Vaccine Fanatics Have Achieved More Than The Anti-vaxxers Have Ever Been Able To Do
Coercing people to get COVID-19 vaccines is damaging trust In public health: states Harvard Professor Kulldorf, one of the world’s leading epidemiologists. There is mounting pressure on people to get vaccinated, and mandatory vaccination is discussed and implemented. But, aside from the long-term implications this can give, some collateral damage is already showing.
Introduction
Dr. Kulldorf has long worked on vaccines, including messaging surrounding the shots. A key aspect is maintaining confidence in vaccines so many people get them, achieving herd immunity. It is unethical to coerce people who are immune, or people who are young, who have a very small risk of dying from COVID when the vaccines are much more needed for older people in other places. While anybody can get infected by COVID, there’s more than a thousand-fold difference in the risk for death between the oldest and the youngest. So with the naïve belief that lockdowns would protect everybody, which now, obviously, we know that didn’t work, a lot of people got COVID, and a lot of people died. There was this naïve belief that we would protect older people. Because of that, we did not implement basic public health measures to actually do what was necessary to protect those older high-risk people. And because of that, many of them died unnecessarily from COVID. The other aspect of it is the collateral damage from these lockdowns. Public health is about all health outcomes. It’s not just about one disease like COVID. You can’t just focus on COVID and then ignore everything else. That goes against how we do public health.
Natural Immunity
If you’ve had COVID, you have very good immunity, not only for the same variant but also for other variants and even for different types of cross-immunity to other types of coronaviruses. So we know, for example, that if you had a COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2, you also have immunity to SARS-CoV-1, which we had earlier, a few years ago. It also provides protective immunity to the other four common coronaviruses that are endemic that we’ve all been exposed to and that we will continue to be exposed to. So the best approach is to make sure that our old people get vaccinated to protect them. And then we should not have lockdowns. We should let people live their normal lives.
Vaccine Causes More Reinfections
Natural immunity is strong and vibrant, and useful. Yet, at the same time, there’s a kind of push to vaccinate people, whether or not they have natural immunity. We expected that we would have good natural immunity from a virus like this. So it’s not a surprise that we do have it. There have been studies showing that we have good immunity from having COVID before. People can be reinfected and test positive, but there are very few cases where somebody had it, and then they get the serious disease afterward; it is very rare. There are millions of people who have had COVID. Once you’ve had it, you have good protection from your immune system for a serious disease or for mortality. Some data from Israel shows that if you have had a vaccine, you’re 6.7 times more likely to be reinfected than if you have had the COVID disease itself. So we would expect that you get better immunity from the disease than you do from the vaccine. And of course, we don’t know exactly, but we can confidently say that having had the disease at least gives you as good and probably better immunity than the vaccine. But for public health scientists, it’s very surprising that this is not recognized. We are forcing people who had the disease, who have good immunity, to take a vaccine, even though they have immunity that’s better than, or at least as good as those who have only had the vaccine.
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.
Marcia Angell
Coercing People Is Counterproductive
Another aspect is that if you force something on people if you coerce somebody to do something, that can backfire. Public health has to be based on trust. And if public health officials want the public to trust them, public health officials also have to trust the public.
Anti-vaxxers are a small group of people who are against vaccines, but they haven’t really been influential. They’re very vocal, but they haven’t been influential because most people trust the vaccines and have confidence in them. The vaccine fanatics who are demanding and pushing for vaccine passports and vaccine mandates have done more damage to the confidence in vaccines than the so-called anti-vaxxers have ever been able to do.
Those who are pushing these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports — vaccine fanatics, I would call them — to me, they have done much more damage during this one year than the anti-vaxxers have done in two decades. I would even say that these vaccine fanatics, they are the biggest anti-vaxxers that we have right now. They’re doing so much more damage to vaccine confidence than anybody else.
Dr. Kulldorf
Proponents of vaccine passports say the mandates increase uptake of the vaccines, helping protect the wider society, including populations who cannot get the vaccine. But the push to vaccinate is backfiring, and people question why there is such a strong crackdown on those who don’t get a vaccine. The mandates also by and large don’t address a key issue: natural immunity or the protection people who recover from COVID-19 enjoy against the virus that causes it.
The global COVID response is the biggest public health fiasco in history.
Dr. Kulldorf
If the vaccine is really so beneficial to you, why do you have to force somebody to take it? And even if people are coerced into getting the vaccine, it will turn them off from public health, and it will make them distrust public health and turn off from other vaccines that are not mandatory. It will have sort of ripple effects on different aspects of public health, and that could be very unfortunate.
Mandates Are Not Necessary
Dr. Kulldorf is a Sweden native. In Sweden, where there are no mandates, the confidence in vaccines remains high. It’s entirely voluntary to take the vaccine, and if you want to have high confidence in vaccines, it has to be voluntary; there shouldn’t be any mandates. But, unfortunately, the collateral damage to public health is something that we’re going to have to live with and die with for many, many years to come.
Interesting Links:
Why Mandatory Vaccination Is a Very Bad Idea
Ausweis Bitte!!! (Pass, please!!!) Do We Really Want to Go Back There With the COVID-19 or Green Pass?
This article is based on an interview with dr. Kulldorf, that you can find here:
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