A print subheadline on a recent Washington Post editorial about the anti-vax movement and one of its champions, Robert Kennedy Jr., reads: “Anti-vax campaigners are spreading sickness and death.”
If this is true — more on that later — then why do so many news outlets devote so much attention to anti-vaxxers? Wouldn’t anti-vaxxers be better off being ignored? Doesn’t this give them far more attention and credence than they deserve? As for Kennedy and his batty remarks, let’s face it. If his name was Robert Smith Jr., he’d have to take out an ad to get his name in the newspaper or his face on television.
The point of the editorial is a needlessly divisive trope. Vilifying people who aren’t vaccinated — reinforcing the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” meme — is inaccurate, corrosive and ultimately self-defeating.
The vaccines are a good thing. They have saved thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. They are extremely protective, in that if you should become infected, you are highly unlikely to become seriously ill or die. That is the main reason people should get vaccinated.
But extremely protective is not the same as completely protective. Occasionally, vaccinated people do get sick and die, albeit at a much lower rate than the unvaccinated.
This is merely one limitation of the vaccines. As the pandemic progresses, we are realizing others. In the first months of vaccination, those vaccinated were far less likely to become infected and also less likely to pass the virus on to others. But waning immunity and the omicron variant have changed that. Despite the presence of vaccines, worldwide cases are now five times higher than they were before vaccination. Some of that is due to increased testing, but not to the tune of five times as high.
Worldwide mortality is down — that is, a declining percentage of infected people die. That’s largely because millions of people are vaccinated, and omicron is less severe than previous variants. But with such a remarkable surge in infections due to omicron’s high transmissibility, deaths are rising worldwide. Essentially, more infections means more deaths. Even with vaccinations.
Cultivating an unhealthy division between the vaccinated and unvaccinated, besides alienating a segment of the population that is on the fence and might otherwise be vaccinated, has other negative consequences. When experts simply display graph after graph of the acknowledged benefits of vaccination, it diminishes the role of complementary approaches such as making effective medications more available to treat those already infected and implementing other measures, such as better ventilation in buildings.
What is really needed is healthier skepticism and more candor from journalists and scientists. When the anodyne term “breakthrough cases” is used for those who become infected after being vaccinated, it neatly avoids the reality of vaccine failure. (“Breakthrough cases” are basically “vaccine failure cases.”)
In lieu of railing against the unvaccinated, experts should be addressing obvious related questions. How can it be that per capita cases and deaths in Africa are so low compared with those in the medically advanced West, where there are much higher vaccination rates? (The likely answers are a younger population and differences in natural population immunity.)
Or that Israel, the country with the most extensive vaccine experience in the world, is coming off its highest case surge ever? One of the country’s leading experts, immunology professor and government adviser Cyrille Cohen, has gone on record as saying, “Especially with omicron, where we don’t see virtually any difference, there is a very narrow gap between people vaccinated and nonvaccinated. Both can get infected with a virus, more or less at the same pace.” Put simply, the saying “pandemic of the unvaccinated” no longer reflects reality, if it ever did.
Another pernicious effect of the false dichotomy between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated is the desire to censor all those who raise questions about any aspect of the vaccines. Censoring anti-vaxxers has the opposite effect of what is desired, as investigative journalist Matt Taibbi wrote in his Substack newsletter TK News: “Censors have a fantasy that if they get rid of (prominent anti-vaxxers), all the holdouts will rush to get vaccinated. The opposite is true. If you wipe out critics, people will immediately default to higher levels of suspicion. They will now be sure there’s something wrong with the vaccine. If you want to convince audiences, you have to allow everyone to talk, even the ones you disagree with. You have to make a better case.”
How can you help the cause of vaccination? Get vaccinated yourself. Appreciate the immense benefits the vaccines have conferred on humanity. But at the same time, acknowledge their shortcomings. We can let anti-vaxxers have their say without glorifying their beliefs and without demonstrating an arrogant dogmatism.
Heed the words of Albert Einstein: “Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.”
Above all, remember who the enemy really is — anti-vax campaigners don’t spread sickness and death. The virus does.
Cory Franklin is a retired physician.
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