A pathway out of our Covid nightmare?
Let's hope the vaccines announced in the past week soon clear all their hurdles
It’s great news that at least two vaccines against Covid-19 may become available over the next few months.
There’s still a long way to go. Many issues remain to be resolved about the efficacy of these vaccines, about the scope of the immunity they will provide, how long this will last and so on. But for the first time, we can allow ourselves to hope that the end of the pandemic crisis may now be in sight.
There is concern, however, that public anxiety about the safety of any such vaccines will prevent enough people from taking them up to provide the necessary “herd” immunity for the population in general. It would be truly appalling if safe and effective vaccines were to be spurned, with the result that Covid-19 continued to pose an intolerable threat to life and health.
Some people claim that the 1998 controversy over the safety of the MMR vaccine has caused a general reluctance to be vaccinated. This claim is ignorant and misleading.
Last year, the National Audit Office reported that NHS England had missed the 95 per cent uptake target for six out of seven pre-school jabs after a general downward trend since 2012-13. In 2018-19, 90.3 per cent of two-year-olds got their first MMR jab, down from 92.7 per cent in 2013-14 but up from 84.9 per cent in 2008-9, while 86.4 per cent of children received the second dose by age five, down from 88.3 per cent in 2013-14 but up from 78 per cent in 2008-9.
However, the NAO report found no evidence of declining confidence in the safety of vaccinations behind the overall fall in domestic uptake. It stated:
Public Health England (PHE) conducts an annual survey into parents’ attitudes to vaccinations [and] has found no evidence that anti-vaccination social media activity has had a major impact on vaccination uptake in England. PHE considers the main reasons for the decline in uptake are related to delivery by local primary care providers.
… Parents may be reluctant to vaccinate their children for many reasons and not be opposed to vaccination. The WHO defines vaccine hesitancy among parents as a reluctance or refusal to vaccinate their children and has identified complacency, inconvenience in accessing vaccines and lack of confidence as key reasons for this reluctance.
…PHE’s survey reports that parents have confidence in the vaccination system and found that 95 per cent of parents in 2019 reported feeling confident or very confident in vaccinations. The survey reported in 2019 that the percentage of parents refusing or postponing vaccination fell from 11 per cent in 2015 to 8 per cent in 2019.
There is nevertheless a significant global anti-vaccination movement which goes back at least four decades. This is associated with the belief that science and technology pose a growing threat to health, that inventions and other developments in these fields are to be avoided, and that only natural foodstuffs or other products are safe.
This way of thinking is currently feeding into the movement against wearing face masks or indeed accepting any restrictions at all to combat the virus. These are people who claim that Covid-19 poses no serious threat to life and health, that there has been no need for the drastic steps taken to combat it across the world and that the whole thing is a conspiracy by the powerful to seize control of all our lives.
This deeply irrational way of thinking has gripped a dismaying number of people during the pandemic. It forms one of the many interlinked waves of conspiracy theory that have been washing around the west for decades now, one of the surest signals of a culture in deep existential trouble.
Others, however, have fears about the vaccines that are more understandable. They are concerned about the speed with which these are being produced, with years being shaved off the time it normally takes to conduct the necessary efficacy and safety trials.
However, this accelerated timescale is largely because testing procedures for the Covid vaccines are simply being run in parallel rather than consecutively, as is normally the case.
The problem, however, is that there has been a profound loss of trust not only in politicians but also in scientific experts. Not only have these been at odds over how to deal with Covid-19, but pronouncements about the virus by the government’s principal scientific officials have been undermined by poor presentation. This has resulted in scepticism and exasperation.
But we can be sure of one thing: that, given the unprecedented circumstances of this pandemic, these vaccines will be subjected to an unprecedented amount of scrutiny of both their safety and efficacy before they are passed as suitable for administering to the public. There will surely never have been such transparently produced vaccines.
I have always been a strong supporter of vaccination, which has proved to be one of the greatest ever contributions to public health. Like so many others, I’m keeping all digits crossed that the two vaccines for which such spectacularly successful early results have been announced in the past week will clear all their further hurdles and provide us with an imminent pathway out of our virus nightmare.
Recent posts
Premium subscribers can read my latest exclusive post, on how democracy is teetering on both sides of the Atlantic, by clicking here.
And you can read my previous post that’s available to everyone, on how the UK has crossed a new and shameful line at the United Nations, if you click here.
One more thing…
This is how my website works.
It has two subscription levels: my free service and the premium service.
Anyone can sign up to the free service on this website. You can of course unsubscribe at any time by clicking “unsubscribe” at the foot of each email.
Everyone on the free list will receive the full text of pieces I write for outlets such as the Jewish News Syndicate and the Jewish Chronicle, as well as other posts and links to my broadcasting work.
But why not subscribe to my premium service? For that you’ll also receive pieces that I write specially for my premium subscribers. Those articles will not be published elsewhere. They’ll arrive in your inbox as soon as I have written them.
There is a monthly fee of $6.99 for the premium service, or $70 for an annual subscription. Although the fee is charged in US dollars, you can sign up with any credit card. Just click on the “subscribe now” button below to see the available options for subscribing either to the premium or the free service.
A note on subscriptions
If you purchase a subscription to my site, you will be authorising a payment to my company Dirah Associates. In the past, that is the name that may have appeared on your credit card statement. In future, though, the charge should appear instead as Melanie Phillips.
And thank you for following my work.