Thoughts for the Vaccine-Hesitant
At a recent session, my patient explained why she had not yet gotten the COVID-19 vaccine. Due to her experience of the modern medical system, she was skeptical of it and viewed it as "unnatural”.
While it’s true that conventional medicine doesn’t always put patient care at its center and can sometimes miss the big picture, let's not throw the baby out with the bath water . . . At Double Happiness Health, we’re proud to offer traditional treatments like acupuncture, herbs and ancestral nutrition. But we also recognize that modern medicine has a lot to offer. Here are some things that Western medicine does really well:
- Lab testing
- Physical therapy
- Imaging like MRI and CT scans
- Emergency medicine (Whoa! Big one!)
We encourage our patients to take advantage of all the resources available to them when it comes to their health. So, as an integrative, traditional medicine practitioner, let me address some concerns that I've heard from the vaccine-hesitant folks I've talked with.
I'm worried the vaccine is too new and the creation of it was rushed.
While it is true that the COVID-19 vaccines were created and approved at an unprecedented pace, quality science was not sacrificed. The vaccines represent a herculean effort on the part of a world-wide scientific community, working together (3). The federal government streamlined the process not by skipping any steps in the traditional vaccine creation process, but by allowing steps to overlap. The FDA allowed drug companies to begin to manufacture the vaccines while they completed the clinical trials. This meant that once the trials were finished, the vaccines were quickly available to the public (2). The clinical trials of the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines included over 73,000 people (8). And while these are the first mRNA vaccines to be widely used, mRNA vaccines aren't new. They have been researched since the 1990s and mRNA vaccines have been tested on humans for rabies, influenza, cytomegalovirus and Zika (4).
2. I'll just wait until it's been around longer. There's no urgency for me to get it.
Mmm . . . maybe think again on this one. With the rise of the Delta variant, it looks like we are at the start of a third wave in the US. Daily cases are averaging nearly 150,000 in the U.S. Delta makes up more than 93% of new COVID cases and is 60% more contagious than the Alpha strain. About 90% of new cases are among the unvaccinated. And while break-through cases happen (the vaccines are not 100% effective), vaccinated people weather Delta much better with mild or no symptoms (7). The vast majority of those who are hospitalized and dying of COVID right now are the unvaccinated.
3. You're a Chinese medicine practitioner--isn't Chinese medicine against vaccines?
The Chinese actually pioneered the technique of inoculation against the disease of smallpox. They discovered that taking scabs from smallpox sores, powdering them and blowing this up the nose of the person to be inoculated (lovely!) provided immunity from serious illness. By the 17th century, the Emperor bragged that his entire family and army had been inoculated in this way, but the practice likely started way back in 200 BC (1) (5).
Chinese medicine practitioners conceptualize the body's immune system as having several layers, with the most superficial defense circulating just outside the body on the skin and entering the mucosa of the respiratory tract. The deepest level of immunity runs in the bloodstream. When it comes to vaccines, some Chinese medicine doctors are wary of injecting a pathogen intramuscularly--into a deeper layer of the body. An inhaled vaccine would be ideal! But let us remember that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines don't contain the virus itself. They work by introducing an mRNA message destined for your body's immune cells. This message is like a primer on how to defeat COVID-19 should your immune system later encounter the spike protein characteristic of the virus. Side effects from the vaccine like fever, chills and headache are normal and show that your immune system is doing exactly what it should. I believe that our bodies can handle the vaccine with no long-term detriment, especially when supported by proper hydration, rest, plus acupuncture and herbal medicine if possible.
4. I'm healthy so I don't need the vaccine. I think I would fare well with a COVID-19 infection. My best protection is just keeping my immune system strong and staying healthy.
If you're healthy, that's fantastic. However, keep in mind that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 is a novel virus for humans. This means that your immune system has never encountered it and therefore is very vulnerable to it. When a virus invades our system, the immune system searches a catalog of immune memory cells to get a heads-up on how to disarm this particular bad guy. If you are unvaccinated, your body has zero memory cells for SARS-CoV-2. It will take much longer for an unvaccinated body to come up with a strategy to successfully defeat the virus than for a vaccinated one. If vaccinated, your immune system already has a cheat sheet on how to best stop the virus from replicating and wreaking havoc on your tissues. This is why most vaccinated folks don’t get sick when exposed to SARS-CoV-2 and if they do, it's a mild illness (6). And if you’ve learned at all about long COVID--where the body has difficulty recovering from a COVID infection and symptoms persist for several weeks, months or more--then you know you don’t want to spin the wheel of fortune on this one.
If you’d like to talk one-on-one with a Double Happiness Health practitioner about your case in particular, come in for a session with us!
SOURCES
(1) Boylston, Arthur. “The Origins of Inoculation.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine vol. 105,7 (2012): 309-13. doi:10.1258/jrsm.2012.12k044.
(2) "COVID-19 Vaccine Questions and Answers." Niaid.nih.gov, 14 Jan. 2021, www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/covid-19-vaccine-faq. Accessed 22 Aug. 2021.
(3) "COVID Has Shown the Power of Science–Industry Collaboration." www.nature.com, 16 June 2021,www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01580-0. Accessed 22 Aug. 2021.
(4) Fiore, Kristina. "Want to Know More About mRNA Before Your COVID Jab? — A Primer on the History, Scope, and Safety of mRNA Vaccines and Therapeutics." Medpagetoday.com, www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/89998. Accessed 3 Dec. 2020.
(5) "History of Vaccines." Smithsonian National Museum of American History, amhistory.si.edu/polio/virusvaccine/history.htm. Accessed 22 Aug. 2021.
(6) Katella, Kathy. "Comparing the COVID-19 Vaccines: How Are They Different?" YaleMedicine.org, 13 Aug. 2021, www.yalemedicine.org/news/covid-19-vaccine-comparison. Accessed 22 Aug. 2021.
(7) Mishra, Sanjay. "Why is Delta more infectious and deadly? New Research Holds Answers." Nationalgeographic.com, 2021. Accessed 22 Aug. 2021.
(8) "Pfizer and Modern COVID Vaccines 95% Effective in Clinical Trials." www.pbs.org, 18 Nov. 2020, www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/pfizer-moderna-covid-vaccines-clinical-trials/. Accessed 22 Aug. 2021.