How Often Do We Have to Get Covid to Stop Getting Covid?
Bloomberg
In October 2020, a few weeks before the experimental trial results for the BioNTech-Pfizer, Moderna and Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines were released, German virologist Christian Drosten cautioned that the shots would be of limited effectiveness in preventing the spread of the disease.
“We are dealing here with an infection of the mucous membrane, i.e., in the nose and the throat and then later the lungs,” he said on Episode 62 of Das Coronavirus-Update, the podcast launched by broadcaster NDR in March 2020 that helped make Drosten a household name in Germany. “The mucous membranes already have their own special local immune system. With the current vaccines, which are more likely to be injected into the muscle, you don’t reach this local immune system so well.” As a result, the vaccines “probably protect more against the severe course [of the disease] than against infection.”
Which is of course exactly how things played out. The vaccines have been spectacularly effective at preventing severe disease and death, much less so at preventing transmission.
Drosten has been described in the U.S. media as “Germany’s Fauci,” but the moniker seems a little unfair. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci was a top researcher in his day, but has been running a sizable government agency (fiscal year 2021 budget, $6 billion) for the past 38 years. His appearances in the media during the pandemic have mostly involved reciting the public-health consensus of the moment, which was useful when the U.S. president was a font of Covid-19 misinformation but not always especially enlightening. Drosten, director of the Institute of Virology at Berlin’s Charité medical school, is perhaps the world’s leading coronavirus expert, responsible for identifying the original severe acute respiratory syndrome virus in 2003 and devising the first diagnostic test for the Covid-causing SARS-CoV-2 virus in January 2020. His public commentary, delivered chiefly in podcast form after he grew frustrated dealing with some in the German media, has tended toward the cutting-edge and forward-looking — as indicated by what he was saying about vaccines in October 2020.
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