Don’t inject politics into vaccine policy
In recent years, the anti-vaccine movement in the United States has become something of a disease itself, finding willing hosts in both the conspiracy theorists of the right and Big Pharma doubters of the left.
In a CNN poll taken early this month, only about half of Americans said they would try to get a COVID-19 vaccine once one is available, a percentage that seems to have declined in the last five months.
This makes it vital that government officials not do anything to sew doubts about a COVID-19 vaccination that is needed to help the nation return to some sort of normalcy. And the only way to do that is to insist that all vaccines are thoroughly tested in clinical trials to make sure they are both safe and effective.
On this front, there is good news and bad news to report. The good news: This month, the Food and Drug Administration published guidelines requiring vaccine makers to monitor their clinical trial patients for a median duration of at least two months after administering their last dose. These two months are necessary to ensure that people don’t have delayed reactions to the vaccine.
The bad news: Getting to this step took work. The White House reportedly held up the guidelines, trying to finagle some politically motivated announcement before Election Day. And when science ultimately prevailed, President Donald Trump responded with an all-too-common snitfest. In a tweet he called the FDA guidelines a “political hit job.”
The FDA, which has approval authority for new vaccines, deserves credit for sticking up for principle in this case. But it, too, has taken some questionable actions under pressure from the White House.
First the agency authorized (and then revoked) emergency use of the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 patients. Then, in August, it granted emergency authorization for use of convalescent plasma as a treatment even though outside doctors said the evidence from trials was still somewhat ambiguous. It then further undermined its credibility by announcing its decision in political, not medical terms: “Another Achievement in Administration’s Fight Against Pandemic,” it said in a press release.
The FDA will be tested again in coming days as it is under political pressure to approve another type of treatment using so-called monoclonal antibodies. Eli Lilly and Regeneron both make such a treatment, and the latter was given to the president himself after he was diagnosed with COVID-19.
It is time to stop politically motivated discussions of vaccines and treatments. It is time to begin a sober and professional discussion of what lies ahead.
Late this year is the first time a vaccine could reach the point where enough volunteers have been tested, and for a long enough period, to deem the vaccine safe and effective. And even then there would be important decisions to be made. Who gets vaccinated first? Who gets what vaccines if multiple ones are available and have shown different effectiveness rates in clinical trials?
This nation will not be totally rid of COVID-19 until it reaches a threshold called “herd immunity,” when enough people are immune that the disease can’t find enough new hosts to infect and consequently wanes. The figure often given for COVID-19 is 70%.
To reach that figure will require some combination of vaccinated people and people who have been exposed to the virus and then recovered. Some unknown slice of the population might also have natural immunity or resistance.
A key variable is the effectiveness of the vaccine or vaccines; the lower the effective rate, the longer it will take to protect the population as a whole.
Sorting all of this out will require careful, responsible public health messaging. The coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed more than 214,000 American lives and is still going strong, is bad enough. Political grandstanding and anti-vax fearmongering will only make it worse.
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