“I am personally convinced” of the opportunity “of the vaccination obligation, because it is a duty that we all have towards the community”. Sergio Abrignani, immunologist of the State University of Milan and member of the Technical Scientific Committee for the Covid-19 emergency, reiterates his position, who spoke at ‘Agorà’ on Rai3.
“When I hear that there are 10-11% of people who do not want to be vaccinated and 7-8% who probably will not get vaccinated”, it means that “overall 18% of Italians” will not protect themselves. So “there are 10 million who do not want to be vaccinated – the expert calculates – plus those who for health reasons will not respond to the vaccine, which are about half a million”. With these numbers “we will allow the virus to circulate again and this – he warns – is not a small problem”.
“We are allowing ourselves all these reopenings because the risk analysis has worked. With vaccinations behind us, of course, which have acted as a central factor of mitigation”, said Abrignani who shows “the optimism of those who know the data, of those who look at them and who have seen how all that in the last month, month and a half all the data are going towards a strong reduction of the pandemic “.
The decisive impact of vaccinations, he points out, has been “and we knew it” on the basis of “everything that has already happened in Britain and Israel. It is no surprise that there is such a strong reduction in the pandemic when we have well over a third of vaccinated Italians “, observes Abrignani. “Obviously – he warns – all this must be monitored”.
“It is true that 20-30 year olds never get sick, which is a very rare event, almost to be published when it happens”, but “this is not the problem”, Abrignani reasons. The question, he points out, is that “if the virus continues to circulate in these people symptomatically, they can infect the frail who have not responded to the vaccine and it can be a grandfather, a father on chemotherapy, because we remember that people on chemotherapy – and there are many – they respond very badly to vaccines “.
Or, “and this is even more worrying”, the unvaccinated “can also be the reservoir of new variants. Because the more the virus replicates, the more it changes – warns the expert – And the more it changes, the more it risks to guess those mutations that make “a variant maybe” more widespread, more lethal and above all resistant to the vaccines currently in use. And give and give and give, by dint of making variants, some will develop that escape the vaccine. It’s true that we can correct the available products in a short time, but if it is possible to avoid it, it is better “.
To those who argue that the best way to go is to inform to make all citizens aware of the importance of getting vaccinated, the CTS immunologist points out that “we may not even have time to convince people. In Italy we had 126 thousand deaths in 14-15 months. I understand the belief approach when it comes to vaccines against diseases with a dozen deaths a year, even if I would be obliged anyway. But when faced with a virus like Sars-CoV-2 no: if we leave tens of millions of people in Italy unvaccinated, and hundreds of millions or billions in the world, the virus continues to circulate among them and could find a variant that at that point risks behaving like the Spanish, which did not only kill those over 60, but he killed from zero to 100. Why – asks Abrignani – give this chance to a virus that has confronted us with our frailty? “.
Abrignani insists on the safety of Covid-19 vaccines. “In the world, 1 billion and 600 million people have now been administered, and the only vaccines that have had problems” albeit very rare – there is talk of “one case in 300 thousand”, notes the CTS immunologist – “were the adenovirals. The mRna vaccines, with which we vaccinated half of this one billion and 600 million people, had no problems other than some small side effect at the beginning, of fever in a few individuals, no deaths and no severe event “.
The anti-Covid vaccines are “life-saving vaccines – insists the specialist – for which the benefit is immensely in favor of the risk”.