A FOAF asked a logical question, about what would happen if half of the population who could receive the Covid-19 vaccines declined to?
That’s a good and logical question, but judging from the breadth of responses to that question, what is likely to happen is not well understood. I figured I’d rough out an outline for everyone else.
Qualifications time: I’m a biology professor at a small college, and my particular subject specialties are microbiology and immunology. A good chunk of my teaching touches upon the fields of epidemiology and public health. I came to teaching after a 20-year career in biology research labs, both academic and corporate. I am not the expert on this topic, but I know an absolute ton about it.
So, what will happen if half of the population that can take one of the coronavirus vaccines turn it down?
Well, without blanket vaccination (i.e. 80-90+% uptake in a given community), COVID-19 will not go away. Quite literally, it will hang around and continue to plague us for years.
There are two pieces of evidence to support this. First, we know that there is some portion of the populace who has had COVID-19 without suffering any symptoms; these people will serve as infection sources for everybody else. Second, there is a significant (and rising) number of people who are suffering from reinfections with SARS-nCoV-2; natural immunity arising from dealing with the infection once, for reasons yet undetermined, is not sustained as we expect for normal infections. We have seen factors like these before, the first is called a “carrier state” (the most famous example of which is “Typhoid Mary”), and the second is observed with another pernicious virus, measles.
Combine these two facts, and we will (if we don’t already) get individuals repeatedly suffering from coronaviral infections without being aware of their infectious state, and these people will act as super-spreaders. The infection WILL reach those parts of the population we most fear for: the elderly, the immunocompromised, the newborns. The fact that we do not yet have vaccines approved for children under the age of 16 already means we are facing an uphill battle with eradicating this virus.
Someone on the original post made a comment about how the COVID-19 virus will evolve to being no worse than a head cold. After all, that’s why smallpox is no longer around, we all developed immunity to the weak, mildly annoying version of the virus!
(Seriously. That’s what the commenter claimed. The ignorance in that comment is… stunning. And racist and classist, to boot.)
One, it is a matter of public record that the reason the human race has eliminated natural smallpox infections is because of an amazing international collaboration that saw a global vaccination campaign reach to every corner of our planet, into every country, and provided vaccines for an entire generation, and in some places, two or three generations. Modern science and medicine actively stamped out smallpox infections through vaccination, not because the virus evolved into a less damaging strain (as late as the 1950s, the World Health Organization records indicate that smallpox infection killed up to 50 million people per year).
Two, while yes, we have seen many pathogens evolve, over decades or centuries or millennia, into less damaging forms that we can live with (who knows how the common cold rhinovirus first started out?), and we have seen evidence that SARS-nCoV-2 is already evolving (check the news for the B117 variant), there is so far no evidence that COVID-19 is becoming less damaging. It is becoming more infectious, which means that the risk of infection is going UP globally, and that many, many more people are going to die from this coronavirus before we get enough people vaccinated and protected against it. I draw your attention back to measles, which humanity has been dealing with for at least a thousand years, and note that it is nowhere less lethal or damaging in modern populations.
So, long story short: if you are capable of receiving the vaccine, GET IT as soon as possible. You will be doing yourself, your friends and family, your community, and the entire human race, a favor.
