Interesting Info About Covid Vaccinations
Today I have my "guest editor" providing the info to my twice weekly COVID blog post. Our son Jason is a physician at NIH and he writes commentaries on all facets of the pandemic for his followers.
"Do you realize that more than half of the planet has now been vaccinated against COVID? We're exactly 14 months since the first shots went into arms outside of clinical studies, and 11 BILLION doses of vaccine have been delivered to 4.3 billion people. It's basically unfathomable to consider what the planet would look like if the vaccines HADN'T done what we needed them to do. It's estimated that we'd have lost more than 1.2 million additional lives, and had over 14 million more infected people, in the US alone had it not been for the immense effort that resulted in safe and effective shots."
"In a way, we're immensely FORTUNATE that we're in the position of having inane debates about masking - because in a world in which vaccines hadn't been successful, there'd be no getting back to normal, there'd be an acclimation at a much worse NEW normal. And I read something today that I hadn't internalized - prior to the pandemic, 90% of all vaccine doses manufactured worldwide came from four companies, but all the success came despite the failure of three of them to deliver! Pfizer got to the finish line with its effort, but Merck halted two attempts due to poor results, Sanofi had quality issues that sidelined its vaccine, and GSK didn't even try to join the party. So while I continue to lament us only managing to vaccinate 65% of Americans, my spirits are buoyed by the work being done across the planet to end the ravages of COVID."
