I am not a virologist so I will not pretend to know more than I do (which is very little) about the new covid19 vaccines now becoming available to the public.
What the average person can know is that these will be the first RNA-based vaccines ever administered to the public. Rather than explain what that means, I will refer you to a few good articles explaining the differences between older vaccines (e.g. polio and small pox) and the newer, genetically manufactured vaccines built upon DNA and RNA (see here, here, and here).
Apparently, the new covid19 vaccines will not prevent you from becoming infected with the covid19 virus. But they will prevent you from developing the physical symptoms that typically arise after infection.
In other words, the vaccine will prevent you from getting sick, but it will not prevent you from catching the virus, being infected by the virus, and carrying the covid19 virus in your body.
This, of course, raises a very important question: will the hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, of people being vaccinated all become asymptomatic carriers of the covid19 virus?
Will a vaccinated person be able to infect an unvaccinated person, causing them to become sick (and perhaps die)?
I posited my questions to a friend the other day whose son is a doctor in a
busy Philadelphia hospital. He called his son on the phone and talked with him about my concerns.
Simply put, his answer to my question was: THAT is THE BIG unanswered question about this vaccine.
And no one knows the answer. Because this has never been done before.
“It’s all one enormous experiment,” says Dr. Peter Doherty, a Nobel Laureate and professor of immunology at Melbourne University.
Indeed it is.
I have not yet decided what I will do. What are your plans?
