Valeriu Gheorghita has a very important warning for millions of Romanians all over the country, and this is because the delta variant of the Coronavirus, the Indian one, is starting to spread more and more in Great Britain, a country with 80% of the eligible vaccinated population.
Valeriu Gheorghita says that there the virus spreads among those who have not been vaccinated, or have only one dose of vaccine, saying that it is essential that Romanians complete the vaccination schedule to benefit from protection against this dangerous variant.
"So yes, it depends on us what will be the amplitude of the next wave of illnesses, how many deaths we will have and what will be the pressure on hospitals. I don't think anyone wants us to have people dying from a vaccine preventable disease anymore. That is the reality and all the data shows us that we have very good control from an epidemiological point of view where the vaccination coverage rate has been very good and here are some very telling examples from countries that have had good vaccination coverage.
And what is happening today in Great Britain, where more than 80% of eligible adults have received at least one dose of the vaccine, shows us, on the one hand, that most cases of illness with the Delta strain are in unvaccinated people, and the cases that occur in vaccinated people, the vast majority of them are in people who have had only one dose. So, I repeat, it is important to complete the vaccination schedule. Also, there are data that appear along the way that relate to the level of immunity obtained through the natural disease and the duration of immunity.
We already see that we have data that shows us a maintenance of the immune response after natural infection, somewhere up to 12 months, up to a year, which may epidemiologically create a temporary barrier against the spread of SARS-COV- infection 2; however, as I said before, the immunity obtained through the natural disease is not sufficiently protective against the risk of re-infection with new mutant viral variants, and here I mean the South African variant, the Indian variant, but also the others, and also , people who experienced natural infection with SARS-COV-2 had a significant increase in antibody levels after vaccination.
So it is important to vaccinate even if we have gone through the natural infection, precisely because in this way we are much better protected against infection with the new viral variants, which, as I said, unfortunately, it seems that they will get a greater extent in the next period. But it is up to us how well we will be immunized in terms of herd immunity."
