(I haven’t been here in a long time. I don’t tend to read Medium articles and I don’t really know why I haven’t canceled my membership. I was about to post the following on my own website, but no one goes there, or my Facebook Account, but I have already posted another article there on a similar subject so I decided to drop this one here.)
There are several glaring mistakes that have been made in the vaccine roll-out. I wonder if you’re thinking of the same ones I am. Let’s see:
- Failing to test patients for antibodies BEFORE administering the vaccine.
This is the ultimate no-brainer. Given the fact that some studies indicate that there are three times more people who have had the virus than we have identified because they either had no symptoms or such minor ones that they never realized that they had been infected.
People in this category are presumed to have acquired conferred immunity from their SARS-CoV2 experience…but we don’t know:
a) if this is really true to begin with because we haven’t tested a large enough sample to draw that conclusion;
b) how long the natural conferred immunity might endure;
c) whether conferred immunity from one strain of the virus confers immunity from other strains of the virus (and recent reporting suggests that may not be the case.)
2. Nevertheless, by not testing EVERYONE before administering the vaccine, we have undoubtedly vaccinated a significant portion of the population that might not have needed it because they had already acquired conferred immunity from a previous exposure to the virus. We just don’t know how many — because we didn’t test everyone before dosing them.
Yes, this procedure would have cost more money, but it might have helped conserve the vaccine reserves, enabling us to roll out the vaccines more quickly to people who actually needed them…but it wouldn’t have cost that much more money.
Yes, this would have increased the amount of time spent per dose administered, but speeding the delivery of the vaccine to those who needed it most would have offset that time deficit.
3. We aren’t post-testing every patient, which is the only way we are going to…