Should Anti-Vaxxers be Allowed to Call the Shots?

Selfishness is not an option during a global crisis.

We are on our way out of a global pandemic. The responsible actions of the vast majority of people worldwide have ensured that we haven’t seen the massive global death toll of the 1918 flu pandemic, estimated at anywhere from 20 - 50 million.

But there are more hurdles to cross before we reach the finish line.

In the US, the number of people choosing not to take the vaccine is far too high to ensure the efficacy of the vaccination campaign.

Scientists say that a vaccine uptake of 70% to 85% is needed to suppress the virus. Reaching high levels of vaccination would mean new outbreaks of the coronavirus would die down quickly, as opposed to growing and spreading.

The novel coronavirus will continue to mutate and new variants will appear as long as people continue to be infected. If as many as 1 in 4 people refuse the vaccine, we will never get on top of this situation.

Personally I have had both of my doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine despite my anxiety over its safety.

But there is still a large number of people choosing not to have the vaccine when they are offered it.

YouTubers with click-baity video titles like “Is Covid vaccine the mark of the Beast” are not helping doctors and scientists in their battle against this deadly virus.

Playing to gullible people’s fears about the risks of a vaccine while not balancing it with the far greater dangers of the virus it fights is plain irresponsible.

In the UK, the majority of patients currently hospitalized with Covid-19 were eligible to have the vaccine and chose not to.

Hospital cases are the severe ones — the people who are struggling to breathe and fighting for survival due to the impact of the virus.

There will be many more people with milder infections of the virus, spreading it around to others when they could have done their civic duty and had the vaccine. We all need to play our part in this fight to restore normality and rid ourselves of this virus.

Science in times of disaster

There is always advancement of scientific and medical knowledge in times of war and disaster. The Vietnam War had little benefit to anyone apart from the opportunity to study young men’s bodies following their untimely death. Many new findings were made in the field of cardiology as men’s hearts and arteries were able to be studied, post-mortem. The correlation between diet and atherosclerosis (furring of the arteries) was made at this time.

Scientists have made incredible discoveries during this pandemic about our immune systems and their response to novel viruses. Humans — and all other vertebrates — have two immune systems, the innate and the adaptive.

It was previously thought that the innate immune system played a far lesser role in attacking viruses that invade our bodies because it doesn’t retain a memory of previously encountered viruses. But scientists are now discovering that our immune systems can be “trained” to respond in faster and better ways.

It is likely that the next development will be a broad-spectrum vaccine that will trigger our innate immune system to act against various mutations of future viruses. We might become even more superhuman than we currently are thanks to these clever vaccinations, assisting our brilliant bodies in doing their job.

The fear is manifold

There is still a large number of people who are scared of advances in medical science such as vaccinations.

The reasons for this are as follows:

• The threat to autonomy over one’s body and choices
• Ignorance of the facts
• Anti-vaccine propaganda
• Conspiracy theories

A lot of people don’t tend to educate themselves about health and medicine. They still follow an old model of behavior — expecting the experts to tell them when something is wrong with them and give them a pill or a surgical procedure to make it better.

And yet if anyone tells us we should do something in order to stay well, like having vaccinations, suddenly people object to having anything imposed on them, as it goes against their free will.

If they don’t have anything wrong with them, they often don’t do anything about their health until something does go wrong. This is a poor example of personal responsibility to begin with. The idea that taking a vaccine shot is a bad idea when there is nothing wrong with you is an extension of this misunderstanding and irresponsibility.

We can choose to look after our bodies but we should educate ourselves about the best way to do that. It is not an autonomous decision to succumb to conspiracy theory and nonsense about vaccinations that is not fact-based. Don’t be a sheep. We need herd immunity not idiotic herd mentality.

Ignorance isn’t bliss

Instead of looking after our health and preventing illness, we often choose to be blissfully ignorant until it’s too late. We drag ourselves to the doctor when we can ignore things no longer.

Prevention is always better than cure. If we paid more attention to staying healthy and looking after our bodies properly there would be far less disease, less obesity, less cancer, etc, etc.

The same people who refused to wear masks, socially distance and follow the rules during pandemic lockdowns are likely to be the people refusing to take the vaccine.

President Trump himself was a shining example of the foolishness of ignoring advice to wear masks and to observe the rules. His disgruntled and loyal supporters don’t appear to have learned this valuable lesson.

Perplexing propaganda

“For almost as long as humanity has had vaccines, it has also had propagandists who try to scare people out of using them. Among the many medical questions contemplated in the journal The Lancet in the late 1890s and early 1900s are letters debating the efficacy of the smallpox vaccine, the age at which children should get it, the risk of the vaccine relative to the disease, and the extent to which local authorities should enforce compulsory vaccination in case of outbreaks.”

— Renée DiResta writing in The Atlantic

The anti-vaxxer community has seized upon the current coronavirus situation to drive their agenda. Their arguments are pretty standard and similar to those from a century ago — ingredients are toxic and unnatural, the vaccines are insufficiently tested, the scientists who produce them are quacks and profiteers, the shots are an affront to the religious, the authorities working to protect public health are guilty of tyrannical overreach.

They are very effective at frightening people.

I am not without empathy as I remember having concerns myself about my young son having the MMR vaccine, twenty years ago. The world was awash with stories backing up the fabricated evidence of Andrew Wakefield after the since-disgraced doctor said he found a link between autism and the vaccine. It was terrifying for me and other parents.

But my son still had the vaccine because I didn’t want him to die from measles or be made infertile from mumps or to cause any child to have birth defects due to rubella.

Other parents made the wrong decision and look where that has got us — diseases that we had practically eradicated are on the rise again.

Conspiracy theories cost lives

The latest conspiracy theory is that the vaccinated are somehow shedding proteins that are harmful to the unvaccinated. Frankly, if it means more people wear masks to protect themselves — for whatever reason — that’s a good thing.

But this theory has no evidence whatsoever and is part of a larger idea that Covid-19 was a deliberate attempt at culling humanity; the vaccine is just another part of this alleged ploy to depopulate the world.

Conspiracy theories are always baseless and yet convincing, often due to the conviction of their creators and supporters. In a time of anxiety and uncertainty people cling to anything that seems to have a groundswell of faithful followers.

The danger is that people follow blindly without doing their own proper research and that they put their own lives and those in their communities at risk by following advice based on fear instead of that which is sound and backed by science.

Should we take away people’s right to choose?

For the greater good, I believe we should take away people’s right to choose. This is no longer the time for a campaign persuading people to do the right thing.

We need to act like firefighters carrying trapped people out of a burning building before they suffocate.

The vaccine should be mandatory everywhere and for everybody.

I’m not say Anti-vaxxers should be rounded up and shot. I care about those who don’t want the vaccine as much as those who do. But can we really allow them to continue to act in a way that is detrimental to everybody else?

If I didn’t care about them, I’d say volenti non fit injuria — hell mend them and let them destroy themselves— as long as they don’t come near me or my loved ones.

But I do care and I wish that everybody currently rejecting the vaccine would educate themselves and then vaccinate themselves, for the good of their own health and for humanity.

What’s your stance on the Covid-19 vaccine? Let me know in the comments.

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