What we’re not telling the public when they get the vaccine

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If we do not tell our patients about how the vaccine works and when the protective effects are expected to kick in, some people are going to feel betrayed when they get sick following vaccination. Getty Images

 

(Jeremy Faust/ New York Magazine) — Once the size of the COVID-19 crisis was clear, and the obvious measures we could take to stop it politicized, I became convinced that vaccines alone were our best path out of this hellscape. The obligatory selfies posted by my fellow frontline health-care providers getting their shots were a good start. While most of my physician colleagues were clamoring to be vaccinated, many of our other colleagues were less enthusiastic.

All of this, I figured, could be addressed with better messaging and a little educational outreach. That is, until I heard about a physician who got her vaccine and the coronavirus itself in the span of a few days. Now, with access to vaccines expanding to the general public, we will need to go to greater lengths to make sure that benign coincidences like this don’t get interpreted and repackaged as something more nefarious than they are. (…)

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