Earlier this week, the New York Times wrote an article with the headline, “Here’s Why Vaccinated People Still Need to Wear a Mask.” The short explanation is that the vaccines help gear a person’s immune system to fight off SARS-CoV-2 within the body, but while a person’s antibodies are fighting it off, significant amounts of the virus can take root and replicate in the nasal passages, without the person getting sick. The vaccinated person can then exhale or sneeze the virus, while not realizing he’s infected.
Because the vaccines are new, medical researchers aren’t certain how quickly people’s bodies will fight off the virus. They’ll stop you from dying or getting sick, but it may take a while for the body to make their nasal passages no longer virally infected.
Or maybe not:
“Preventing severe disease is easiest, preventing mild disease is harder, and preventing all infections is the hardest,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona. “If it’s 95 percent effective at preventing symptomatic disease, it’s going to be something less than that in preventing all infections, for sure.”
Still, he and other experts said they were optimistic that the vaccines would suppress the virus enough even in the nose and throat to prevent immunized people from spreading it to others.
“My feeling is that once you develop some form of immunity with the vaccine, your ability to get infected will also go down,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. “Even if you’re infected, the level of virus that you replicate in your nose should be reduced.”
The article goes on to state, “only people who have virus teeming in their nose and throat would be expected to transmit the virus, and the lack of symptoms in the immunized people who became infected suggests that the vaccine may have kept the virus levels in check.” Based upon that, you would think that immunized people would be at low risk of spreading the virus to others . . . and thus, those people wouldn’t need to wear a mask.
Whatever the researchers conclude, it is likely that a lot of vaccinated people will not wear a mask. People are tired of wearing them, tired of arguing about them, and tired of fighting about them.