Kenai Peninsula Borough Emergency Manager, Dan Nelson hosted an interactive Zoom discussion Tuesday evening with Alaska Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Anne Zink. The question and answer portion lasted for 45 minutes discussing COVID-19 and getting vaccinated.
Zink answered a common question on everyone’s mind, is the vaccine safe? “There’s always this ongoing monitoring that happens with any sort of vaccine either a full vaccine or this EUA process, but they just went through with this EUA approval with the most important two questions – is it safe and does it prevent people dying? The answer to both of questions was yes and as a result it got the EUA approval. We have had almost 100 million people vaccinated in the United States as a whole. We have not had anyone who death has been attributed to the vaccine. As a result, I feel very grateful that we’ve got, a year into this, three vaccines that are safe and they’re efficacious. They’re our ticket out of this pandemic. I honestly did not think would be this far ahead this quickly. These vaccines were better than we expected that they were incredibly safe and were amazingly good at preventing severe illness and death and even symptomatic and asymptomatic infection.”
Zink states that you should ask your medical doctor if you have specific questions regarding your medical history for getting vaccinated. She also says that an area of pause is if you have any sort of reaction from injectable medicine.
Dr. Zink says that science recommends wearing a facemask in public, “There’s been a lot of studies on this. It’s non pharmaceutical. It’s something you can make yourself. It needs to be well woven, at least a couple of layers and it needs to fit well. There has been an impressive body of literature that has come out since to be able to look for. People do cherry pick studies and they say ‘well how about this one from back then’ or ‘how about this time when everyone was in lockdown and it didn’t help’? I would say that if everyone was in their house, that’s going to be more effective than a mask when everyone’s together. There are ways that people can cherry pick the studies, but the overwhelming body of evidence shows that masks are a very useful tool at slowing the spread of this disease.”
Watch the entire conversation below:
For more information or to register and sign up for a vaccination appointment, visit covidvax.alaska.gov. If you need assistance by phone, call 907-646-3322.