If you are fully vaccinated, are you protected from COVID-19? Will we need booster shots? What is the best way to keep children safe as they return to school?
These and other pressing questions were discussed in an Aspen Ideas Festival virtual event, in which Kenneth Davis, MD, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Mount Sinai Health System, interviewed Judith A. Aberg, Dean of System Operations for Clinical Sciences, and Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases, and Harm van Bakel, PhD, Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and a leader of Mount Sinai’s Pathogen Surveillance Program. The interview, which was released in July, can be viewed here.
Dr. Aberg, who leads Mount Sinai’s COVID-19 clinical trial efforts, shared a favorite analogy about the vaccines’ effectiveness: “An umbrella will keep you dry for the most part, but you can still get wet in a bad storm,” she said. In the same fashion, “the current vaccines are highly effective even for the circulating variants, but we do expect there will be breakthrough infections in some individuals. So I encourage everyone to get vaccinated.”