A doctor does not understand why many people, especially young people, are still resistant to receiving their COVID-19 vaccine as the Delta variant spreads around the world.
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The contagiousness of the Delta variant should convince people to get vaccinated, he believes, because “100% of unvaccinated people will get it,” says Dr Élie Haddad, head of the pediatric immunology and rheumatology department at the CHU Sainte-Justine interviewed at LCN.
To those afraid of messenger RNA vaccines, Dr Haddad replies that the virus contains much more RNA than the vaccine.
“The vaccine contains RNA, an RNA which is the virus, while the virus contains about fifty of them, RNA. So people who are afraid of the vaccine, since they don’t get vaccinated, they will catch the virus, they will get even more RNA, ”he explains.
He adds that the fear of RNA “does not make sense”.
“To be afraid of RNA per se makes no sense. It doesn’t make sense to be afraid of this RNA either because if we don’t get vaccinated, we will catch it because of the contagiousness. And when you catch it, in the majority of cases it’s fine, but in the minority of cases it can have serious forms, ”says the doctor.
Dr Haddad is particularly keen to send a message to young people who believe that they do not need to be vaccinated because they will not develop severe forms of COVID-19.
“If we don’t get vaccinated, we’ll catch it and when we catch it, don’t think it’s that simple. There are serious forms, there are long forms of COVID, there are pulmonary complications that we have not yet understood, there will be more and more of them, ”he warns.
The doctor at Sainte-Justine Hospital also mentions that people will have similar symptoms in reaction to the vaccine as those they would have had in reaction to the virus.
“People have to stop believing themselves to be invincible and above all, if the virus does nothing to them, the vaccine will do nothing to them,” says Dr Haddad.
If many people are of the opinion that they do not need to be vaccinated because the province will achieve collective immunity, Dr. Élie Haddad adds a caveat.
“The more contagious a virus, the greater the percentage of patients to achieve group immunity must be. With something very contagious, 95% of people would need to have caught it. So the more contagious it is, the more it is necessary to be vaccinated, in fact, and we have changed the paradigm with this new variant, ”notes the doctor.
The more people get vaccinated, the less likely you are to see new variants appear, he also says.
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