Public Mood on COVID-19 Vaccine Resistance

"We've had discussions at the task force, we've had presentations by experts in this area, about vaccine hesitancy. It's not the extreme anti-vaxxers we're talking about -- it's people who I think quite reasonably will have an 'I'll wait a little bit and see what my friends say', kind of thing." 

"And I would say, in a word, this comes down to trust. A lot of people have been concerned because it [vaccine trials] seems to be going so fast."

"The honest answer is, we don't know [what vaccine uptake numbers should be to achieve herd immunity]. Obviously, the higher the number, the better."

"It would be unwise to say, 'Gee there won't be any side effects'. We don't know that. We just don't know the answer to that question until we do the Phase III  trials."

"[But] one has to remember we're in the middle of a pandemic. So you have to weigh -- we all have to weigh -- the risks of taking a vaccine against the risk of getting COVID."

"[And unlike in the U.S.], there is no evidence whatsoever of political interference, or any other kind of compromising, on safety. So I think we're quite lucky in this country that we can trust our regulator."

"Public health is all about transparency communication, earning the public's trust. This [eventual vaccine] will not necessarily be a magic bullet. It'll be part of the public health armamentarium; wearing a mask, washing our hands, keep a distance, and the vaccine."

"We will eventually get rid of this virus. But it won't happen the day after you are immunized."

Dr.Alan Bernstein, COVID-19 vaccine task force Canada

"[While most vaccine safety scares aren't supported by scientific evidence], without substantial global investment in active vaccine safety surveillance, continuous monitoring of public perceptions and development of rapid and flexible communication strategies, there is a risk of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine never reaching their potential due to a continued inability to quickly and effectively respond to public vaccine safety concerns, real or otherwise."

Institute for Vaccine Safety, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Research assistant Jae-Heon Kim conducts research on a vaccine for the novel coronavirus at a laboratory in San Diego, California, March 17, 2020   Photo by Bing Guan/Reuters

The World Economic Forum had contracted with Ipsos to conduct a survey, released in August, of 20,000 adults from 27 countries, which found that 74 percent of the polled would opt for an inoculation against COVID, but 37 percent only agreed strongly, while 37 percent somewhat agreed. In most countries, the pollsters reported, the agreeable group vastly outnumbered the group choosing to disagree. Last year, the World Health Organization identified vaccine hesitancy as one of the top ten global health threats.

 

Critics contend that U.S.President Donald Trump has politicized the issue of COVID-19 vaccines, and in so doing has seriously undermined public confidence. He has stated that his administration may -- or may not -- approve more stringent FDA standards linked to emergency authorization of a COVID vaccine. "Because when you have Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Moderna, these great companies, coming up with the vaccines and they've done testing and everything else ... why would they have to be adding great length to the process?", Mr.Trump has mused. 

A number of the front-runner candidates for vaccines are RNA-based vaccines, using specific parts f the SARS-CoV-2 virus genetic code meant to trigger an immune response. This is an entirely different process. Normally to develop a new vaccine it will take a decade and more. And in the current situation with the global pandemic, researchers and pharmaceutical labs are attempting to do the research, the trials, due diligence in one year; collapsing ten into one.  Even so, emphasizes Dr.Bernstein, president and CEO of the global research organization CIFAR, there are no short-cuts being taken.

 

Anti-vaccine demonstrators outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta in June. Credit...Audra Melton for The New York Times

Physicist Neil Johnson of George Washington University has been tracking online vaccine conversations through 100 million Facebook users, noting that pre-COVID the "undecided" were becoming more tangled up with hard-core anti-vaxxers, a trend that has strengthened since March. That the science keeps shifting, and evolving appears to be part of the problem in public perception. Questions such as whether or not COVID is airborne, what the size is of a particle, a droplet; "Should you be six feet away, should it be three feet, should it be 2,000?", queries Dr.Johnson. "It's not wrong, it just looks like science doesn't know."

And Dr.Johnson identifies safety, need, big-pharma conspiracies and does-science-actually-know-what-it's-doing, as the major impact appearing among the "not-sures". "But we also see it -- and I think this is even more scary -- in the yeses, the ones that say 'they would get a vaccine', who then inside are thinking, 'yeah, but I wouldn't be first in line. I'm going to wait until my whole street, everybody I know has it, and if they're still standing a few months later, I'll get one."

Question: What happens if you have the flu shot at the same time as the first COVID shot? What happens if I've had antibodies already established in me and I have the vaccine, is that bad? "These are the things occurring to them." It's not yet clear which strategy will be the most effective among the dozens of vaccines now being tested in humans, though the best vaccines are those most clearly mimicking a natural infection; avoiding making the person sick, even killing them.

Even a partially effective vaccine in the 60- to 70-percent range would produce an important impact; on the other hand the less effective the vaccine turns out, the greater the number of people required to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. Another unknown: how long vaccine-induced immunity may be good for; months? a year? longer? What is anticipated is that the vaccines would be more effective in the young and the healthy, and far less so among the health-impaired and the elderly.

"[The choice whether to be vaccinated is one most people won't have to face for months], if not a year or more. The supply just won't be there for the general public."

"[Despite the prospect of a potentially fearsome fall and winter surge of COVID, and the potential that vaccines] can liberate everyone from the constraints on liberty [represented by lockdowns and quarantining, there are some people who will say] count me out."

"They don't trust vaccines or they don't trust the government to provide a safe one."

Arthur Caplan, founding head, division of medical ethics, NYU School of Medicine