Why are coronavirus vaccines – a success story in human innovation – viewed so negatively?

Name: Global Covid-19 death toll hits 4 million as WHO says vaccines ‘surest way to prevent more deaths’
Uploaded: 2021-07-16T01:30:19.000Z
Duration: 3 min 51 s
Description: Global Covid-19 death toll hits 4 million as WHO says vaccines ‘surest way to prevent more deaths’

The arrival of multiple highly effective and overwhelmingly safe inoculations has been accompanied by warnings and fears

Experts say some perspective has been lost – not only did the jabs arrive in record time, they are also a way out of the pandemic

Reading Time:5 minutes

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A vial of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine being used at Gleneagles hospital in Singapore. Photo: Reuters

John Power

Published: 9:30am, 16 Jul 2021Updated: 1:56pm, 16 Jul 2021

Health authorities paused vaccine roll-outs and told younger people to avoid certain jabs over extremely rare side effects. Experts warned of soaring Covid-19 cases in even highly vaccinated countries such as Britain and Israel. Studies sounded the alarm about the jabs being less effective against virus variants, and vaccine makers raised the need for boosters to ensure people remained protected.

A year ago, many experts thought the arrival of a Covid-19 vaccine could take years – if it happened at all. As recently as August, World Health Organization (WHO) director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned the pandemic “silver bullet” of a vaccine might never come.

And yet, the arrival of multiple highly effective and overwhelmingly safe vaccines in record time has been accompanied by a deluge of warnings, caveats and dire prognostications that have served to emphasise the ways in which the jabs – like any medical intervention – are not absolutely perfect or free of risk.

Siddharth Sridhar, a clinical virologist at Hong Kong University (HKU), said this time last year it would have been impossible to imagine being so “spoilt for choice” with vaccines.

“The messaging needs to be simple: vaccines work at keeping people with Covid-19 alive and they do this wonderfully well,” said Sridhar, who criticised the “paralysing” and “non-stop” public discussion about variables such as whether vaccines stopped transmission, not just severe disease, or worked against the variants.

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Global Covid-19 death toll hits 4 million as WHO says vaccines ‘surest way to prevent more deaths’

It’s a degree of negativity that is out of proportion with either the risks or limitations of vaccines, according to some experts, and threatens to undermine efforts to save lives and get societies back to normal life.

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