Concerns about COVID-19 vaccines addressed
WITH the island becoming one of the first countries in the region to roll out its mass vaccination programme in a bid to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, Barbadians are being urged to trust the science. As those with genuine concerns continue to ask questions about the safety, efficacy and ethics behind the speedy production of the vaccines currently available, the Berea Seventh-day Adventist Church hosted a panel discussion titled ‘The Importance of taking the COVID Vaccine’. Featuring several local and overseas-based specialists, all with ties to Barbados, the question-and-answer webinar saw quite a few concerns being addressed.
Highlighting the fact that since March 2020, Barbados had recorded in the region of 2,700 cases, which accounted for 0.9% of our population, Dr. Omar Edwards, an Infectious Disease Specialist with the Ministry of Health and Wellness, stated that the 31 local deaths attributed to COVID-19 equated to 0.01% of the death rate. Noting that the current mass vaccination campaign was moving along swimmingly, he said that they were hoping to have 5% of the population covered by the end of this week.
When asked if a vaccine was needed in Barbados given the current situation, Dr. Edwards explained that it was the best weapon in the current arsenal. “I would say that the vaccine is a critical tool here now in our fight against COVID-19, especially given the context of community spread. We must also look at the context of hospitalisation in Barbados. We have a small nation with a small hospital system: one major medical facility – the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and we have opened additional isolation centres to accommodate COVID-19. But of course, hospitalisation would be a major cost to us and a significant factor in the fight against COVID-19. So with the vaccine, we are looking at this rollout and we are also hoping that we would see a decrease in the severe hospitalisation cases and that is a major factor now for Barbados, given the strain on our existing resources,” he said.
A recurring question in the vaccine debate was whether or not vaccination prevented contraction of the virus. However, Chief of Medicine at Piedmont Fayette Hospital, Dr. Mark Bradshaw, said that medical practitioners were most concerned with whether or not an infection causes disease as opposed to whether or not a person is infected.
Stating that daily we come into contact with, if not dozens, hundreds of bacteria and viruses, he added that they were for the most part not very concerning because the overwhelming majority do not cause disease. “The most recent data suggests that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines appear to confer some reduced transmissibility of the virus itself, but if that weren’t true and the only benefit of the vaccine was that it made the individual who was vaccinated less susceptible to severe disease, essentially the effect of being vaccinated, especially on a mass scale, is that you would essentially render this virus to be an irrelevant virus. Who cares if you’re infected if ultimately you don’t have symptoms? Before we get to the point of determining whether or not there is some effect on transmissibility, the fact that if we are able to reach ‘herd immunity’, i.e. a critical number of people are vaccinated, essentially what that does is render the SARS-CoV-2 virus to be a meaningless virus at that time because it doesn’t really cause disease for human beings,” Dr. Bradshaw said.
The speedy move to create and administer the vaccines has also been a heavy talking point in the public domain, but Dr. Edwards urged members of the public to allow things to take their course. “You have to give the science and the research a little time. We have deployed the vaccine now in a practical setting outside of the clinical research trials, and as you actually get feedback on your populations, you will begin to see the actual true effect of the vaccine. So already by changing the dosing interval from four weeks between the first and the second doses, we are already seeing that you have improved efficacy of the vaccine. Now that would also be a good time if you’re going to move towards herd immunity. No country would be depending necessarily on one vaccine. This is what we made the start with and of course we are looking at other options as well,” he said. (MP)