Why is Vaccination Important for Public Health? What percentage of the country should be vaccinated?
For many infectious diseases, vaccination has historically been the only weapon available for centuries. Today, even if there are some treatments for infectious diseases, these treatments never give full permanent results, and the creation of resistance to bacteria, viruses can shift in the face of treatment, produce their own subtypes (subtypes), escape from drugs and attack again.
In this case, vaccination is the only valid way, always has been and always will be. We are talking about a method that is much cheaper, easier and with a much more guaranteed outcome than treatment.
As you know, the vaccine originated in Turkey, even Istanbul. Lady Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador, was a lady with a smallpox face, someone who had survived smallpox and came back from the dead and lost her siblings to smallpox.
Therefore, she has an extreme interest and sensitivity towards smallpox. When she came to Istanbul as the wife of an ambassador, the people of Istanbul taught the world that the ladies in Istanbul cut the invisible parts of their own children, their thighs, their groins, and took the rashes of the children who were actively suffering from smallpox and planted them there, thus inoculating the body with viruses that were not overloaded with the body, preventing the deterioration of the visible parts of their children's faces and preventing them from dying and preventing them from going blind.
She wrote this in a letter to her acquaintances from the royal family and made it permanent. If Lady Montagu had not written this, we would not be able to talk about the success of our ancestors and we would know the discoverer of the smallpox vaccine as Edward Jenner. However, it is the people of Istanbul, but Edward Jenner is the one who industrialized it. He industrialized the vaccination activity on the basis of these events and made it spread around the world.
Vaccination is the number one public health achievement of the twentieth century. If it were not for vaccination, the world today would have lost hundreds of millions, perhaps close to a billion children and adults to infectious diseases.
When we talk about vaccination, we are actually talking about a weapon that has saved so many people. Covid is a brand new disease and humanity has found a vaccine for it. This vaccine is, of course, an option that will either completely eradicate the disease or at least control it and prevent it from having a major impact on the world, except for small-scale attacks. More than 200 vaccine studies have been conducted in the world, including in Turkey. 18 of them were conducted in Turkey. We hope that the Turkish vaccine can be put into use in the coming periods.
We know that the fifty million doses of Chinese vaccine imported to Turkey this year inactivates the activity of viruses and that no other technology is used. In this vaccine, we are talking about a vaccine technology that has been used by humanity for centuries.
What Percentage of the Country Should Be Vaccinated to End Covid?
Depending on the infectiousness rate of the virus in a society, if you increase their immunity by vaccinating 65-85 percent of them or by passing the disease, that virus can now survive by jumping after infection in a person, that is, by passing from one person to another person. Otherwise, it will either kill the person or the human immunity will kill it within ten days.
When the human dies, the life of the virus is over, and when our immune system defeats the virus, the life of the virus is over. In other words, after this virus enters a person, it needs to jump/infect another person within ten days in order to survive. In order to do this, it needs to be surrounded by people who have neither been vaccinated nor previously recognized the disease. In order to prevent this, to prevent the virus from jumping, it is aimed to ensure social immunity by vaccinating at least 65% of the society.