by Angelina Hubner at Entreprendre (France)
What are the latest data that can be observed concerning vaccination?
We are starting to have data. There is a very interesting work which has appeared and which analyzes in a very honest way, in England, the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca vaccine against the English mutant, which is the one which circulates the most and which represents 85 to 90% in our country. cases. This study shows that the AstraZeneca vaccine works less well than expected.
It’s no wonder: by just taking a protein which is that of the virus which was there in March / April 2020 to create a vaccine with that protein rather than with the whole virus, the chance that you have mutation in this protein which vaccine resistance is quite high.
If you take the whole virus, maybe it’s less directive, maybe the concentration is less, but there is a chance that there is still some immunity. However, with the choice that has been made, immunity is very fragile since it is based on very few amino acids.
It seems that for the symptomatic and documented forms, the degree of protection is of the order of 70% in the best case and when we are talking about people who are carriers or who have no declared symptoms then the rate of protection is extremely low.
On the South African and Brazilian variants, it works extremely poorly. Now we ask ourselves the question: what do we do with this in practice to give advice to people? So, I repeat: for the moment, the vaccine is not compulsory, it is the medical practitioners who must discuss with their patients to tell them: I advise you or I do not advise you to vaccinate yourself for the moment. .
The most important point is of course to do as usual, ie what is the balance between the risk and the benefit?
When people tell you there is no risk, that is not true. We are starting to know the risks of this vaccine, there are really dangerous risks of allergy due to the compound we use, polyethylene glycol, with people who have anaphylactic shock that may be fatal and people who have thromboses . So the numbers we have need to be solidified to know how many people are in potentially fatal accidents. Is it 1 in 100,000 or 1 in 10,000? These are things we need to know to say, this is the risk you are taking with the vaccine.
Now what is the risk you take when you are not vaccinated? Well, it’s a mix between the proportion of people who are infected and then the proportion of people who are infected have a severe form. So, to avoid severe forms, this vaccine is probably of interest. We must give people the choice to think. After when you are over 75 or 80, then of course the number of sick people who are at risk of dying is significant. Mortality among those over 85 is over 20% so the benefit to be hoped for in a period when the virus is circulating for people over 80 is very good.
And if, in the great era of terror in which we live, it reassures people to be vaccinated, they must be vaccinated. But there are more downsides than they say. There is work that just came out in Nature that shows that there are 70% side effects with the Pfizer vaccine. We had never seen that with a vaccine: it is two to three times more than the vaccine against the flu. There are also some lethal effects. Is the risk worth taking? Certainly when you are part of a population at risk, but when you are part of the population without risk, you can ask yourself the question, it is everyone’s choice.
You are talking about a risk profit taken at the individual level. At the community level, is it interesting to get vaccinated to avoid infecting others?
So far, only one job has been done on AstraZeneca. These data do not allow us to say that we will control the circulation of the virus in England with the vaccine. There would be a decrease in the severity of infections when one is vaccinated. As for a decrease in the circulation of the virus, what this work shows does not convince me. The target of this vaccine is so narrow that it will be very easy to see new variants appear which will resist the antibodies generated by this vaccine. So again, the vaccine is not the magic wand that was hoped to prevent this virus and its variants from circulating.
We must, I think, come back to the idea of what a disease is. We certainly have to develop hospital beds in this country in order to face the fact that we need to do hyper oxygenation and to have monitoring to monitor people and on the other hand we have to effectively concentrate the patients. vaccine efforts on people at major risk of dying or going into intensive care. You have to have a very active and very effective targeted policy because you have to be careful not to promise the moon every 6 months because the credibility of each other gradually crumbles. We need to maintain credibility with the population if we want to be able to have effective public health actions…