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Let Vaccines End the Pandemic. Don’t Let Trump End Vaccines.
Vaccines are a pact between us all to protect one another
Vaccine by November 1 come hell or high water, the current administration says. Some misunderstand the purpose of vaccines. FDA Commissioner Stephen M. Hahn, MD, is one of them. Donald Trump is another. That lack of understanding has the potential to cause Covid-19 to be here for a long time.
The purpose of a vaccine is not to protect “me,” it is to protect “we.”
Done right, vaccines end pandemics. Done wrong, pandemics end vaccines.
Let’s start with some simple math. If the goal is to stop the virus from spreading, it has to have a place to be spread from and spread to. If one of those two people is vaccinated, the virus can’t spread.
The two things the FDA needs to maximize are: 1) vaccine effectiveness and 2) vaccine trust. We want those two numbers to be as high as possible. You can simply multiply them. Multiply 100% by 50%. It equals 50%.
Here’s the trick, it doesn’t matter which way. If the trust in a vaccine is 80%, but effectiveness is 50%, we will add 40% to herd immunity. If a vaccine is only 50% effective, but trusted by 80%, we get the same 40%. So trust is just as important as effectiveness.
