Research shows that immunizers were largely responsible for containing the surges in hospitalizations and deaths around the world. What are the next challenges to get the coronavirus under control?
The London Science Museum in the UK has staged a temporary exhibition to celebrate the epic development and deployment of the covid-19 vaccines in record time.
On one of the shelves you can see the syringe, ampoule and cardboard tray used on December 8, 2020, when 90-year-old British Margaret Keenan became the first person to receive the covid-19 vaccine outside of studies clinicians.
Since then, another 13 billion doses have been administered worldwide, including boosters and updated immunizers, which protect against the latest variants.
What have we learned in these two years of electoral campaign? What do the data on the effectiveness of vaccinations reveal? And what is known about the side effects?
In short, studies show that the vaccines tested and approved against covid have been primarily responsible for containing hospitalizations and deaths from infection: without them, the numbers affected by the health crisis would be much greater.
Furthermore, the most serious adverse events are considered rare by public health institutions.
the practical effects
“Covid vaccination has made the difference between dying and surviving for many people,” summarizes Dr. Isabella Ballalai, vice president of the Brazilian Immunization Society (SBIM).
Since the doses began to be applied to the majority of the population, hospitalizations and death rates from complications related to the coronavirus have decreased significantly.
And even with the arrival of more transmissible variants like omicron, immunization ensured that most people didn’t become seriously ill or die.
Brazil is an example of this: when the first vaccines were approved by the National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) in January 2021, the country was about to experience the most serious moment of the entire pandemic.
Between the end of March and the beginning of April last year, the daily moving average of deaths from covid exceeded 3,000 (with a record of 72,000 new infections/day), according to the National Council of Health Secretaries (Conass).
As the weeks passed – and the percentage of Brazilians vaccinated increased – the numbers began to decrease little by little.
This statistic only rose again in January 2022, with the arrival of the omicron variant. Even so, the peak of this surge was 950 deaths per day, while the number of new infections reached 189,000 every 24 hours.
To make the comparison clearer:
- March/April 2021 wave peak: average of 75,000 cases and 3,000 deaths per day.
- Peak wave of January/February 2022: average of 189 thousand cases and 950 deaths per day.
Another indication of the effectiveness of vaccines comes from a survey published on December 13th.
In it, the Commonwealth Fund asked scientists from the School of Public Health at Yale University in the United States to try and answer a question: what if we had no vaccines against covid-19 until now?
The findings indicate that the US alone would have faced 18.5 million hospitalizations and 3.2 million more deaths from covid over the past two years.
In addition, the US vaccination program saved $1.15 trillion in medical expenses that would have been needed to pay for treatment of extra cases of infection.
“Since December 2020, 82 million infections, 4.8 million hospitalizations and 798,000 deaths have been recorded in the country. In other words, without vaccination, the US would have recorded 1.5 times more infections, 3.8 times more hospitalizations and 4.1 times more deaths “, compare the authors
And the side effects?
“The more time passes and the more doses of anti-Covid vaccines are administered, the more confident we are of their safety profile,” Ballalai replies.
In these two years, regulatory agencies and public health institutions make a great effort to monitor and investigate every case of probable post-vaccination adverse event.
The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) points out that ‘serious side effects are very rare’.
Among the most common discomforts after vaccination, they highlight:
- Pain at the injection site;
- Feeling tired;
- Headache;
- Body pain;
- Temperature;
- Feeling sick or unwell.
The entity specifies that “most of these side effects are mild and should last less than a week.”
“If you have a high fever for more than two days, a continuous cough or lose your sense of taste and smell, you could have Covid-19,” guides the NHS.
“You don’t get the covid from the vaccine, but it is possible to get infected shortly before or after receiving the dose,” the article supplements.
But what about serious adverse events? What do the latest numbers say?
The most up-to-date record of those statistics is published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
In a publication, the agency reports the proportional number of cases of the most serious side effects known to date:
- anaphylaxis(severe allergic reaction after vaccination): 5 cases per 1 million doses applied;
- Janssen vaccine related thrombosis: 4 cases per 1 million doses applied;
- Janssen Vaccine Related Guillain-Barré Syndrome: there is no fixed number, but there was a small increase in cases in men over 50 immunized with this product compared to those who received doses of Pfizer;
- Myocarditis and pericarditis (heart inflammation) in young people who have received the Pfizer vaccine:
- From 12 to 15 years: 70.7 cases per million doses applied;
- From 16 to 17 years old: 105.9 cases per million doses applied;
- From 18 to 24 years old: 52.4 cases per million doses applied.
The CDC reports that “most patients who had myocarditis and pericarditis after covid-19 vaccination responded well to treatment and rest and felt better quickly.”
The agency reiterates that “multiple studies and reviews of data from safety monitoring systems continue to demonstrate that vaccines are safe”.
As regards deaths, the American registries calculate that, of the 657 million doses administered there up to 7 December 2022, 17,800 deaths were identified after vaccination (i.e. 0.0027% of the total), even if the application of the doses has not been identified as a direct cause of this. Investigation of all these cases through medical record analysis and autopsies found only nine deaths associated with the use of the Janssen vaccine.
Ballalai reminds that no drug, vaccine or procedure is risk-free. “All these data show us that the cost-effectiveness of vaccination far outweighs the occasional and rare problems,” he concludes.
What awaits us
Two years after the first covid-19 vaccines became available, there are still many challenges to effectively controlling the coronavirus.
“From a global point of view, we have countries far behind in immunization,” emphasizes epidemiologist André Ribas Freitas, scientific advisor of A Casa, a platform that brings together national health agents and agents to fight endemic diseases.
In Haiti, for example, only 2% of the population took the initial two doses. The numbers are also low in countries such as Algeria (15%), Mali (12%), Congo (4%) and Yemen (2%).
“This represents a very big concern, since maintaining intense viral transmission poses a risk for the emergence of more transmissible or pathogenic variants,” warns the specialist, who is also a professor at the São Leopoldo Mandic Medical School, in Campinas , in the paulista interior.
Brazil also has its own challenges and paths to correct in the coming months, experts point out.
“Some scholars calculate that up to 300,000 lives could have been saved if we had started vaccination earlier and at full capacity”, regrets Soraya Smaili, professor of pharmacology and former dean of the Federal University of Sao Paulo (Unifesp).
Data collected by the CoronavirusBra1 portal reveals that so far 81% of Brazilians have followed the initial vaccination schedule.
The number of individuals who received booster doses, essential to protect themselves from the omicron variant, is much lower: only 56% of people have their immunization schedule correctly updated.
In addition to increasing this vaccination coverage, health professionals interviewed by BBC News Brasil report two other frontiers that the country will have to pay attention to in the coming months: the protection of children and the application of bivalent doses (which protect against more recent variants) in priority groups, such as the elderly and the immunocompromised.
“One of these updated bivalent vaccines has already been approved by Anvisa and is administered in the United States and Europe.
Ballalai points out that these updated immunizers should be limited to just these specific groups. “The ‘original’ vaccines that we have today continue to protect the rest of the population well,” he says.
Freitas, in turn, understands that immunizing children should be a top priority. “Vaccination coverage against covid among young Brazilians is very low,” he underlines.
Although deaths among children are less frequent, the absolute numbers are alarming: the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FioCruz) calculates that Brazil has recorded one death of children aged 6 months to 5 years per day during the entire year 2022.
“Although we find ourselves in a much more favorable scenario, the pandemic is not over yet and between 80 and 100 Brazilians still die every day,” Ballalai points out.
“And having up-to-date vaccinations is the best strategy to be more protected,” concludes the doctor.
– This text was published in https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-63985184
🇧🇷The best content in your email for free. Choose your favorite Terra newsletter. Click here!
Source: Terra
Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.
