A day on, not a day off! #reclaimthesummer
Dear Colleagues,
Today as we take time to reflect on the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. it is important to note that this federal holiday is recognized as a day of service. Today at our main campus we are busy vaccinating 700 patients against the deadly disease we have come to know as Covid-19. This will be our largest single vaccination event yet and I am so proud of all the staff that are here today ensuring that we actively pursue this disease. We are now on the offense. This service to our Veterans is not unique, however I am so thankful to all the staff who voluntarily raise their hand to serve. I have challenged our team with developing and executing local Covid-19 vaccination plans that maximize vaccine dose allocation, impact priority groups, and ensure overall population health infusion. The rally cry has been to “Reclaim the Summer”. To accomplish this we need all employees to engage. First off, I want to encourage you - yourself to get vaccinated. I am committed to vaccinating any KCVA employee who wants to be vaccinated. Secondly, I want you to encourage your patients, friends, and family members to get vaccinated as soon as their opportunity comes.
The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines — the only two approved in the U.S. currently — are among the best vaccines ever created, with effectiveness rates of about 95 percent after two doses. That’s on par with the vaccines for chickenpox and measles. And a vaccine doesn’t even need to be so effective to reduce cases sharply and crush a pandemic.
If anything, the 95 percent number understates the effectiveness, because it counts anyone who came down with a mild case of Covid-19 as a failure. But turning Covid into a typical flu — as the vaccines evidently did for most of the remaining 5 percent — is actually a success. Of the 32,000 people who received the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine in a research trial, do you want to guess how many contracted a severe Covid case? One.
Although no rigorous study has yet analyzed whether vaccinated people can spread the virus, it would be surprising if they did. “If there is an example of a vaccine in widespread clinical use that has this selective effect — prevents disease but not infection — I can’t think of one!” Dr. Paul Sax of Harvard has written in The New England Journal of Medicine. (And, no, exclamation points are not common in medical journals.) On Twitter, Dr. Monica Gandhi of the University of California, San Francisco, argued: “Please be assured that YOU ARE SAFE after vaccine from what matters — disease and spreading.”
The risks for vaccinated people are still not zero, because almost nothing in the real world is zero risk. A tiny percentage of people may have allergic reactions. And I’ll be eager to see what the studies on post-vaccination spread eventually show. But the evidence so far suggests that the vaccines are akin to a cure.
Be apart of reclaiming the summer. Get vaccinated, encourage others to get vaccinated, and continue to do your part with wearing a mask, hand hygiene, and distancing when appropriate. #reclaimthesummer
DAVID ISAACKS, FACHE