Time.news – “The transmissibility of the Delta variant is much more efficient than the other variants and the viral load in the upper airways of infected people is up to a thousand times higher than other variants such as Alpha. In the United States this has led to a decline in efficacy vaccines against severe forms of the disease with consequent hospitalizations, which is 91 to 81% for Moderna and 85 to 75% for Pfizer “. While the debate on the third dose is ignited in Italy, its usefulness, at least for the elderly and the frail, does not seem to be questioned by the data exposed by the immunologist and scientific advisor of the White House, Anthony Fauci, at the Florence Congress of hospital internists di Fadoi, which awarded him the “Internal Medicine Research Award 2021”.
Upon delivery Fauci then expressed “respect and gratitude to the Fadoi doctors for their dedication to patients during the pandemic and their simply fantastic competence”. The effectiveness of the third dose is demonstrated by the Israeli experience condensed by Fauci in other, significant numbers: “15 days after the administration of the third dose of the Moderna vaccine compared to more variants we can see a 23-fold increase in protection compared to the D614G mutation ( the first significant compared to the original Wuhan strain, ed), 32 times compared to the B.1.351 mutation (called South African) and finally 44 times compared to the P.1 mutation (called Brazilian). Data similar to those detected for the Pfizer booster and indiscriminately in young and old, in which there have been drastic increases in antibody levels and protection relative to severe forms of disease and infections “.
It is also on the basis of these numbers that, as recalled by the immunologist himself, the American FDA recently authorized the booster dose of Pfizer vaccine for people aged 65 and over and those aged 18 and over with high risk of developing a severe form of Covid-19 infection, or for people at risk. Fauci then wanted to reassure the vaccines “people sometimes worried that only 11 months have passed from the sequencing of the virus to the time of the first administrations”. “But the speed and efficiency with which these vaccines capable of saving millions of lives have been developed – he explained – are actually due to an extraordinary multidisciplinary effort, which involved basic preclinical and clinical science, act out of the spotlight for decades, before the Covid-19 pandemic “.
Fauci then turned on the headlights on another problem, that of the Long Covid. “There are also post Covid-19 conditions that can be explained by the residual dysfunction of the organs, due to damage, such as lung damage, which leads to abnormal function. However, about 15 to 30% of individuals have a persistence of signs and symptoms, from weeks to months, which are not fully explainable.Some of those reported as Long Covid are extreme fatigue, sometimes debilitating, unexplained shortness of breath, muscle aches, dysautonomia (malfunction of the nervous system, ed) characterized by sudden changes in temperature and unexplained tachycardia, sleep disturbances, depression and anxiety, and a very curious condition called ‘brain fog’, which causes people to find it difficult to focus or concentrate their thoughts “.
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