Venkat Raman
Auckland, October 26, 2021
It is time to ignore conspiracy theories and get the jab
Photo by Andriy-Onufriyenko (Getty Images)[/caption]
The magic number today is 90.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, prompted by her Cabinet Ministers and Health officials, has said that New Zealanders will be able to carry on their normal activities once the District Health Boards individually achieve 90% Vaccination Rate.
Abandoning her earlier stance of elimination, Ms Ardern has made a compromise, tacitly agreeing that with a majority of the population vaccinated, the danger from Covid-19 and its variants will wane, improving public health.
Even as the government continues its persuasive campaigns appealing to the people to get themselves vaccinated, with the process simplified, it has had to contend with conspiracy theorists and vaccine-hesitant. Both are not necessarily the same,; while the former are wedded to the opinion that ‘vaccination is an invasion of their body’ and that ‘they have the right not to be vaccinated,’ the latter are necessarily against inoculation but would like to wait and see. Included among these are people who would like to have a vaccine that is an alternative to Pfizer Vaccine.
David Robinson, a Science Journalist, has no doubt that Covid-19 vaccines are saving lives.
Quoting a study tracking more than 200,000 people, he said that nearly every single participant had developed antibodies against the virus within two weeks of their second dose. And despite initial worries that the current vaccines may be less effective against the Delta variant, analyses suggest that both the AstraZeneca and the Pfizer-BioNTech jabs reduce hospitalisation rates by 92-96%.
“As many health practitioners have repeated, the risks of severe side effects from a vaccine are tiny in comparison to the risk of the disease itself,” he said.
Yet a sizeable number of people are still reluctant to get the shots. According to a recent report by the International Monetary Fund, that ranges from around 10-20% of people in the UK to around 50% in Japan and 60% in France.
In New Zealand, that number could be small but critical to reaching 90% Vaccination.
As Mr Robinson said, the result is becoming something of a culture war on social media, with many online commentators claiming that the vaccine-hesitant are simply ignorant or selfish. “But psychologists who specialise in medical decision-making argue that these choices are often the result of many complicating factors that need to be addressed sensitively if we are to have any hope of reaching population-level immunity,” he said.
Mr Robinson has explained our point about the vaccine-hesitant.
“While it is tempting to assume that anyone who refuses a vaccine holds the same beliefs, the fears of most vaccine-hesitant people should not be confused with the bizarre theories of staunch anti-vaxxers,” he said.
Mohammad Razai, Research Fellow at the Population Health Research Institute at St George’s University of London said that “these people are very vocal and they have a strong presence offline and online. But they are a very small minority.”
According to the Economist, demonstrations have become common not just in Britain, but all over the world. The pandemic has produced a tsunami of misinformation.
“In France, a documentary alleging that covid-19 was invented by political elites as part of a conspiracy to bring about a “new world order” was watched 2.5 million times in three days. In America, the notion that covid is a hoax has spread alongside a collection of feverish theories known as “QAnon,” which hold that the government is run by a secret cabal of paedophiles and that Donald Trump is a saviour destined to defeat them.”
This is, in short, a golden age of conspiracy theories. The internet makes it easier than ever to spread them.
Social media is rife with posts disparaging the vaccine-hesitant – but these reactions to a complex and nuanced issue are doing more harm than good.
