Consider This from NPR - The CDC's New Mask Guidance, Explained, And A Look At How Long Vaccines Protect Us

Episode Date: April 28, 2021

Fully vaccinated people can ditch the mask outdoors, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this week — unless they're at a crowded event. Dr. Anthony Fauci explains the new guidance to NPR and weighs in on how soon children under 16 might be eligible for vaccines. NPR's Joe Palca reports on the scientific effort to learn more about how long vaccines protect us. Additional reporting in this episode from NPR's Allison Aubrey. In participating regions, you'll also hear from local journalists about what's happening in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu forward. It's time to lose the mask outside. If you are fully vaccinated and want to attend a small outdoor gathering with people who are vaccinated and unvaccinated, or dine at an outdoor restaurant with friends from multiple households, the science shows if you are vaccinated, you can do so safely unmasked. Fully vaccinated means two weeks past your second shot, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said on Tuesday, or two weeks after your single shot of J&J.

Today is another day we can take a step back to the normalcy of before. Of course, in many places, Americans have already taken that step, indoors and out. In almost half the country, there's no statewide mask mandate right now. And yet, even with more transmissible variants circulating, new cases in the U.S. have fallen 21 percent in recent days. An average of 650 people each day are dying from the virus, a number that represents a tragic loss of life. But that is thankfully far lower than it's been in months. Each day, more and more Americans are rolling up their sleeves and getting vaccinated and likely contributing to these very positive trends.

The vaccines aren't perfect. And with only 30% of U.S. adults fully immunized, the recommendation is still for people to wear masks indoors and in crowded outdoor places like a concert or a baseball game. As we get more and more people vaccinated and the level of infection gets lower and lower, you're going to see more flexibility in what people who are vaccinated can do. Dr. Anthony Fauci spoke to NPR on Tuesday. And hopefully that will encourage more people

to get vaccinated so that they can have this flexibility. Consider this. Scientists are doing all they can to learn more about how long vaccine protection lasts. Plus, we'll have more from Anthony Fauci about just how safe it is to be outside. From NPR, I'm Adi Cornish. It's Wednesday, April 28th. Immune Support Tea, a spicy sweet herbal tea blended with Ayurvedic herbs like elderberry and echinacea to help support immune function. Find your flow with Yogi Tea. I'm Yoé Shaw. I'm Kia Miyakunatis. We're the hosts of the NPR podcast, Invisibilia.

You can think of Invisibilia kind of like a sonic blacklight. When you switch us on, you will hear surprising and intimate stories. Stories that help you notice things in your world that maybe you didn't see before. Listen to the Invisibilia podcast from NPR. It's Consider This from NPR. In a recent study out of China, scientists dug into thousands of coronavirus cases to figure out how people got infected. They did really careful contact tracing out of 7,324 infections.

Only one they could even trace to outdoor transmission. That's Dr. Monica Gandhi of UC San Francisco. The risk of transmission is so much lower outside. That study contains the kind of data that has been steadily accumulating, making public health officials confident that being outdoors, with a constant circulation of air, is really pretty safe for vaccinated people. So for those who haven't gotten their vaccination yet,

especially if you're younger or think you don't need it, this is another great reason to go get vaccinated. Now. Now. President Biden, speaking on Tuesday, pressed young people specifically. Surveys have shown they are more likely to be hesitant about being vaccinated, which is why the Republican governor of West Virginia, Jim Justice, recently announced that anyone aged 16 to 35, they're not taking the vaccines as fast as we'd like them to take. We'll get a hundred dollar savings bond for being vaccinated. And I hope that you keep it for a long, long, long time because at this time you are stepping up to shut this thing down. Now one place where

the danger to young people is especially clear is Michigan, which is just coming down from a surge of infections driven by the more transmissible B.1.1.7 variant. At Sparrow Hospital in Lansing, a record 70 kids were admitted with COVID last week, including an infant just two months old. All the ones that are in peds ICU are needing respiratory support. They're on a ventilator, just like the adults are. Kathleen Marble runs pediatric nursing there. And there's still kids that come in that we find out they're COVID because we test them when they come into the hospital. And they're here for a broken leg. Or they're here because they were in an auto accident. And then we find out they're positive.

So they're not symptomatic. Kathleen Marble spoke to reporter Kate Wells of Michigan Radio. Asymptomatic young people are just one way the virus could continue to spread, even as vaccinations increase. Right now, vaccines are only authorized for people 16 and older. Dr. Anthony Fauci spoke to NPR this week about when that could change and about the CDC's new mask guidance. He spoke with Mary Louise Kelly. So this new guidance means we're going to get to see people's faces when we jog past them, when we bike past them. How are you going to interpret it? Will you be out there? I know you have a dog. Walk in the dog. No mask. example. So right now, my own personal thing is that I will be doing what the CDC is saying one

can do. If you're fully vaccinated and you're on a walk or a run or a bike, you can do that. And I'm going to be looking forward to doing that. You just called the risk minuscule. What do you say to people who are scared, who would argue variants are still spreading? Most of us are not fully vaccinated yet. Young kids can't get vaccinated. It's too soon. What do you say? No, I say get vaccinated.

That's the point. I mean, if you are vaccinated, then the risk, as I mentioned, is extremely low. And even when you're looking at the dominant variant that's going around, the B.1.1.7, that the vaccinated people and the antibodies that are elicited by the vaccine are really quite good and protective against the variant that's the B.1.1.7. So when people are really concerned, I think we need to be just make sure they get the information that they need. They get the data. And they get the vaccine. What about, I mentioned kids. What about if you cannot vaccinate? How are we doing on getting kids vaccinated? Well, we're making progress on that. There was a study from Pfizer that showed that children from 12 to 15, when vaccinated, are virtually 100% protected against being clinically infected.

So we anticipate that we'll be able to vaccinate high school kids as we get into the early fall term of this coming fall term. I was going to ask, so we're talking fall, not summer. And we hope that by the time we get to the end of this calendar year and very, very early part of the first quarter of 2022, we will be able to vaccinate children of any age. So that's certainly on the agenda to get done as soon as we possibly can. I heard your message loud and clear, which is get the vaccine. That has been the message consistently from public health officials these last few months. But a lot of people are not convinced.

They are still hesitant. How big a worry is that? And is that going to keep us from reaching herd immunity this summer, which I know is a goal you had been hoping we might get to? Yeah. You know, I hope not, Mary Louise, but what we're doing is that we have a system now called COVID-19 Community Corps, where we have literally thousands of trusted messengers that are respected by people in the community, people like sports figures, entertainment figures, and importantly, the clergy, who were giving enough information for them to go out and try and explain to people why it's so important to get vaccinated. So we are really pushing.

Dr. Anthony Fauci. One of the things scientists still don't know about vaccines is how long they protect us from COVID-19. Like, will we all need a booster shot at some point? And how about new shots to protect against new variants? Researchers are trying to come up with a way to answer those questions by inventing simple blood tests that can determine not only whether a vaccine will work, but for how long. NPR's Joe Palka has more. Researchers at the University of Oxford are conducting a study that at first blush may seem somewhat odd. They are deliberately exposing healthy young volunteers to the coronavirus, volunteers who have already had COVID-19 once. Helen McShane is the chief investigator for the project. The reason we're doing the study is that we expect to see some

level of protection against reinfection. The key question is how much and what kind of immune response correlates with that protection. Here's the logic. When you get infected with a virus, your immune system produces antibodies that target the virus and fight it off. If you recover from the viral infection, then the antibodies did their job. What McShane and her colleagues want to learn is what level of antibodies, something known as the antibody titer, what level of antibodies is enough to provide protection against future infection. It may be not possible to reinfect people with an antibody level above a certain amount. Measuring antibody levels is done with a blood test,

and answering that question should be a significant help in coping with the COVID pandemic. Because we can then use that level, that cutoff, if you like, to say, OK, anyone who has that level of antibodies, either induced by natural infection or by vaccination, is protected. Knowing that cutoff level, that cutoff titer, will be particularly useful for figuring out how long the protection afforded by a vaccine will last. Because we can say, hey, 18 months after you were vaccinated, you still have antibody titers that are within that range of protection. Chris Houchens is with the U.S. government's Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. Houchens says the antibody cutoff becomes what's called a correlate of protection. In this case, the levels of antibodies in the blood that will indicate whether a new

vaccine will work without having to test it in tens of thousands of volunteers. We're going to want to be able to use the correlates of protection to conduct smaller studies that are going to involve the enrollment of hundreds of patients rather than tens of thousands of patients. Houchens is involved in another effort to get at the antibody level needed to achieve protection. Researchers are comparing antibody levels in people who got the Moderna vaccine but still got COVID with levels in people who got the vaccine but didn't get sick. That's another way to find the level of antibodies needed for protection.

Unfortunately, Houchin says that approach is taking a while. Because the Moderna vaccine is so very effective, it's taken a very long time to collect enough samples from the vaccinated individuals who became infected. Hutchins says they now have enough of these so-called breakthrough infections. Peter Gilbert from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center is leading the data analysis team. He says he and his colleagues are loading the results into a database. And we'll be able to basically push the button, or actually Moderna will push the button as a partnership, and that'll produce statistical reports containing the correlates results. The correlates will show whether there is a specific antibody level that will let you say with confidence a new vaccine will work without testing it in tens of thousands of people. Everyone in the field is waiting for those results

to give more confidence in being able to approve other vaccines more quickly and more reliably. So we're getting close. I think we're almost there, actually. For vaccine developers, that day can't come soon enough. That's NPR's Joe Pelka. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish.