Guest Post: Do Everything You Van to Increase Your Odds Against COVID

This post is shared with permission from David Coutin, M.D. Dr. Coutin is a retired immunologist living in Bend, Oregon. He wrote this piece for The Bulletin in August 2021.

The human immune system is highly complex. Sometimes it takes many years of study to understand it. Given the heated discussion and misinformation surrounding how to approach the coronavirus pandemic, it is important for all of us to understand the basic concepts why recommendations are being made to you and why they change.

Alfred Einstein said, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” Indeed, God designed our immune system down to its most elemental level. It’s literally in our DNA, in our chromosome 6, which codes the surface proteins, which is how our immune system responds to foreign microbes and our own cells.

We all know stories about how Native Americans and Hawaiians, when confronted with viruses, were not able to mount immune responses to viruses and, unfortunately, died in large numbers. That is because their genes did not recognize those microbes. 

Similarly, autoimmune disease is genetic wherein our own immune cells accidentally attack our own cells due to exposure to microbes that share common surface proteins. Macrophages engulf foreign microbes based on surface proteins and present them to T cells — which present them to B cells, which produce antibodies, which attack the microbes. There are Memory B and T cells that are activated upon re-exposure but, with time, lose this ability. Also, age, diabetes, cancer, chemotherapy, steroids, autoimmune disease, immunodeficiency all negatively affect our immune responses and lead to more severe infection and death.

Many have concerns that the vaccine leads to autoimmune disease, but studies have shown that there is far more chance of that with natural infection.

The coronavirus is new, and we are only beginning to understand it. Science is not fixed in stone. It evolves with observation, experimentation and rational interpretation of the data.

One of medicine’s first mistakes was not to recommend masking for the public. That was done because there was a shortage, and they wanted to have an adequate supply for health care providers. Secondly, they should not have recommended cloth masks, but surgical masks at a minimum. Many studies have clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of masks. Now that N95 or K95 masks are abundantly available, they are reserved for contact with COVID-19. At the beginning of the pandemic, we did not know how fast or how lethal the variants of COVID-19 would evolve. The delta variant is 1,000 times stickier and more transmissible and can accumulate 1,000 times higher in our bodies.

People with waning antibody levels can be reinfected, but fortunately the majority of them do not need to be hospitalized as they have a milder course. Now you can understand the need for the vaccinated and unvaccinated to wear masks. Masks protect both from all COVID-19 variants. 

Nationwide, approximately 80% of hospitalized patients have never been vaccinated and 20% have been vaccinated. By closely following the rate of new infections, hospitalizations, ICU admissions and available ICU beds, recommendations are being made to you to protect both you and the community.

Our bodies are in constant battle with microbes. If you haven’t been vaccinated or had natural infection, you are a walking petri dish that can infect others and especially affect those with waning immunity. The concern is that variants such as the lambda variant will evolve to be resistant to present vaccines before we can develop new ones. The way to avoid that is to vaccinate as many people and as fast as possible to decrease the reservoir.

Please don’t just think of the vaccine as treatment for the individual, but as treatment for the whole community. The vast majority of the medical community has found our present vaccines to be both safe and effective with rare side effects. Doctors are not profiting from your illness or from the pharmaceutical industry. We are not trying to take over your lives, but to protect lives.

It is best that we physicians constantly reach out to you, rather than let the politicians decide for you. Think of approaching this infection as doing everything to increase your odds as if you were going to Las Vegas, and that we are engaged in both in a battle and a race. Please talk to your physician about your concerns and make the best decision for yourself, your loved ones and your community.