Hansen CH, Michlmayr D, Gubbels SM Assessment of protection against reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 among 4 million PCR-tested individuals in Denmark in 2020: a population-level observational study. Lancet. 2021; https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)00575-4
All healthcare workers, including dental professionals are foot soldiers in the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, in the USA, dental practitioners and dental students are now recruited to deliver COVID-19 vaccines to the general population to expedite vaccine uptake, and rapidly suppress the pandemic. There are many unknowns in the evolving COVID-19 vaccine story, although we now see the true situation in a better light, with the rapid emergence of data from numerous countries, including UK, where the vaccine has currently been administered to millions. The situation is further compounded by the reported vagaries of the increasing number of brand-name vaccines, manufactured on both the new and old vaccine platforms, the purported or real, vaccine adverse effects, the emergence of possible vaccine-resistant viral variants, and the resultant low vaccine uptake due to vacillating public opinion. In this COVID-19 Commentary, we provide an update on the efficacy of the vaccines and the prevalence of adverse effects, as well as a summary of useful information for dental care workers on vaccine protocols appertaining to special situations, as promulgated both by the UK Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, and the US Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
Article
March 11 2020 will go down in the annals of human history as a day of reckoning. On that day, confronted with an uncontrollably raging novel viral infection sweeping across the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) as a pandemic.1 Since then, the infection has spared virtually no country, claiming over 121 million lives globally and killing over 2.6 million in total.2 A small piece of RNA has indelibly changed human history.
The global research community, at the time, predicted that it may take at least a year or more before an effective vaccine would be found for the disease, because no vaccine for an infectious disease has ever been invented within a year of the infection's arrival, and only a sceptic would have dared to suggest that an efficacious COVID-19 vaccine would be discovered, evaluated and administered within 9 months. Nevertheless, due to the remarkable ingenuity of humankind and the recent, explosive technological advances, both in molecular biology and industrial automation, there are currently at least 13 COVID-19 vaccines approved for early or limited use, and a further 27 are in large scale, Phase III, final trials (as of 18 March 2021).2,3
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