Why to not fear the vaccine.
This is a Facebook post but I see a bit of anti-vax sentiment on my LinkedIn feed, too, bizarrely. And people concerned about the (ostensibly) rushed nature of the vaccines.
Practically every day, the vaccination data becomes more and more encouraging. So, I want to try to reassure you. The vaccines aren’t entirely a silver bullet. But they will have a significant impact on COVID-19, which, while not the plague, is just about dangerous and unpredictable enough that we’ve had to go into lockdown to stop a genuinely unmanageable number of hospitalisations.
The number of hospitalisations we saw in early January simply cannot be managed if those numbers were prolonged for much longer. And without a lockdown, the number would’ve grown and grown. It would’ve been a disaster for everyone relying on hospitals for treatment, whether urgent or routine, covid or non-covid.
There is light at the end of the tunnel and lockdown is a miserable existence, which has harmful consequences for lots of people, so it’s important that we do the right things now to make sure we don’t have to lock down again. There’s no point complaining about lockdown now we’ve come this far. We can’t turn back the clock and do things better.
Anyway, I’ve digressed. Millions upon millions upon millions of people will have been vaccinated by the end of the first quarter. Among those millions are tens of thousands of healthcare workers. To unleash an unsafe vaccine upon that many people would have the most dire consequences you could ever imagine.
When vaccines are created they usually take many years. But quite a lot of that time is what we call bureaucracy, which translates to red tape, which translates to things like paperwork and administration. In special circumstances, certain things can be bypassed to fast-track the production of a vaccine, and the COVID-19 pandemic is most certainly a special circumstance.
However, there is a base minimum that needs to be met. And that minimum is health & safety. At the very least, the vaccines won’t pose a significant threat to the safety of the people whom receive them (whichever one it is).
And also in relation to time: never before have the world’s medical boffins all got to work at once on creating a vaccine like this one.
There will be stories circulating of adverse reactions. Some perniciously, some naively. Some will be entirely fake; some will be real but unsubstantiated - in other words, real sickness but not necessarily related to the vaccine - purely coincidental, which will happen when you have such a high volume of vaccination. And, sadly, some people will genuinely suffer an adverse reaction. But the number, proportionally speaking, will be a tiny, tiny fraction compared to the number of people who fall sick with or succumb to COVID-19 - however you define a Covid death.
Immunologists and virologists also have some "pre-existing" knowledge because of sars-cov-1 and MERS - they're all from the coronavirus group of viruses. Not flu, though - that's from the influenza virus. Flu is to influenza what COVID-19 is to sars-cov-2. But understanding how SARS1 and MERS attack cells and replicate inside those cells will have helped researchers create an effective vaccine. We're quite lucky in that sense.
By all accounts, nobody is going to be forced to take the vaccine. Children most certainly won’t. But we know they don’t need to be, with the exception of them becoming “vectors” (grim description), but the data suggests that can be mitigated, so long as the vulnerable are protected.
I now know quite a number of people who have been vaccinated, and they’re all fine (and relieved). Eventually, you will too.
So, in a nutshell:
1. The vaccines are safe - although nothing in life is guaranteed. The word safe implies favourable probability. Crime happens in every city but we regard some of those cities as safe even when crime exists there.
2. You’re not going to be forced to take it. You will be hugely encouraged, but ultimately, it’s your choice.
That's pretty much it.
Like
Comment
Share