COVID five years in

The COVID pandemic in the US began five years ago. It wasn’t declared a pandemic then, but in retrospect, that’s when it began. 

My university has an NIH-designated vaccine testing and evaluation unit. In late January 2020, I attended a lecture by the clinical director about the recently named SARS-CoV-2. That was the first time it really came home to me that this could be more serious than the usual flu season. 

Even then, there were skeptics. The Israeli chemistry Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt pooh-poohed the virus. He predicted there would be no more than ten deaths in Israel due to COVID-19. In the event, he was off by two logs. I bet my chairman a bottle of scotch whiskey that the peak in COVID infections and deaths in the US would come after April 22. He lost and he paid up.

Our VTEU was a site for the phase III trial of the Moderna vaccine, and I enrolled. As I had just turned 65, they were happy to have me. It was a placebo-controlled double-blind study, so I didn’t know if I’d get the vaccine in August or the placebo. But 12 hours after the second jab, I knew I was in the vaccine arm: headache, muscle ache and mild fever that resolved within a day. I did arrange clandestinely to break the blind and be tested. The secret tests confirmed that I had a high titer of spike antibody but no detectable nucleocapsid antibody, so it was the vaccine and not an infection. Six months later, they unblinded us and confirmed what I already knew.

I’ve had the Moderna shot five times since those first two injections, and never had anything worse than a soreness at the injection site for a couple days. And that’s been the experience of tens of millions who have gotten either the Moderna or Pfizer mRNA vaccines. All the people who, like RFK Jr, claim the COVID vaccines are dangerous are just lying.

I did get a COVID infection once, about three and a half years in, and it was like a really mild case of the flu. The vaccine doesn’t keep you from getting COVID, but it keeps you out of the ED and the morgue and reduces your ability to infect others. 

In vaccinated populations, the viral burden is lower, which means the frequency of new variants emerging is lower. So there is a public health benefit to vaccination, as well as a personal benefit.

Stay up-to-date with your COVID boosters. Ignore anti-vaxxer cranks like RFK Jr. Stay healthy.

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