Within the last week we’ve experienced a sprint of good news – with press releases showing vaccine efficacy above 90% toppling over one another as BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna race their vaccines towards the finish line.

The efficacy found in those trials is spectacularly higher than the set approval target of 50% from the United States Food and Drug Administration and much higher than effectiveness of vaccines against seasonal flu, which need to be “remade” each year, due to the influenza virus’ high mutation rate.

Under normal circumstances  - meaning “old normal” - vaccine development takes more than 10 years even in a best case scenario. The companies that are now submitting their data to regulators did it in less than a year.

There may be differences in safety, temperature stability and associations to Dolly Parton (the latter being a decisive factor for my own humble favoritism). But contrary to the usual drug to market contest, where the first drug over the finish line gains a (sometime massive) advantage, this vaccine race knows only winners. The demands for COVID-19 vaccine are so high that there is space for many contestants to take the crown.

How does the public react to that hopeful piece of news?

For people like me, the news of a potentially effective and safe vaccine mean a relief that equals a huge suffocating weight (huge, like for example the sum of all pandemic weight gain in my city of 4 million people) falling off my chest. An effective vaccine seems to be the ONLY realistic hope of ending the pandemic soon and without even more dramatic casualties and economic damage, than we’re already experiencing.

There is a second group of people, the indifferent bunch, who don’t seem too enthusiastic about the vaccine news, thinking – SO WHAT? They’d seen the development of an effective vaccine as a given and feel nothing but a mild disappointment that the looming vaccine doesn’t end the pandemic in an instant and that it may still take at least a year or more for the existence of vaccines to translate into a return to normal – in this case “old normal” or a better version of “new normal” .

Then there is a third group of people: those who don’t want to be vaccinated. Some of those people have concerns that vaccination might do more harm to one’s health than it would do good. Others see vaccination as the work of the devil, as a big ploy of evil elites, who try enslaving the ignorant population, as a money-making scheme by the pharma industry, who hide vaccines’ dangerous side-effects, from autism to mind control via microchips (I guess I don’t have to spell out that neither autism nor microchip-mind control are side effects of vaccines, o wait, now I’m spelling it out anyways), and that as a final coup, those vaccines will be delivered by genetically modified mosquitoes (which, I must admit might actually work in the future) .

The antivaccination movement hasn’t been born amid the pandemic but as other anti-science movements, is gaining momentum as the pandemic tide washes over us, leaving people confused and desperate for alternative explanations – explanations which deviate from the general tenor of “This sucks but it might be over eventually if we all grit our teeth and push through”.

 

Underlying vaccination hesitancy is a deep-set human refusal to acknowledge bad things might befall us, or our children. It’s too abstract to imagine the threat from diseases, which have been virtually eradicated by vaccination, or in the case of COVID-19, too abstract to connect the pictures on the television of overrun hospitals and of exponential growth curves to our own lives. We feel young, and healthy and above all invincible – even if we never truly are.

And then there is the believe in alternative truths – COVID19 is a hoax and scientists are idiots in league with dark powers... The ability to hold those different theories in one’s mind is a complex feat worthy of Orwell’s doublethink (though it might even be triplethink here): 1) believing in the impotence of science, 2)  granting scientists with the ability to bring about the scientific miracles worthy of a dystopian sci-fi thriller (microchip-mosquito-mind-control) 3) believing that the protection from those high-tech threats lies in methods worthy of a medieval witch craze, like wrapping your head in metallic foil or wearing protective gemstone charms.

While those ideas appear as enjoyably absurd as a Monty Pythons sketch, the spillover of the crazy ideas into mainstream thinking endangers the population and the economy. Polls say that only ~50-65% of people want to be vaccinated against COVID19 in the US, UK, Germany.

SO WHAT? say the indifferent (because that’s what they always say) ...

If those people don’t want to get vaccinated, more vaccine left for the smart ones who’ll get their shot at the shot earlier. BUT (and that one’s a clear all caps) BUT we need enough people vaccinated to achieve herd immunity and hopefully make the virus disappear. And the people who refuse vaccination, and who will likely also refuse other security measures like wearing masks and keeping social distance, will still fall ill with COVID-19, will still need treatment in hospitals and take up space in ICUs. It’s not an option to deny them treatment for their own stupidity. Punishing stupidity is not a tempting idea as all of us are prone to endanger our health with some kind of stupid behavior, from unhealthy lifestyle choices, from fatty food to dangerous sports.

No, punishing stupidity is not and shouldn’t be an option, and yet, we have to live with the reality that the stupidity of some has the power to punish the rest of society with their antivaccination stance.