Today’s government figures for the first dose stand at just under 21 million, and the more that people are vaccinated, the clearer it is becoming that this vaccine is no more harmful than the flu jab.
Around one in ten people experience flu-like symptoms such as lethargy, headache, and a temperature, but these are short-lived and most only report having some pain at the injection site.
This is according to the UK government’s yellow card scheme, which keeps track of any symptoms people face after getting the vaccine.
In other good news the “R” number is now under 1.0 again and may be as low as 0.6, meaning that for every ten people who are infected they will spread the virus to as few as six others.
The graphs on this page of official stats also show that the numbers in all of the following categories are dropping sharply overall: people testing positive; people being admitted to hospital; people dying within 28 days of a positive test.
All of these graphs begin to drop around January 20th, around six weeks after the first vaccine was administered in the UK, on December 6th, suggesting that the vaccination has a role to play in saving lives and reducing transmission.
However, many people are hesitant to trust a vaccine that was developed so quickly when the standard is usually closer to ten years. But as the world didn’t have ten years, more money and more time was spent on vaccine development more quickly, until the time came that the UK was able to grant emergency-use authorisation to a vaccine from drug firms Pfizer and BioNTech on December 2nd.
Although this was only seven months after the start of clinical trials, those clinical trials cut no legal corners and in Pfizer’s case involved over 42,000 people.
We can only hope that – if the “R” number continues to decrease, and more importantly the mortality rate goes down – the vaccine wins the trust of more people.
