Once again, the COVID-19 health message is getting muddled.
Even as officials and scientists urge the public to get vaccinated, they warn that after vaccination, we'll still have to go on isolating and wearing masks.
It's a mistake to oversimplify this way. We should be talking about using the vaccines to end the pandemic — not filling people with dread that they will be stuck with isolation and masks forever.
The evidence is compelling that a strong, rapid vaccination campaign could render SARS-CoV-2 less of a threat than seasonal flu through building herd immunity.
Without herd immunity as a shared goal, some might skip the vaccine, influenced by scare stories about side effects and rare allergic reactions, especially if they are young and face only a small chance of dying from the virus.
It's simple enough to tell people that if we all work hard to avoid getting or spreading the disease during the vaccination campaign, and everybody steps up to get the shots, aspects of normal life could resume this year. And even before we reach herd immunity, people who live alone and are vaccinated might be able to visit other vaccinated people without undue fear of disease, guilt or social stigma.
There is some encouraging data on herd immunity from the clinical trials of two leading vaccines, says infectious disease doctor Monica Gandhi of the University of California, San Francisco. While the three leading vaccines have proved extremely effective at preventing symptomatic illness, two showed some hints that they limited transmission of the virus as well.
In the trial for the Moderna vaccine, researchers tested all the participants for SARS-CoV-2 when they returned to get a second dose and found that the first dose alone was about 60% effective at stopping so-called asymptomatic cases.