Anti-vaxxers may sing new tune by springtime

Perhaps there is some reason to be leery about receiving one of the new vaccines for COVID-19. Never before have scientists developed a drug to effectively prevent a disease in less than a year – a blazing sprint compared with the 10-year marathon that has been required to deliver vaccines for diseases like polio and the measles.

And yet here we are. The vaccine created by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech won approval more than a week ago for use in the United Kingdom and inoculations are well underway with a first-time supply of 40 million doses. Pfizer’s drug was expected to be approved this weekend for emergency use in our country, and doses will begin being deployed as soon as tomorrow.

The fact that the U.K. got a head start may not be a bad thing, because it doesn’t hurt to have another country act as your guinea pig. Of course Pfizer stands by the vaccine, which is reputed to be 95 percent effective when taken in two doses separated by about three weeks.

But … and this is a significant worry for some. What if the jab renders you sterile or turns you into an antenna for 5G wireless technology? Those are just two of the possible outcomes suggested by conspiracy theories that have blossomed across social media. Nor is the anti-vaccine movement constrained by political parties. It has reached people on both sides of the aisle with multiple versions of anti-vaccine messaging.

Much of the pushback has to do with health concerns, such as vaccines contain toxins or even the long-debunked conspiracy that they cause autism. There are also religious people who don’t feel the need for a vaccine because God will protect them. And then there is a conservative contingent that insists that the government encouragement of vaccination is thinly-disguised tyranny.

Of all the positions in the anti-vaxxer movement, perhaps none has a better argument for skepticism than people of color. In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service launched an experiment in search of a cure for syphilis. Known as the Tuskegee experiment, scientists recruited 600 Black men from Macon, Georgia, to be treated for what was euphemistically called “bad blood.”

Three hundred and ninety-nine of the men had latent syphilis, while the control group of 201 was disease free. Over the next 40 years the PHS recorded the progress of the disease in the test subjects without giving them any treatment. As you can imagine, the outcomes were unimaginable.

That horrible event in U.S. medical history gives us a clear understanding why some people would sooner the government put a gun to their head than a needle in their arm.

Current polling suggests that about 60 percent of Americans are willing to be vaccinated (scientists say the number needs to be closer to 70 percent to achieve herd immunity). It seems likely, however, that as the winter surge in cases edges closer to all of us, more are going to be willing to do almost anything – including transmitting 5G wireless signals from our skulls – to put an end to the suffering. In that anxious moment the anti-vaxxer movement may follow the Dodo bird to extinction.

*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from Uvalde Leader-News can be found here ***