You're right about hospital workers needed to get tested. When I began working in a hospital, I was tested for both TB and rubella. I knew my rubella titer was good, because it's also routinely tested in women when you get married. (I am older than the MMR vaccine, and was of the era when it's predecessor had questionable effectiveness. I actually had mumps and chicken pox.)
In the future, I suspect if the COVID-19 vaccine works, it will be one of those things that colleges require, much as they do the meningitis vaccine today. The question is, how long will immunity last? One problem with hurrying the data is that we only know for as long as we've been giving the vaccine, which is a few months.
There’s a raging pandemic and it’s not well-controlled in places across the country. How do you administer vaccines to people who may already be infected? Could inoculating someone who is currently-infected make the vaccine more dangerous than for someone with no detectable trace of the virus? Would there be a need to get tested for the virus first, wait forever the result (which could be minutes, hours or days) and only then get the shot? And what about the booster - is there some likelihood of becoming infected between first and second shots?
Thanks, as always, for an excellent newsletter, Dr. Skylar!
You're right about hospital workers needed to get tested. When I began working in a hospital, I was tested for both TB and rubella. I knew my rubella titer was good, because it's also routinely tested in women when you get married. (I am older than the MMR vaccine, and was of the era when it's predecessor had questionable effectiveness. I actually had mumps and chicken pox.)
In the future, I suspect if the COVID-19 vaccine works, it will be one of those things that colleges require, much as they do the meningitis vaccine today. The question is, how long will immunity last? One problem with hurrying the data is that we only know for as long as we've been giving the vaccine, which is a few months.
There’s a raging pandemic and it’s not well-controlled in places across the country. How do you administer vaccines to people who may already be infected? Could inoculating someone who is currently-infected make the vaccine more dangerous than for someone with no detectable trace of the virus? Would there be a need to get tested for the virus first, wait forever the result (which could be minutes, hours or days) and only then get the shot? And what about the booster - is there some likelihood of becoming infected between first and second shots?
Thanks, as always, for an excellent newsletter, Dr. Skylar!