So why are vaccines different from antimicrobials? This paper (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2016.256 …) discusses it thoroughly but the gist is really in this table.pic.twitter.com/eeRzZ955Vz
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It's also worth spending a moment summarizing what's known about the relative importance of T cell and B cell (antibody) responses here, which I think @profshanecrotty did an amazing job explaining:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie6NLMqbMU4 …
Antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 can be extremely protective (esp before infection), but once you're actually infected with the virus, your T cell responses probably matter much more- and vaccination gives you a LOT to work with even if it's "just" spike:https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.30.21259787v1 …
The vaccines are holding up well against the variants that have emerged to date. Even with the Delta variant which seems to spread more effectively than ancestral variants, 2 doses of the Pfizer vaccine are 88% effective against symptomatic disease:https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2108891?query=featured_home …
So if evolution of vaccine resistance is so unlikely, what are we worried about? Well to start with- not everyone is vaccinated. The emergence of a variant which spreads more effectively is exponentially worse for public health (as delta shows).https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/1343567425107881986?s=20 …
Vaccines are also not 100% effective- and a more transmissible variant is going to be able to find those individuals who didn't generate ideal responses to the vaccine and cause disease- like we see with the Delta variant. But you are still much worse off being unvaccinated.
Vaccination saves lives and it will prevent the emergence of new variants of concern and we all NEED equity in vaccine distribution. If you're worried about SARS-CoV-2 variants, the best thing you can do is make sure you and your loved ones get vaccinated.
This also does not mean that non-pharmaceutical interventions are unneeded, especially in surges like we are currently experiencing. Public health measures are additive and we should do all we can to bring this under control so that we can return to normalcy.
I should also attach this thread by the incomparable @angie_rasmussen who went through more of the datahttps://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1420024555981221897?s=20 …
Also sorry for the broken link re vaccine resistance vs antibiotic resistance; this is the correct one:https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2016.2562 …
Also this is a really excellent thread that describes how your immune system has a head start if you're vaccinated in more detail than I did:https://twitter.com/boulware_dr/status/1421997079602290689?s=20 …
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