Can Covid vaccines prevention the spread of the virus and lead to herd immunity?
More and more people are being vaccinated across the globe to prevent them from getting Covid 19. But will vaccination also prevent people from spreading the virus? This is the great question that remains to be answered by science regarding the terrible pandemic we have been living through since last spring.
When enough people are immune to a virus because they have already had it or because they are vaccinated, the virus cannot move from person to person anymore. This is called herd immunity. Herd immunity is the ideal stage for a group of people to be in, since the virus can no longer infect around 80% of the population. So can the current vaccines; Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines prevent the spread of the virus? Can these vaccines and the others that are being developed in China and Russia stop the spread and create herd immunity? According to the limited research doen so far, the answer is basically yes. Studies have shown the following:
Research covering the entire Scottish population of 5.4 million – with one-fifth inoculated with the Pfizer or Oxford/AstraZeneca jabs -- provides real-world validation that the vaccines prevent COVID symptoms and illness more than 90 percent of the time.A study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine -- comparing two groups in Israel of nearly 600,000 people each, one vaccinated and the other not -- also reported reduced illness in line with clinical trials.
But unlike the research from Scotland, the Israeli findings also showed infections had sharply declined in the vaccinated group -- by 92 percent among those at least one week past the second of two doses. (COVID vaccines' effectiveness at preventing infection is key to a return to normalcy)
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