EXCERPT:
HOTEZ: “Well, the answer for the next few months is you’re not going to have much of a choice. You pretty much have to take what’s offered to you. And that’s okay because all of these vaccines, again, work by the same mechanism, they all induce those virus-neutralizing antibodies. That's what's going to keep you out of the hospital and the intensive care. And remember, one of the issues with the emergency use authorization rather than a full approval process, in the full approval process you wait at least a year to see how durable the protection is, how long it lasts and if there are any other long-term safety issues. We won’t have that because the emergency use authorization is trying to save lives now. Because if we wait a full year, you do the math, if you’re getting 2,000 to 3,000 deaths per day, the death toll would just be staggering. So, we don’t know how durable the protection is going to be. You know, with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine, is the protection going to last three months, three years, 30 years? We won’t know but it okay. Get the vaccine, get those virus-neutralizing antibodies in your system, and if it later turns out I'd need a boost later on, that’s okay, or a boost with a same vaccine or a different vaccine. All this is going to have to be worked out in the course of 2021 and into 2022, but get what you can now."