Anti-vaccine sentiment hinders efforts

While the United Kingdom is at the forefront of Europe's novel coronavirus vaccine rollout targeting an end to the damaging effects of COVID-19, anti-vaccination sentiment risks undoing that work, British medical experts have warned.

A social media-fuelled storm of misinformation and confusion is running rife, falsely claiming that 5G mobile phone signals either transmit the virus or reduce defence against it, and that the pandemic is a grand plan led by global corporations to implant microchips into humans along with a COVID-19 vaccine.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, great hope has been placed on vaccine rollout to help countries return to normalcy. The growing anti-vaccination movement could possibly block the pathway out of the pandemic.

David Strain, who is a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter Medical School and head of the academic department for healthcare for older adults, said COVID-19 vaccination uptake needs to be high because of the reproduction rate, known as the R number.

A non-random vaccination program, targeting high-risk groups such as vulnerable older people, would need 80 percent of the population to be inoculated to be effective, he added. A randomized program would require closer to 87 percent to have the jab.

In response to the false claims made by conspiracy theorists, Strain said, "Part of me wants to take them for a walk around my ward. Before this all started, having a death on the ward was an uncommon occurrence, that would trigger a moment of quiet reflection. Now we are seeing as many in a week as I saw in my first five years as a consultant.'"

Parveen Kumar, chair of the British Medical Association's board of science, said: "We need to act quickly and firmly against these narratives, and we need to tell people the truth: that immunization is good for you."

Yet, hesitancy about the COVID-19 vaccine is still disproportionately high. Research by You-Gov following Pfizer's effective vaccine announcement in November showed that 21 percent were unlikely to take the vaccine when it became available, and 12 percent were unsure.

In a survey by King's College London and Ipsos MORI earlier in the pandemic, in July 2020, 22 percent of 16 to 34-year-olds said they were unlikely to have a COVID-19 vaccine or definitely would not, compared with 11 percent of 55 to 75-year-olds.

Despite this trend, ambitions for COVID-19 vaccination coverage need to be high, said Strain. "With COVID, we are seeing patients in their 40s and 50s dying and young patients, people in their 20s and 30s getting long COVID. We want to get COVID wiped out or near zero, so we have to make this work."

According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the total English-language audience for so-called anti-vaxxers online has grown significantly in the past year and now stands at 59 million followers.

However, Ian Jones, a professor of virology at the University of Reading, is confident that anti-vax sentiment will recede in the face of clear scientific evidence and he believes their view will shrink further as rollout continues and the infection numbers are brought under control.

"Based on the numbers so far immunized, already 4 million, takeup has been good with the anti-vaccine debate all but silenced. People clearly want the vaccine," he said.

Jones cited British biologist Charles Darwin's comment, which he describes as particularly apt for those with anti-vax views: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."