I’ve posted here before about herd immunity. Prior to inoculation/vaccination, herd immunity was the result of enough people dying or surviving that the transmission of the disease (plague, smallpox, etc) was arrested in that population until the next generation of uninfected people grew up, whereupon the substrate for another round of death appeared.But let’s be clear: the survivors weren’t necessarily healthy. Many polio survivors spent the rest of...
Read More »Long COVID and chronic fatigue
The recurring bleat of vaccine denialists is that COVID should be addressed through “herd immunity.” Well, OK, a vaccinated population has herd immunity, but that’s not what they mean. They mean herd immunity in the sense of the Black Plague—the people who didn’t die were immune.Apart from all the deaths caused by COVID infections in unvaccinated people, there’s the issue of long COVID. While its etiology is poorly understood, its reality is certain....
Read More »Vaccination protects from long COVID
The COVID-19 pandemic had a dramatic effect on the US economy that was mitigated by the rapid development and deployment of COVID vaccines. I was a subject in the Moderna Phase III clinical trial of their RNA vaccine, and eventually have had six injections.The well-established benefit of COVID vaccination is that it will keep you out of the ED and the morgue. But what about “long COVID,” the post-acute sequelae of COVID infection that can last for...
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