In an interview with independent journalist Sharyl Attkisson, virologist Dr. John Dye said experts have no clear idea how long the COVID vaccine will protect recipients. He stressed it was almost certain that “booster shots” would be required.
Dr. Dye, Chief of Viral Immunology at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, sat down with Attkisson to answer questions regarding the vaccine. Some have welcomed the vaccine as a way to return to “normalcy,” while others are rejecting it as a huge unknown and a step down a path that will destroy longstanding freedoms and rights perhaps forever.
“Scientists don’t know how long the vaccines confer immunity. For most individuals, it could be a matter of six months to a year, or perhaps as many as five years,” said Dye.
Attkisson asked many pertinent questions, including how long the vaccines were expected to confer immunity, how fast immunity would develop after vaccination, what differences were there between an mRNA vaccine and more traditional vaccines, and whether the current vaccines work on variants already present around the world or on different, future strains.
During the interview, Nye defended the speed of bringing a novel vaccine technology to the masses. He asserted that processes that normally occur sequentially due to money constraints were being conducted “in parallel” thanks to a huge infusion of money and manpower to speed up the timetable. What otherwise might take five to ten years for a ready-for-the-public vaccine was achieved in under a year.
Dye acknowledged that more data is coming in from wide implementation efforts, and efficacy rates of the COVID vaccines originally reported in test trials will be updated and may well end up lower than those trials indicated.
