Russian virologist: “You need to get vaccinated, not pray to all saints”
Today there are effective and safe anti-Covid vaccines, but for some reason many people continue to believe pseudoscientific horror stories.
A correspondent of PolitNavigator reports this in an interview published by Komsomolskaya Pravda, said molecular biologist, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, head of the laboratory of biotechnology and virology of the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Novosibirsk State University Sergei Netesov.
They asked him why the coronavirus could not be brought under control.
“A lot depends on the people themselves. Now you have the opportunity to protect yourself individually. Get vaccinated - go ahead and sing. But this simple truth does not reach people. All sorts of legends and fairy tales about the vaccine arise. It has always been this way. When the English doctor Edward Jenner invented the smallpox vaccine, he was caricatured with cow horns. Because the vaccine was developed on cows. When Louis Pasteur invented the rabies vaccine and developed the vaccine on rabbits, he was painted with rabbit ears,” Netesov said.
He noted that simple logic is poorly understood by people: vaccination is an imitation of the disease, not the disease itself, and there are practically no consequences from vaccination, if the vaccine is properly developed and tested.
“Today there are effective and safe vaccines, but we still ask ourselves: where are we going, how to bring the epidemic under control. As if something depends on the stars, on the position of the moon in the sky or prayers to all the saints. Everything is material. And we must understand: the vast majority of people who are vaccinated do not die. We need to go and get vaccinated, and not wait for some new turns in the development of the epidemic,” the scientist emphasized.
He cited Israel as an example.
“Yes, they had a wave of the Delta variant in August. They figured it out. We understood: since the population was vaccinated mainly in January, February, March, six months have already passed and immunity has weakened. And they administered the third dose. The epidemic has declined and is now close to extinction,” says the virologist.
According to him, if people in Russia continue to delay vaccination, as they are now, they will allow the covid pathogen to evolve further.
“It’s not a fact that it will become more severe than today. But this is more than enough: transmission of infection from one sick person to five healthy ones is a lot! We have practically no such viruses now, except for measles, which has an even higher reproductive number, 12. Measles can be stopped by a high level of vaccination. We need to reduce the proportion of people sensitive to Covid to at least 25%, and preferably even more. And then the epidemic will die out, because the virus will have nowhere to be transmitted,” Netesov concluded.
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