Talk of The Villages Florida - View Single Post - Vaccine and masks?
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Old 11-12-2020, 07:30 AM
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blueash blueash is offline
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This is very tricky to extrapolate my future behavior based on a public relations report. For starters, the 90% figure is in people who volunteered to be in a vaccine study. It is of course the best you can do and thank you to those that volunteered. But perhaps those kind of people are believers in science and care about community thus they are willing to take some personal risk to get answers for others. That kind of person might be more likely to be a mask wearing or a hand washers or a stay at home and social distance person. The correct conclusion might be that the vaccine is 90% effective in people who significantly lowered their risk.

That may not apply to people who don't lower their risk thus have higher viral exposure. Time will tell. We also do not have any long term data on protection but hopefully that data will be reported before the vaccine is widely available. And an important point. While the CDC now says that mask wearing not only reduces the likelihood of me spreading my Covid to you, it also does help protect me from your Covid.

If the vaccine protects against clinical disease, that's great. There is not any reported data, nor anything in the protocol that will provide an answer, on whether it protects against subclinical disease. In other words if I get the shots might I still be likely to be contagious to others when I am exposed even though I am not "sick"? This question could only be answered by doing regular Covid screening in the study groups. It was not done.

My answer to the OP's question is I don't know. There is not enough data available for a reasonable person to make an informed choice. But I can tell you that my decision will be based on science and on my belief that I am responsible not only for my own health but that I have a moral obligation to protect yours as well.
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