COVID AND THE VACCINE - TRUTH, LIES, AND MISCONCEPTIONS REVEALED, page-1234

I have been seeing a lot of posts on social media these days disparaging the utility of the COVID-19 vaccines. They attempt to poke holes in the logic of these inoculations with innocuous sounding questions: After the shot, can you still get COVID-19? Can you still pass the virus? Do you still need to wear a mask and socially distance?

The answers are yes, yes and yes, but these questions are not justifications for not getting the vaccines. That is faulty reasoning. Especially now that the Food and Drug Administration has authorized the Johnson & Johnson one-shot vaccine, we need to fight disinformation campaigns and change our message. Widespread use of the vaccine is the best way to stop this pandemic, save lives, and return to normalcy.

If our everyday lives cannot change immediately after the shots, why take them? The answer lies in their ability to stop severe COVID-19 infections that lead to hospitalization and death. In fact, the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine was 100% protective in preventing either of these two outcomes, in a disease that has claimed half-a-million lives and counting.

A modern scientific miracle in Israel

The Moderna and Pfizer BioNTech vaccines were also protective in trials and have proven their worth in widespread use. The latter led to a 92% decrease in hospitalizations in Israel after wide rollout. This is astounding and nothing short of a modern scientific miracle.

And this is the message that we should spread throughout the nation. These vaccines save lives. Period. To be sure, the pandemic seems to be dying down, but it was only two months ago that, as an internal medicine doctor, I was seeing my hospital wards filled with people — old and young alike — gasping for air from COVID-19.