Covid19 has been affecting our daily life and mental health since December 2019.
Masks, rubbing alcohol and disinfectants have become a huge part of our life. It is even hard to remember the last time when we could see smiles on people’s faces on streets.
Thankfully, more and more effective COVID-19 vaccines have been developed by scientists and administered in the population. According to CDC data, nearly 50% of the US adults have been fully vaccinated, based on which CDC updated the mask guidelines 2 weeks ago. The guidelines target the fully vaccinated population, stating that this specific group of people does not need to wear masks indoors or outdoors, practice social distance, or stay away from others even when knowing they have been exposed to individuals who are COVID-19 positive.
The updated mask guidelines have allowed more fully vaccinated people to take off their masks and live as if everything is back to normal, which is attracting people who are against COVID-19 vaccines to get immunized. It seems like we are on the right track based on the percentage of fully vaccinated people in the country. However, does “fully vaccinated” reallygive us the protection we expected? Not necessarily. Here’s why:
Virus does not care if you are vaccinated or not
It is certain that vaccination will train your immune system to develop immunity against SARS-CoV2, but it does not stop the viruses from entering your body. So how do vaccines work? The ideal vaccine will tell your immune system to produce sufficient amount of neutralizing antibodies and certain level of T cell immunity. The vaccine-induced neutralizingantibodies will be circulating in blood stream, waiting for their preys. When viruses enter your system and look for target cells to infect, effective neutralizing antibodies will bind to the viruses and destroy them before the infection happens, and there you have the “effective protection” we expect from the vaccine. However, this only happens when the vaccine itself can trigger such strong and sufficient neutralizing antibodies, which is not an easy task for vaccine developers.
In many cases, the developed vaccines can only induce some antibodies that are not strong enough to destroy viruses before they infect their target cells, in which case T cell immunity will help to kill virus-infected cells so that viruses lose their hosts to survive and die at the end. Under this situation, the “not so effective” vaccines can protect us from developing severe symptoms, but not infection. In addition, we hope the less effective protection from these vaccines will eliminate all viruses in the body before they have a chance to transmit to others, which is one of the main goal of vaccination. As you can see, there is still a window forthese “fully vaccinated” individuals to spread viruses in the community before their immune system clear the viruses, which can be the case for COVID-19 vaccines.
Vaccine efficacy is individual-dependent
Even if we are all humans, immune system performs individually, which can be dependent onage, race, ethnic groups, etc.. However, for a group of people with same sex, same age and other identical characteristics, they might still respond differently to one vaccine due to their distinct genetic makeup. It is why scientists usually observe less than 100% efficacy for a vaccine in clinical trials. In other words, not all fully vaccinated people will generate protection against COVID-19, which leads us to see cases of vaccine breakthrough infections. More importantly, there are immunodeficient populations who cannot receive vaccines, so they can still be vulnerable around fully vaccinated people who are virus carriers.
Is it the time to relax mask mandate for fully vaccinated people? Not really.
Wearing masks is not only protecting ourselves, but also the vulnerable groups, even if we are fully vaccinated. The ONLY way to end this pandemic is to wear masks whether you are vaccinated or not, maintain social distance, get vaccinated and strict self-quarantine if testedpositive or having symptoms till tested negative again.