With studies currently being conducted for those ages 12-15, Owensboro Health Vice President of Medical Affairs Michael Kelley said vaccinating the younger generation would be crucial in achieving herd immunity — adding that initial studies showed the Pfizer vaccine to be 100% effective in preventing the virus for that age group.
Kelley addressed the topic Tuesday during a Facebook Live session with Daviess County Judge-Executive Al Mattingly.
Kelley said emergency use authorization was “likely” coming soon for the 12-15 age group. After that, studies would be focused on an even younger age range.
“That’s going to be the next group — that’s 20% of our population,” Kelley said of ages 12-15. “So when we get into this talk about herd immunity, about vaccinating a certain percentage of our population so that this disease goes from being a pandemic to an endemic where there’s only spot cases … getting that 20% vaccinated will become important.”
Kelley said he hears a lot about the vaccination not preventing asymptomatic infections and spread, but he said the vaccinations provided far more protection than most people realized.
“It wasn’t studied [to determine whether vaccines prevent asymptomatic infections and spread], but a lot of the evidence — when they checked antibodies and other things through the study — they noticed that more people in the placebo that didn’t get a vaccine had more asymptomatic infections or low-grade infections versus people who got vaccinated,” he said.
Another reason to get vaccinated, Kelley said, was that “it prevents you from getting severe disease, hospitalized, ventilated and dying, first of all. The second thing is, you gotta look out for your fellow person.”
Though some people have questioned the need for a vaccine for the younger generation — namely because the majority of them don’t get very sick — Kelley argued against that it’s still important to protect everyone.
“There are still a number of kids who get very sick and die,” he said. “It’s a much smaller percentage, thank God, but it does exist. We have to look at how to vaccinate as a community, as a whole, as a civilization to be able to protect everybody.”
Mattingly noted there were many people who believed the vaccine had been studied, approved and manufactured too quickly. To that, Kelley said there were a couple of things that he’d noticed people getting worried about, including the myth that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines changed a person’s DNA.
“The mRNA technology that was used for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines has been around for a long time,” he said. “The idea behind it is complicated and simplistic all at once.”
A piece of benign code is injected into the deltoid, where certain cells in the body recognize it and absorb it. It’s then transcribed into a piece of benign code that mimics the virus, Kelley said.
“In doing that, that piece is actually degraded very quickly in the cell and goes away,” he said. “It never goes into the nucleus, where the DNA is, so it’s not a part of your genome. It presents on the surface of that cell and creates an immune response that says, ‘I don’t recognize this benign fragment’ that looks like the virus. So it tricks your body in some ways to generate that immune response.”
The actual spiked protein on the cell goes away eventually as well, Kelley added.
Kelley also said he was “very comfortable” with the speed at which the vaccines were produced.
“I’m excited about what MrNA may be able to do for other diseases as we move forward as well,” he said.
Kelley said he was also excited to be in a place where the supply of the vaccine was outweighing the demand, adding that this was an opportunity to educate people about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, as well as the need for herd immunity.
“The benefit of getting vaccinated far outweighs the risk,” he said. “Even with the risk you’re seeing out there today [with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine], there’s a one in a million chance. You’re more likely to get anaphylaxis with a penicillin shot than with this. … I am not concerned with the speed at which this vaccine rolled out.”
