Vaccines: The Good, The Bad & The Misinformation
As the world gears up for a vaccine for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it’s important to understand where vaccine mistrust comes from and the irrefutable case to be made for vaccines — and our lives.
Vaccines. Vaccines. Vaccines. From the time many of us are born to the point at which we eventually die, we would have (hopefully) received a considerable number of vaccines. From the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) vaccine as infants to the influenza vaccines in later life, vaccines have not only become a part of human life but in many ways, allowed life itself to continue.
So what’s all the fuss around vaccines? Why do they get a bad rep from a considerable portion of the human population? Well, we need to firstly, understand what a vaccine is. In a nutshell, a vaccine is a biological agent that is administered in order to provide immunity to a given disease. Without going into too much detail, a vaccine usually contains either a more dilute form of a disease-causing agent (for example, a virus), the disease-causing agent in its dead state or a piece of the disease-causing agent, say a protein. Any one of these methods allows for the body to detect a foreign agent and subsequently develop anti-bodies to fight disease.
Now, having seen what a vaccine is, it’s a little easier to understand how it can actually be weaponised. Naturally, anything that has been made for good, humans have corrupted. There are a number of unethical events which have occurred in the past and as a result, fuelled anti-vaccine sentiments. I will outline just two to paint a somewhat clearer picture.
The first is the infamous 1998 study conducted by medical doctor Andrew Wakefield and a few of his colleagues in the UK. The team, led by Wakefield, published the results of their appalling study which claimed that the MMR vaccine caused autism. Now, this was of course untrue. There were several things that were wrong with the study including its very small sample size (just 12 children), it’s flawed methodology and the falsifying of data and facts. While several epidemiological studies followed right after and disproved Wakefield’s findings, the damage had already been done. The number of children in the UK vaccinated against MMR went from 91.8 percent in the two years prior to Wakefield’s study to 79.9 in 2004. Lancet, the journal in which the study was published, only retracted the paper in 2010 — a little over a decade later.
The second study is equally infamous and was dubbed “The Tuskegee Experiment”. Now, this study did not involve a vaccine but it certainly did conspicuously foster mistrust of public health researchers and the general scientific community especially with regards to the treatment of disease. Effectively, this 1932 study (which lasted over a decade-and-a-half) recruited about 600 African-American men with the intention of studying the progression of syphilis (at a time when there were no known treatments for the sexually transmitted disease) whilst providing medical care. However, the researchers deliberately provided zero care for the participants, opting for them to develop severe symptoms and eventually die. Only in the mid-1960s was The Tuskegee Experiment exposed for its grossly unethical and fatal nature.
It would be remiss of me, and any scientist at that, to dismiss all mistrust of vaccines as “conspiracy theory” because history tells a different story. However, the scientific community; along with the help of journalists, community leaders, activists, ethics committees and regulatory bodies, strict policies and procedures and increased transparency; has come a long way such that it is near impossible for those events to ever occur again. Science itself has become more inclusive with Black people, people of colour, women, and other minority groups working within the space to ensure that their respective communities are not victimised or targeted in the “name of science”. That’s vital.
We’re currently in the middle of an ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the AstraZeneca, Janssen’s, Novavax’s, Pfizer-BioNtech’s and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines are going to be rolled out soon. There has already been pushback from ordinary citizens, celebrities to politicians voicing out that they will not be accepting the vaccine and in turn, churning out added anti-vaccine propaganda. Type in “vaccinations” on Facebook, for example, and the results will show thousands of anti-vaccine pages and misinformation before you’re told what a vaccine actually is.
While the tragic events of the past can neither be excused nor reversed, the impact of vaccines is undeniable. Smallpox was completely eradicated from the face of the earth in 1980 because of a vaccine. Polio has been eradicated in many countries save a few and often those without adequate access to the vaccine. Measles is under control for the most part except in isolated communities who continue to refuse to have their children vaccinated. There is a solid case to be made for vaccines and empirical evidence to support this case. With over 88 million cases of COVID-19 and close to 2 million deaths, we simply cannot afford to think otherwise.
It’s important to understand the historical context of vaccines but it’s also important to not allow the part to speak entirely for the whole. Instead, let the part inform the whole along with the evolved health practices of our current reality which continue to save the lives of millions.
