Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
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Modern bloodletting

Some important science on the COVID has not passed muster. We hope the vaccines will stand up over the as yet nonexistent long-term.

How many centuries did it take for science to understand that bloodletting did not help the patient but hurt the patient? Here’s progress: It has taken only nine months or so for science to understand that disinfecting surfaces does not reduce the spread of COVID-19 (though it doesn’t hurt, either).

It is strange to be in a time warp, back to medieval times — to realize that a supposed medical matter in which we put so much stock at the time is no better than bloodletting. Remember the conscientious people who, nine months ago, scrubbed down entire public places, from hotel foyers, including banisters and stairs, to subway platforms?

Now the scientific consensus is that COVIDis spread through the air, that the critical behavior is not to breathe it in; in other words, to avoid restricted public spaces, such as restaurants and bars, or at least to wear masks there; or, if outside, to avoid standing next to others less than six feet apart.

There is another scientific consensus: Those most at risk, besides those in closed spaces, are the elderly. If it is the science that is to be listened to, this means that the highest priority for vaccination, after frontline health workers, is the elderly. Not minorities, not “essential workers,” not others, because the science says the best way reduce the death rate from COVID is to first vaccinate that cohort with the highest death rate from COVID. Science identifies this cohort not among the various other groups, but among the elderly. When the elderly are in closed spaces, such as nursing homes, all the more so should they be the first to be vaccinated. After that should come the elderly in descending age groups: those over 90, then over 80, then over 75, etc. It is the elderly, rather than those in closed spaces, who die of COVID at the highest rates.

It would be a loss of perspective to regard the debate over priorities for the initial receipt of the vaccines as the most important scientific matter just now. That pride of place should go to gratitude for the swift development of, and delivery of, the vaccines.

It might be assumed that once a vaccine is invented and tested it is simultaneously ready for delivery. This is not so, especially regarding the unprecedented number of doses of the COVID vaccines. Operation Warp Speed undertook to plan the complicated delivery process simultaneously with the charge to develop the vaccine. That is, even before there was a vaccine, there was extensive planning as how to deliver a vaccinate to hundreds of millions of people in tens of thousands (or more) of places.

We leave it to others to decide which was more decisive: the Trump administration’s wrong, early messaging about the severity and the potential pervasiveness of COVID, and this administration’s unprecedented clearing away of the governmental, procedural obstacles that let the private sector move so swiftly in developing and distributing the vaccines.

We hope that these vaccines do not turn out to be another instance of modern bloodletting. All that can be said about them now is that they have been tested to be safe and 95% effective. What cannot be said is how long they will be effective for, that is, what the long-term effect will be. That is unknown, since there has been no long-term! Until a significant period of time passes, it will not be known how long these vaccines are effective for.

That is science. The evidence has to come in.

We’re waiting.

Meantime, we’re taking the vaccine — when it’s our turn.

Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News




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