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Opinions on Wednesday, March 10, 2021
Columnist: Bernard Okoe-Boye
2021-03-10
Dr. Bernard Okoe-Boye, former Deputy Minister of Health
Today, March 9, 2021, is exactly one week since the government of Ghana began vaccinating its citizens against the COVID-19 disease. As a consulting physician at Lekma Hospital, I joined the queue on the first day of the national vaccine deployment exercise. I belong to the first group of citizens eligible to receive the vaccine due to my status as a health worker. Other genders of citizens such as the elderly (over 60) and those with underlying illnesses joined the queue on the first day. After a week of vaccination, some 210,000 Ghanaians have taken the opportunity to get vaccinated.
Unfortunately, there are still those who keep asking the question: should I wait a while to see what happens to those who go for vaccines or just for the vaccine now?
The AstraZeneca vaccine has gone through the three necessary clinical trials that must be conducted before it can be administered to people in any country. Tens of thousands of participants participated in phase three trials that were conducted to find out how effective vaccines are in protecting the population against COVID-19 infection, as well as serious illness and death related to COVID. 19. AstraZeneca is approximately 70% efficient.
This efficacy only speaks of the protection provided by the vaccine against contracting COVID-19. That is, if 100 people get vaccinated, 70 of them will not get COVID-19 at all. The rest of the 30 can get COVID-19. Simply ending the efficacy information here misses out on two critical benefits the vaccine provides; two benefits that have been established in clinical trials in different countries and that have in fact been confirmed in countries like the United Kingdom, where more than 21 million have been vaccinated.
Vaccination protects you from serious and critical illness in case you are in the minority that can get COVID-19 despite vaccination. What it means is that you are saved from hospitalization and, more importantly, from COVID-19 related death with the vaccine. AstraZeneca vaccines may be an average of 70% effective against COVID-19, but their protection against serious illness caused by COVID-19 is greater than 85%, with protection against death close to 99%.
The Pfizer vaccine produced in the USA may be 94% effective as the Moderna vaccine, but the good news is that they both give you pretty much the same AstraZeneca result when it comes to preventing serious illness and death.
The Johnson and Johnson Johnson vaccine that was recently licensed for emergency use has an average efficacy of 70% as the AstraZeneca vaccine. Phase three clinical trials conducted in South Africa with this Johnson and Johnson vaccine showed that the hospitalization rate was drastically reduced in those who received the vaccine compared to those who did not receive the vaccine. There were no deaths in those who received the Johnson and Johnson vaccine.
This information from the Johnson and Johnson vaccine studies validates a truth, WHICH IS: IT IS MORE SMART TO GET THE VACCINE, REGARDLESS OF WHICH BRAND, WHEN IT IS AVAILABLE THAN TO EXPECT. I know that in Ghana 85 out of a hundred people who contract COVID-19 will have only mild to moderate illness and these statistics have undoubtedly encouraged some people to say ‘let me wait and watch’, with the thought that they should even get the virus, they will be part of the 85% who do not experience serious illness.
A relative of mine contracted COVID-19 and experienced a serious illness that could have killed him. She got it from a family member who only experienced mild symptoms when she had it. The lesson is that if you avoid the vaccine thinking that you will be fine even with infection, you can act as a carrier, passing the virus on to other friends and family who could become seriously ill and die.
Therefore, getting vaccinated not only protects you, it also protects your family members by breaking the chain of transmission. Now I am vaccinated, so if I meet a COVID positive person who contacts me with the virus, two things can happen; or my vaccine-acquired immunity stops the virus from infecting me or enters my system, but it cannot overwhelm me and land me in the hospital. Since more than 70 out of 100 who receive the vaccine are protected from COVID infection, those people serve as barriers that break the chain of transmission. When a virus reaches them, it ends there and is not transmitted to the next.
Thus, vaccination achieves a reduction in transmission rates, infection rates, hospitalization rates, mortality rates, and will ultimately stop the pandemic. The deployment of VACCINES marks the beginning of the end of the Pandemic. What will make this final stage shorter and less fatal is continued adherence to hand washing and mask use protocols, as these protocols serve as an extranet to capture the few viral strains that escape the provided protective wall. for vaccines.
The Ghanaian government’s goal is to complete this final stage of the pandemic by December 2021. Hopefully, by this time, more than 20 million Ghanaians will have been vaccinated and the COVID 19 transmission rate will have approached zero.
I know that the launch of the vaccine will save us many more deaths in this final stage, but if we want to experience a very low mortality or better yet avoid any death, the mask use protocols must be followed so that this latest episode of the pandemic is makes it short and less deadly.
You don’t need AstraZeneca or Pfizer or Moderna in particular to achieve a world free from COVID pandemics. Any of the approved vaccines will protect you from the pandemic, keep you out of the ICU, save you from death, and significantly reduce infection rates until nationwide elimination of the disease is achieved.
I predict that this pandemic will end in this calendar year, 2021. This prediction can only be true if you are vaccinated and put on your mask. Let’s help make the prediction true because we can’t afford to have our cinemas and our hospitality industry shut down on our knees in 2022. We can’t afford not to hug our loved ones in 2022.
I guess the answer to waiting a while or not before getting the vaccine is obvious now. It is not a smart move to wait, it can be suicidal.
By: Dr. Okoe Boye
Former Vice Minister of Health.
