Vaccine Myths
I want to discuss three problematic claims I've seen on the Internet. The first is vaccine immunity versus natural immunity. The second is vaccine shedding. The third is the need for children to be immunized.
Some people are saying that you should get vaccinated even if you've already caught covid. I don't see the sense in that. Vaccination is a way to mimic the body's response to disease without exposing it to the danger of the disease. The vaccine stimulates the same immune system in the body the disease stimulates. So it makes no sense to say that vaccination produces a protective immune response, but the disease does not. We have a year's worth of evidence that previous exposure to covid protects you against a second exposure, nore and better evidence than the evidence the vaccine works. And the evidence that the vaccine works is pretty good. There is no evidence yet that one works better than the other or gives longer lasting protection. Both seem good enough. So I do not understand this push to get people who have had covid to get vaccinated.
Vaccine shedding is the possibilty that someone who has not received aa vaccine to get it through contact with a person who has. Vaccine shedding is only a possibilty with vaccines using a live virus. It's a problem because the weakened virus may revert to a more virulent form and cause the damage the vaccine is supposed to protect against. Two of the three vaccines licensed in the United State, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, do not use a live virus, they use messenger RNA. So there is no possibility that they cause virus shedding, regardless of what you may read on the Internet. The third vaccine, Johnson & Johnson, uses a cold virus that has been genetically modified to have the outer shell of the covid virus. I was not able to determine if there is a live or killed virus in the vaccine, I assume it is live. If so, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine can be shed, but it should cause no problems other than a common cold. I would not worry about it, unless you are immuno-compromised. In that case I would stay away from anyone who has received the J&J covid vaccine, or any other live vaccine, in the past two weeks.
Finally, I do not understand the push to vaccinate children against covid. We have very good evidence that children are not at risk. Each covid vaccine given to a child takes it away from an adult in the Third World that should have it instead. It's incredibly selfish to vaccinate children in the United States when the Third World is still suffering the ravages of covid and its associated lockdowns. Send the vaccine overseas, don't give them to children here.