France has just reached 5 million people partially vaccinated for 2,220,608 people fully vaccinated, naming they have been given two doses of vaccine! And the government promised to improve the pace in early March to enable the economy to resume.
This is good news, enabling nursing home inhabitants to get out and receive their families again. A governmental advertisement event let people see children hugging their grandparents again, along with a key caption: “For we all dream to meet again, let’s be vaccinated”. The dream is therefore darkened by the final message “For now, even vaccinated, let’s keep on complying with health guidelines and wearing masks”.
So, when can one see their families without a facemask nor health guidelines once vaccinated? The question is dividing because scientists still have no answer to when is one really protected after they have been vaccinated. Interviewed by 20 minutes, virologist and Montpellier Inrae scientist Mylène Ogliastro explains that for mRNA vaccines (namely Pfizer and Moderna), “one starts to be protected three weeks after the first injection”, but she recommends to wait for the second dose, because “in elderly people, this immune reaction is slower than in young”. As for AstraZeneca, a British study shows immunity is 82% effective after the second dose, three months after the first one.
From this moment only, one has fewer risks of falling ill and being hospitalized. But the risk of being an asymptomatic carrier and give the virus to relatives is still here, and studies have a hard time assessing the risk. It would be necessary that all people one sees be vaccinated to be sure they cannot give them covid…
This is the entire question of herd immunity. If enough people are vaccinated, the risk of being someone likely to have Covid and be part of the transmission chain could be dramatically cut. Institut Pasteur bets on herd immunity including 70% people vaccinated against Covid-19 which R0 reproduction rate reaches 3.3. But the outbreak of variants widely influences the fight against the coronavirus epidemic, reassessing some scientific conclusions. Herd immunity is now set at 80%.
