The jabs undoubtedly saved lives, but overblown claims sadly damaged the reputation of vaccination.
Vaccination is one mankind’s most miraculous innovations. The eradication of smallpox, the retreat of measles and other cruel afflictions mean that vaccines rival sanitation for first prize in the saving of human lives. New vaccines against malaria and melanoma promise great benefits. All the more reason to worry that covid vaccines might have tarnished the technology’s reputation.
Vaccines never have been without some side-effects and risks. They are harm-reduction interventions, not harm-elimination ones. Mistakes have been made in the past. Some polio vaccines in the 1960s were contaminated with the monkey virus SV40. Vaccination campaigns in Africa that re-used needles may have helped to spread HIV.
The covid vaccines developed in 2020 undoubtedly reduced the severity of covid for vulnerable people and contributed to the defeat of the pandemic – though the evolutionary replacement of harmful variants by the milder omicron types was probably a bigger factor. But they were not as effective or as safe as we were led to believe at first.
The (understandably) rushed clinical trials led public health officials to exaggerate the benefits and underplay the risks. Thrombosis caused by the Astrazeneca vaccine and myocarditis caused by the messenger-RNA vaccines of BioNTech and Pfizer are emerging as rare but serious side effects.
The pandemic’s legacy now includes greater public mistrust of vaccines in general. Measles is on the rise. More and more people are refusing the MMR jab as well as covid boosters. A recent UNICEF survey found vaccine confidence had fallen in 52 out of 55 countries.
https://thehoya.com/science/the-intersection-measles-a-lesson-for-vaccine-hesitancy/
Who is responsible for this mistrust? Public health officials tend to blame antivaxx campaigners with lurid conspiracy theories about Bill Gates, and they are partly right. But perhaps they should also look in the mirror. Misinformation came from both sides, and by overpromising what the vaccines could do, and demanding vaccine mandates and passports, many scientists and government officials contributed to scepticism.
For example, the American government tried to reassure people about messenger RNA vaccines by implicitly criticising live vaccines like those used for measles: “The mRNA vaccines do not contain any live virus. Instead, they work by teaching our cells to make a harmless piece of a ‘spike protein’”. So live vaccines are not so “harmless”?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9858741/
America’s leading infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci said in May 2021 that vaccination “makes it extremely unlikely — not impossible but very, very low likelihood — that they’re going to transmit it…In other words, you become a dead end to the virus.” That turned out to be badly wrong, as he later admitted, with the vaccine doing little to prevent reinfection and transmission.
Preventing transmission was the excuse used for vaccinating children yet when that excuse evaporated, the policy continued. For young age groups, wrote a clutch of doctors in the BMJ in December 2021, “the harms of taking a vaccine are almost certain to outweigh the benefits”.
https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2957/rr-1
Authoritarianism made the problem worse. France criminalised criticism of vaccine mandates; Canada froze the bank accounts of truckers for protesting against them. Part of the reason governments were so reckless in forcing vaccines was probably that they wanted an exit from lockdowns, which were needed for longer and more often than promised.
Some of us urged government ministers not to claim too much for vaccines or pretend there would be no side effects as that would backfire. But the government pressed ahead with mandates to prevent care-home workers going to work unless vaccinated. A study by doctors concluded: “Our data suggest that debate around mandates can arouse strong concerns and could entrench scepticism. Policymakers should proceed with caution.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9162982/
This was compounded by a baffling refusal to acknowledge that natural immunity from covid itself was better than the vaccine at protecting people. In 2020 a paper in the Lancet stated that “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection”. Yet we now know that it lasts longer and is more effective than the protection provided by a vaccine.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32153-X/fulltext
The backlash against vaccines will go too far. Italy’s former health minister Roberto Speranza, who imposed vaccine mandates, can no longer walk in a street without angry Italians calling him a murderer. But public health officials worldwide must concede that overblown claims and underestimated risks of the vaccines developed during covid have hurt the reputation of a valuable medical technology.
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