The true tragedy of the Covid-19 vaccines

Vaccination is one of mankind’s most miraculous innovations. The eradication of smallpox, and the retreat of measles and other cruel afflictions, mean that vaccines rival sanitation for first prize in the saving of lives. New jabs against malaria and melanoma promise great benefits. All the more reason to worry that Covid vaccines may have tarnished the technology’s reputation.

Vaccines never have been without some side-effects and risks. They are harm-reduction interventions, not harm-elimination ones. Mistakes have been made in the past. Some polio jabs in the 1960s were contaminated with the monkey virus SV40. Vaccination campaigns in Africa that re-used needles may have helped spread HIV.

The Covid jabs developed in 2020 undoubtedly reduced the severity of the virus for vulnerable people and contributed to the defeat of the pandemic – though the evolutionary replacement of harmful variants by the milder omicron types may have been a bigger factor. But the vaccines were not as effective or as safe as we were led to believe at first.

Indeed, some public health officials exaggerated the benefits and underplayed some of the risks. Thrombosis caused by the AstraZeneca vaccine and myocarditis caused by the messenger-RNA vaccines of BioNTech and Pfizer have emerged as rare but serious side effects. 

The pandemic’s legacy now seems to include greater public mistrust of vaccines in general. Measles is on the rise. More people are refusing the MMR jab. A recent Unicef survey found that vaccine confidence had fallen in 52 out of 55 countries.

Who is responsible? Public health officials tend to blame antivaxx campaigners with lurid conspiracy theories about Bill Gates, and they are partly right. But perhaps they should also look in the mirror. Misinformation came from both sides, and by overpromising what the vaccines could do, and demanding vaccine mandates, many scientists and government officials contributed to scepticism.

For example, the US government tried to reassure people about messenger-RNA vaccines by implicitly criticising live vaccines like those used for measles: “The mRNA vaccines do not contain any live virus. Instead, they work by teaching our cells to make a harmless piece of a ‘spike protein’.” So, live vaccines are not “harmless”?

America’s leading infectious-disease expert, Anthony Fauci, said in May 2021 that vaccination “makes it extremely unlikely – not impossible, but very, very low likelihood – that they’re going to transmit it … In other words, you become a dead end to the virus.” That turned out to be wrong, as he later admitted, with the jab doing little to prevent reinfection and transmission.

Preventing transmission was the excuse used for vaccinating children, yet when that excuse evaporated, the policy continued. For young age groups, wrote a clutch of doctors in the BMJ in December 2021, “the harms of taking a vaccine are almost certain to outweigh the benefits”.

Authoritarianism made the problem worse. France criminalised criticism of vaccine mandates; Canada froze the bank accounts of truckers for protesting against them. Part of the reason governments were so reckless in forcing vaccines was probably that they wanted an exit from lockdowns, which were imposed for longer and more often than promised.

Some of us urged ministers not to claim too much for vaccines or pretend there would be no side effects as that would backfire. But the Government pressed ahead with mandates to prevent care-home workers going to work unless vaccinated. A study by doctors concluded: “Our data suggest that debate around mandates can arouse strong concerns and could entrench scepticism. Policymakers should proceed with caution.”

This was compounded by a baffling refusal to acknowledge that natural immunity from Covid itself had a role in protecting people. In 2020 a paper in The Lancet stated that “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection”. Yet we now know that it lasts longer and is more effective than the protection provided by a jab.

The backlash against vaccines will go too far. Italy’s former health minister Roberto Speranza, who imposed vaccine mandates, can no longer walk in a street without angry Italians calling him a murderer. But public health officials worldwide must concede that overblown claims and underestimated risks of the vaccines developed during Covid have hurt the reputation of a valuable medical technology.