which variants of COVID-19 we see in the United States going forward. Some of the variants that we’re seeing out of South America, South Africa and England are more transmissible. So if it’s easier for the virus to transfer itself between people, then you have to have more people who are covered by vaccination or by having prior infection. We were saying at the beginning of the pandemic that you would need about two thirds of the populace to be vaccinated, but the the virus seems to be able to transmit itself more efficiently than what we thought at first. Now we’re probably looking at more like somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of the population needs to be vaccinated before we can reach herd immunity and and have it basically stamped out.
One of the ways we’ll know is (when caseloads decline). Eventually, they will get far enough down that you will be able to see that there’s not going to be any more surges. We are in the middle of another surge right now. Some of the relaxation of social distancing and masking guidelines has led us to another, albeit smaller, surge and hopefully fewer deaths in the surge since most of our really vulnerable populations have been vaccinated.
Where can people get more information?
The CDC has a good area on their website that talks about the vaccine. For more local information, I would go to the Oklahoma State Department of Health. They can give information about what’s in the vaccines, where people can go to get one and what they should expect whenever they get one.
Hear this interview in its entirety at https://apple.co/3gvboTp.
Dr. Joshua Gentges, D.O., is the research director and an associate professor of emergency medicine for the Oklahoma University Department of Emergency Medicine.