A good article discussing the vaccine and the Omicron
I am a huge proponent of only listening to qualified opinions and this is one of those opinions you should listen to
How effective are vaccines against omicron? An epidemiologist answers 6 questions
December 15, 2021 2.49pm EST
https://theconversation.com/how-effective-are-vaccines-against-omicron-an-epidemiologist-answers-6-questions-173554
Melissa Hawkins
Director, Undergraduate Programs, Dept. of Health Studies
Health Studies
Contact
Send email to Melissa Hawkins
(202) 885-6252 (Office)
CAS - Health Studies
McCabe - 220
Degrees
Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University
M.H.S., Johns Hopkins University
B.A., Emory University
Bio
Melissa Hawkins is the Director of Undergraduate Programs in the Department of Health Studies at American University. Dr. Hawkins is an epidemiologist with over a decade of experience in the application of public health methodologies to government and private sector challenges. Her expertise is in maternal and child health, with an interest in improving pregnancy outcomes. Currently, her research addresses the integration of Community Health Workers (CHW) in the U.S. health workforce, in both clinical and community-based teams, and examining the effectiveness of CHWs as change agents in improving health equity. She is also the research director for a 5-year intervention study, funded by the USDA, to improve health literacy and prevent obesity in elementary school students in Washington DC. Before joining American in 2015, she served as Research Director for TMNcorp, a public health communications organization, where she lead the design, conduct, and analyses for epidemiological investigations related to women, infant, and children’s health. She also served as a Senior Epidemiologist with Epidemiology International, a contract research organization, where her research focused on resolving methodological and data collection issues in study design and evaluation. Her work focuses on translating data to improve community health. Dr. Hawkins holds a Ph.D. and M.H.S. in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University, where she previously taught undergraduate and graduate students for fifteen years before coming to American University. She is a fellow with the American College of Epidemiology.
and for the many that have never heard of epidemiology (at least before Covid) or who is not sure what it is
Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in defined populations.
It is a cornerstone of public health, and shapes policy decisions and evidence-based practice by identifying risk factors for disease and targets for preventive healthcare. Epidemiologists help with study design, collection, and statistical analysis of data, amend interpretation and dissemination of results (including peer review and occasional systematic review). Epidemiology has helped develop methodology used in clinical research, public health studies, and, to a lesser extent, basic research in the biological sciences.[1]
Major areas of epidemiological study include disease causation, transmission, outbreak investigation, disease surveillance, environmental epidemiology, forensic epidemiology, occupational epidemiology, screening, biomonitoring, and comparisons of treatment effects such as in clinical trials. Epidemiologists rely on other scientific disciplines like biology to better understand disease processes, statistics to make efficient use of the data and draw appropriate conclusions, social sciences to better understand proximate and distal causes, and engineering for exposure assessment.
Epidemiology, literally meaning "the study of what is upon the people", is derived from Greek epi 'upon, among', demos 'people, district', and logos 'study, word, discourse', suggesting that it applies only to human populations. However, the term is widely used in studies of zoological populations (veterinary epidemiology), although the term "epizoology" is available, and it has also been applied to studies of plant populations (botanical or plant disease epidemiology).[2]
The distinction between "epidemic" and "endemic" was first drawn by Hippocrates,[3] to distinguish between diseases that are "visited upon" a population (epidemic) from those that "reside within" a population (endemic).[4] The term "epidemiology" appears to have first been used to describe the study of epidemics in 1802 by the Spanish physician Villalba in Epidemiología Española.[4] Epidemiologists also study the interaction of diseases in a population, a condition known as a syndemic.
The term epidemiology is now widely applied to cover the description and causation of not only epidemic, infectious disease, but of disease in general, including related conditions. Some examples of topics examined through epidemiology include as high blood pressure, mental illness and obesity. Therefore, this epidemiology is based upon how the pattern of the disease causes change in the function of human beings.
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