The COVID-19 cavalry is on the horizon. Scientists have produced vaccines in record time and there’s an end in sight to the pandemic catastrophe.
Now all you have to do is take the shot.
That should be obvious, but it seems researchers needed a second vaccine to attack the virus of suspicion, paranoia and misinformation that threatens to derail the project.
“To beat this pandemic, we also have to defeat the parallel pandemic of distrust,” said Francesco Rocca, president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
Polls show about 60% of Americans are willing to take the vaccine. That’s a problem. In order to achieve herd immunity and snuff out the virus, about 70% of the population must be vaccinated.
That’s about 230 million Americans, but vaccines aren’t 100% effective. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines average about 95% efficacy.
That means about 240 million people in the U.S. need to take it. In Florida, herd immunity through a vaccine will require inoculating about 16 million people.
You need to be one of them. You need to put aside the conspiracy theories, historical suspicion and apprehensions that come with a new cure.
They are nothing new. When a smallpox epidemic gripped Montreal in 1885, a conniving doctor named Alexander Ross published a pamphlet that advised sick people to visit him instead of the vaccination center.
“THOUSANDS of PEOPLE insanely rushing to the shambles of the vaccinators,” Ross wrote, “as the people of the dark ages did to the soothsayers and miracle workers for protection against evil spirits.”
Such nonsense is now amplified by the internet and B-list celebrities who fancy themselves epidemiologists. About 31 million people follow anti-vaccine groups on Facebook, according to Centre for Countering Digital Hate.
Like just about everything else these days, the COVID-19 vaccine has been politicized. The right is wary of masks, shutdowns and other health edicts.
The left turned the vaccine into a talking point. In the vice president debate, Kamala Harris said she’d take it if Dr. Anthony Fauci said to.
“But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it,” Harris said, “then I’m not taking it.”
The demagoguery is a disservice to the medical community. It took an astounding amount of brainpower and organization it took to produce a vaccine in 10 months.
Pfizer submitted the first application for vaccine authorization on Nov. 20 after trials on 44,000 study patients. The Food and Drug Administration had 150 people working around the clock investigating that data.
An independent committee reviewed those findings. All the documents were made public before Thursday’s hearing. A final go-ahead is expected in a few days.
“We realize there is an issue in the U.S. around vaccine hesitancy. There have been concerns raised about the speed with which Covid-19 vaccines have been developed,” FDA Commissioner Stephen M. Hahn told the Wall Street Journal.
The only discernible flaw in Operation Warp Speed is its name. The partnership between government and Big Pharma expedited a cure, but no testing corners were cut in the process.
“This will meet our gold standard of safety and efficacy that the American people have come to trust,” Hahn said.
Not all Americans feel that trust. A discredited 1998 study on vaccines and autism has fueled the anti-vaxxer movement and no amount of hard scientific data can dissuade the true believers.
Others aren’t absolutists. They realize vaccines for polio and smallpox have saved millions of lives, but they are wary of unproven remedies.
Some Black Americans have a lingering distrust of government based partly on Tuskegee syphilis studies from the 1930s to the 1960s.
“I understand you know historically — everything dating back all the way to the Tuskegee experiments and so forth — why the African American community, would have some skepticism,” Barack Obama said last week. “But the fact of the matter is, is that vaccines are why we don’t have polio anymore, the reason why we don’t have a whole bunch of kids dying from measles and smallpox and diseases that used to decimate entire populations and communities.”
Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have said they’ll go on TV and take the vaccine to help promote its acceptance.
And there’s good news for Vice President-elect Harris. Fauci is ready to give her a prescription.
“I promise you, I will take the vaccine,” he said. “And I will recommend that my family take the vaccine.”
You know who else would have taken it?
The conniving Dr. Ross from Montreal. He’d secretly gotten a smallpox vaccination before producing the anti-vaxxer pamphlet.
That pandemic killed 3,000 people in his city. COVID-19 has killed more than 250,000 in America, and the numbers are climbing by the hour.
The good news is a light now flickers at the end of the tunnel. Let’s hope the vaccine is strong enough to cure the ignorance surrounding it.
