Permanent Secretary for Health, Doctor James Fong maintains that the COVID-19 vaccine protects against severe disease, hospitalisation and death, and only reduces transmission.
Following recent comments on whether herd immunity is workable, Doctor Fong says the important point is that vaccines prevent 90 percent of severe disease, but may be less effective at preventing infection or transmission.
He says in other words, vaccination is effective in preventing a person from getting the virus and they are effective in reducing onward transmission.
Doctor Fong says this means the unvaccinated have a higher chance of getting the virus, a higher chance of transmitting it to others and are less protected from severe COVID 19.
The Permanent Secretary says given the lower efficacy in reducing transmission, the vaccine is not a silver bullet, but to protect the community, the first step is the vaccine.
Doctor Fong says the vaccine will serve like road blocks that hampers and slows down the movement of the virus from one person to another.
He says then we have the “restrictions” or (hands, face and space COVID safe measures) and the workplace and social gathering COVID safe conditions.
Doctor Fong says this means that the virus will have limited space to move in the community.
He says the virus depends on moving from one human to another - break that and it just dies out in the community.
Doctor Fong says a community with plenty COVID “road blocks” is a community ready to contain the virus – the virus comes in, gets through a few persons in one locality and dies out.
543,296 eligible adults have received the first dose of the COVID vaccine in Fiji while 234,976 people are now fully vaccinated.
This means 92.6 percent of the eligible people have received the first dose while 40.1 percent of the people are fully vaccinated.
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