Originally posted by Serial_Apologist
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Once a vaccination programme starts ......
In the first month or so, nothing will really change, since the people who will be vaccinated will be the very elderly and the most vulnerable, and not in everybody's everyday society. So most of us should take the same precautions as we having been doing (hopefully) for most of this year - not meeting people, washing hands, wearing masks if out and about, not going indoors etc.
After a while people who are vaccinated will hopefully start to get a benefit - as they will be - as far as can be told at present - immune, though I still wouldn't recommend that they went out deliberately looking for the virus.
Remember that these vaccines do two things. Firstly, they may give the vaccinated person some protection against the virus, but in one sense that isn't what the public health officials are looking for. They are not trying to protect (most) particular individuals in society, but rather larger groups. It's sad when individuals become ill and sometimes die, but it's not the job of the public health officials to protect people at an individual level.
The other thing is that as more people are vaccinated, the prevalence of active virus in the community should go down, so the probability of encountering anyone with an active viral load diminishes. People are thinking of this as "herd immunity", but I'm not sure that that is really what it is. Any one individual who has not been vaccinated is possibly just as likely to suffer as before if he or she does meet someone with the virus, but the probability that that happens will diminish over time.
There may also be biological effects, as the virus adapts, and it's possible that there could be some form of immunity picked up by a biological mechanism, but essentially the main effect is to reduce the prevalence of the virus in the community, thus reducing the likelihood of transmission with the consequences of that.
Over time - and I'm not an expert in this - the public health officials may have some idea - the prevalence of the virus will start to drop, but it will depend to some extent on the community. My guess is that this will take 3 to 6 months once a full vaccination programme gets fully underway, but it may take longer as obviously there are going to be lots of logistic problems.
Thus I would hesitate before booking a flight of any sort with a full plane load of passengers unless one has high confidence in the vaccines used, and also high confidence that there is unlikely to be anyone on that flight who is carrying the virus, whether vaccinated or not. Airline and travel companies will probably try to push for "business as usual" as soon as possible, and given what we are now seeing in our society regarding economic and social effects that may be helpful to some people, but people who are in what have now been identified as high risk or vulnerable groups may still (and not unreasonably) feel safer waiting until known infection rates are really low - ideally zero.
Gradually more and more people will become confident that they can go back to "business as usual" - which for many people will not be unreasonable, but there will still be some vulnerable people who might become infected if there is still any virus active anywhere in the community. Probably people willl start to become less concerned, even careless, which might allow pockets of infection to linger on longer than otherwise.
If the vaccines do indeed seem safe, and if the incidence of the virus decreases considerably, then the best protection for each person will be to accept a vaccination, rather than relying on "herd" immunity - an assumption that there is low or no virus out there to be infected by.
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