The data situation is still unclear. What do the medical experts think?
Studies about the vaccination
In general, medicine welcomes the new vaccines. In particular, the short time until approval and the extremely good efficacy of the two vaccines already approved in the EU are praised. Both the BionTech/Pfizer vaccine and the Moderna vaccine have been shown to have a success rate of well over 90% in the studies. Both vaccines are so-called mRNA vaccines. We have already described how they work in our article on vaccines.
Of course, nothing can be said yet about long-term side effects or complications. For this reason, some people working in the health care system have taken the position of waiting until the first long-term results are available before vaccinating themselves.
The acute side effects are described as pain at the injection site, headaches and aching limbs for up to a week, fever and cold symptoms.
Some deaths of very old patients in Norway after receiving the vaccination, reports of allergic shocks and high fever above 41 degrees have caused concern as well.
However, this is not really significant information, because these are individual cases which of course need to be investigated further. Allergy sufferers who are allergic to the lipids contained must not be vaccinated. From now on, the EMA (European Medicines Agency) will carry out monitoring of all reported problems, i.e. all side effects and complications must be reported to the EMA and these will be continuously investigated.
Then there has been a hacker attack on the regulatory data collected at the EMA, especially from BionTech. It is also suspected that some data may have been manipulated by the hackers. Everything is rather vague and you don’t get much information about it. Only the French daily Le Monde has taken up the issue. What came out there was that the EMA was under a lot of pressure from all sides to approve the vaccines as quickly as possible. Which is not good. The delays in delivery reported by BionTech could also be due to the fact that the quality of the mRNA concentration could not be consistently maintained. Here is the link to the article from 16 January:
The mutations/variants of the virus
There are now several variants, each with more than one mutation. A mutation is a change in the genetic material of the virus. The two variants from Great Britain and South Africa are considered dangerous. The danger seems to be that the virus can spread more easily. There are very different assessments of how these variants came about. In his podcast, the well-known virologist Christian Drosten assumes that the British variant must have mutated a long time ago because there are more than 20 changes to the genome of the virus. This does not happen in one step. That’s why they are investigating where this variant was able to develop undetected for so long. A second theory is that the variants could have developed within a single person because the immune system could not fully fight the virus. The virus was therefore forced to evolve rapidly in order to survive. Whether one or the other or both are true will only become clear through further research.
Virologists agree that all previous mutations are covered by the vaccines, that the virus can only spread better and thus faster.
We should not let ourselves be driven crazy by the daily horror reports in the newspapers, which discover new mutations every day (Brazil, Garmisch-Partenkirchen). Just remember that the media want to sell themselves as well as possible, and horror sells well.
At the same time, we would like to warn against relying too much on the effect of vaccines. This is because of an interview that one of the best-known medical publicists, Prof. Dr. Eric J. Topol (editor of Medscape) conducted with the epidemiologist Prof. Dr. Edward C. Holmes (University of Sydney), an evolutionary biologist and virologist who studies precisely how viruses evolve. Holmes assumes that as immunity increases, evolutionary pressure will force the virus to mutate further and faster. Prof. Holmes fears that the virus will become endemic, meaning that it will appear in new variants every year much like the influenza viruses. This would mean that we would not remain immune for long with the vaccination and even if we were already infected with covid, this could mean that the immunity developed through it would not last long. This, of course, puts quite a dent in our idea that we could return to our old lives before the pandemic. You have to trust this specialist, he knows the subject very well. Here is the link to the original interview: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/943251
A similar assumption had also been made by a spokesperson for the Network Globalhealth, Dirk Brandl, in his commentary on the epidemic year, that the virus will not simply disappear.
But there is also hope. We always think of viruses as enemies, although many viruses live inside us and do not harm us, but even support us. The virus wants to survive and it does not want to kill its host, because then it also dies, because it cannot survive without a host. The dangerousness of many viruses comes from the fact that they come from the animal kingdom, jump to humans and have not yet properly adapted to humans, their new host. But we have always had Corona viruses – though not as dangerous – in our flu mix in winter. Couldn’t it be that the new virus is adapting to its new host and therefore becoming less dangerous? That, at least, is a hypothesis that cannot be dismissed. From pandemic to endemic – that will be the most likely path the virus (and we as its hosts) will take. Let’s all hope that the dangerousness of the virus continues to weaken, otherwise we will be dealing with annual vaccinations, just like with influenza.
The ever tougher lockdown and vaccinations
Although the numbers are decreasing due to the current lockdown, further restrictions on the spread of the virus are being called for by almost all virologists, epidemiologists and politicians. It feels a bit like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. More far-reaching strategies to protect the particularly affected sections of the population are absolutely necessary in addition, so that we can reduce the death toll – cue Tübingen (where the Red Cross has developed a special strategy for dealing with the risk groups).
A more precise, broad-based coordination of all measures, supported by meaningful statistical data, is also necessary and is demanded by many scientists. As much as individual doctors have helped us, research where everyone just investigates what is most important to them does not seem to be effective. We need to learn much more about this virus, and this can be done better in a systematic, coordinated way.
All hopes are pinned on vaccinating broad sections of the population as quickly as possible. At the moment, progress is slow. It is imperative that we involve the general practitioners of all disciplines in this mammoth task, otherwise the supposed herd immunity will not come about.