MSNBC's Doctor: You Shouldn't Be Traveling After Second Vaccine Dose

First, there was the "social distancing and washing your hands" stage. Then there was the "flatten the curve" stage. Then indoor dining was closed, opened with restrictions, fined for too many people standing while drinking, etc., etc. Then we couldn't play football because anywhere from 3 to 7 college football players would die due to COVID.

Then it was something else, another thing and then needles started injecting people with vaccines on December 14. Whew, everyone can breathe a little bit. Maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel. Nurses can go back to getting black-out drunk in Vegas or in Cancun on girls' weekends.

Enter MSNBC's medical analyst Vin Gupta. He caught wind that the first person to get vaccinated in New Haven, Connecticut was planning to travel after getting the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine.

"Just because you get vaccinated after the second dose does not mean you should be traveling. You could still get infected and pass it along to others," Vin told Meet the Press.

"Everything still applies until all of us gets that two-dose regimen. We don't think that'll happen til June or July.

"Right now, we still don't have definitive proof that vaccination protects you from any type of infection, just the severe forms of illness that lead you to the ICU."

I'm going to need Vin to provide some benchmarks for when people should be traveling. Infection rates? Some sort of curve I should be looking for? Case numbers? Vin's out here confusing brains right now as nurses are getting stuck in the arm and dreaming of a beach to get drunk on.

After examining Gupta's Twitter timeline, it appears he's basing his travel theory on this New York Times story published December 8 in which a Stanford professor says vaccinated people will still have to wear masks because they could be contagious. In the same story, there's also a belief that vaccinated persons will be carrying a reduced viral load and would prevent them from spreading COVID.

“My feeling is that once you develop some form of immunity with the vaccine, your ability to get infected will also go down,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. “Even if you’re infected, the level of virus that you replicate in your nose should be reduced.”

If Vin thinks people are going to say no to traveling because they may infect one person out of 5,000 that they come in contact with over that trip, he's in for a rude awakening. Kylie and her fellow nurses damn well better be getting on those planes to Cancun and/or Key West no matter what Vin says.

Ladies, drop me your Venmo accounts. I'll buy you a strawberry marg.