Thursday, March 18, 2021

Avoiding vaccine panic

 

Last May, when COVID-19 vaccines were a dream, I researched and wrote a story for The Walrus on how COVID-19 vaccines would affect the anti-vax movement. Now that vaccines are here, so much of what was said to me then seems prophetic of the issues that would emerge. Here’s an extended quote (only partly published in The Walrus) from Noni MacDonald, professor of Paediatrics (Infectious Diseases) at Dalhousie University and the IWK Health Centre in Halifax.

I’m going to be careful how I use some of these words: none of these vaccines will be given approval for use in Canada without scrutiny, and I mean deep scrutiny, with the science that’s available, and a decision made that there’s adequate science to go forward. But none of these vaccines, just like most new drugs, will have be done on millions of people, and these vaccines will eventually be given to millions. There will be rare, and very rare side effects, that we didn’t know anything about in the pre-licensure trials, because we don’t put a million people in a pre-licensure trial. What we will need to ensure that people understand is that whatever gets licensed did have careful scrutiny pre-licensure, and post-licensure I am expecting them to put in place very significant surveillance programs to detect serious adverse events following immunization, and then careful scrutiny to see if it was due to the vaccine or not due to the vaccine. Can I do a parallel for you? Do you remember in Denmark when there was a big kerfuffle over the HPV vaccine, and their uptake [in 2014] went from 80% down to 40%, there was a big TV program about it? That [perceived adverse effect] was not due to the vaccine. Those were immunization stress-related responses. We see those in people when they’re being immunized. If I do something stressful to you, I can make you hyperventilate, I can make you have seizures. Other things can happen. They’re not due to the vaccine itself, they’re due to the act of being immunized. If we’re going to give a vaccine to as many people as we’re expecting to over a period of time, we will have many immunization stress-related responses. How well public health responds to this, how well it’s explained to the general public, how well they’ve prepared to prevent those reactions from happening, because there’s stuff you can do, all of that is going to make a huge difference in how that vaccine is seen. The complexity here is large.

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