One year ago, we knew little about COVID-19 and what could be done to combat it. Now, millions of people around the globe have received vaccines meant to counter the worst aspects of the virus. The speed of response has been truly miraculous.
Alongside these advancements has been a sense of caution, and rightly so. While it’s appropriate to be careful, the tendency to fearmonger and demand perfection still lingers.
The latest concerns deal with vaccines, which are the best tools to fight infection and move closer to herd immunity. While the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is under review by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, fears about certain variants, including the powerful South African variant, continue to spread.
Whether collective anxiety is a response to the virus, vaccines, or variants, fueling it harms the overall mission of ending the pandemic.
No matter the scientific achievement behind the COVID-19 vaccines, they were never going to be perfect. This is true of any medical answer to a serious health problem. The vaccines are highly effective against preventing very serious illness and hospitalization. As the CDC plainly notes on its website, “Some people who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 will still get sick because no vaccine is 100% effective.”
Yet, some people seem to be confused when what health professionals have stated will occur actually does, in fact, take place. Articles such as “NYC man tests positive for COVID two weeks after Johnson & Johnson vaccine” and “Since January, 142 Houstonians tested positive for COVID 14 days after being fully vaccinated, data shows” only contribute to anti-vaccine paranoia. Never mind that buried within these, and many other articles, doctors state that it is possible to get COVID-19 after being fully vaccinated. The headlines do enough damage, and in the social media age, they spread like wildfire.
This week, federal health agencies recommended states pause the use of the Johnson & Johnson one-dose vaccine until more is known about rare side effects. Of the approximately 7 million Johnson & Johnson doses administered, six recipients, all women, have developed life-threatening blood clots. The European rollout of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has also been halted until further notice.
But on Thursday, information from a study done at Oxford University was released, showing that the risk of developing a blood clot is actually much higher in those who contract COVID-19 compared to those who receive one of the vaccines. It also shows that the blood clot risk isn’t isolated to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine:
The research released by Oxford on Thursday found that about 39 of every 1 million people who contract COVID-19 are likely to experience the clots on the brain.
Anyone who is interested in receiving a COVID-19 vaccine should personally weigh the risk versus the reward. Individual health factors are certainly at play and should inform their choice. Unfortunately, there is a heightened sense of fear about most everything right now, even our best defenses. Living in the midst of a pandemic breeds a certain type of wariness. This results in media-fueled speculation that, upon further review, should just be a commonsense precaution.
The Johnson & Johnson pause has caused more people to become vaccine-hesitant, according to a YouGov poll. Before the pause, 26% of respondents said they thought the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was unsafe. After the pause, the number jumped to 39%.
Despite the concerns over rare but serious side effects or variants, the vaccines still remain the best mechanism to battle a virus that continues to infect and kill. But as we’ve seen in the last 13 months, panic, disinformation, and even a demand for unattainable perfection sells when facing the critical and unknown.
Kimberly Ross (@SouthernKeeks) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog and a columnist at Arc Digital.
