Nearly every time you open a newspaper, visit YouTube or even just open your phone, you are likely to be confronted with an article admonishing the “vaccine-hesitant” to get vaccinated.
For instance, the Portsmouth Herald featured a Tribune News Service article by Paul Sisson titled “Misinformation stalls vaccination.” Others bemoan that “Not enough NH residents vaccinated to achieve herd immunity” in letters to the editor.
Dr. Fieseher, retired MD from Dover, scolds “the large percentage of vaccine deniers and doubters” along with the “minority communities and Trump Republicans” who have resisted the unceasing pressure to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
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For some people, getting vaccinated is an excellent choice. For example, my parents who live in York are both over 80, and I am grateful for and supportive of their fully vaccinated status. But for other people, the decision is not so clear-cut.
Is COVID-19 vaccine “hesitancy” rational? I think it is. The COVID-19 vaccine refusniks that I know (and I know a LOT of them) are VERY well educated on the topic and quite rational and articulate about their reasons for making a personal health choice against the COVID-19 vaccine.
It comes down to weighing the potential benefits against the potential risks, and this calculation is different for everybody. Dr. Fieseher further proclaimed the hesitant to be resisting a “vaccine that will save their own life, the lives of their loved ones and the lives of their neighbors.” But is that really the case? Are my loved ones and neighbors REALLY at serious risk of dying from COVID-19?
While some people ARE at risk, the New Hampshire data does not support applying this broad assertion across the general population.
When I wrote this letter, there were 98,791 identified cases of COVID-19 in New Hampshire, a handful of which are still active. Since many positive test results were associated with people with no symptoms, it is reasonable to assume there were even more cases than the official number suggests, which would skew the recovery rate higher, but let’s stick with what we know.
Of the known cases, 97,013 recovered—a rate of 98.2% —which does not account for the high likelihood that all the currently active cases (425) will recover too, leading to an even higher recovery rate. 1,353 deaths were tragically recorded, 894 of which were among people already in long-term care settings.
If you subtract out the long-term care deaths, the recovery rate in New Hampshire is 99.1%. This does not seem like an existential public health crisis to many rational thinkers, and that includes me.
Some studies, such as the recent one by the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis published May 24 in the journal Nature, suggest that mild cases of COVID-19 leave those infected with lasting antibody protection and that repeated bouts of illness are likely to be uncommon.
In other words, 97,000 people across New Hampshire may have no need to be immunized because they already possess naturally acquired immunity which may provide as good or even better protection than the vaccine does. “What we found is that everyone who had been confirmed to have been infected by the virus, even people who had no symptoms whatsoever, made a really nice antibody response. And they all made antibodies that kept the virus from infecting cells.
What we also found is that everyone maintains those antibodies for as long as we’ve been able to look,” explained Dr. Deepta Bhattachayra, Associate Professor of Immunobiology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine.
The science on this is still emerging, but it’s reasonable to assume that the acquired immunity mechanism works for COVID the way it does for virtually all other viruses and that those who recover from COVID-19 are protected from future infection of that same virus because their immune systems learned how to beat it.
This is why older people catch fewer colds than younger people do – the immune system of the older people leaps into action immediately when a cold virus enters the body, and it is wiped out before symptoms emerge because their immune system has encountered that particular virus before.
Younger immune systems have to learn how to beat a “novel” cold virus and while it is learning to do so, cold symptoms emerge. Eventually, the young immune system figures out the key, and the cold disappears, never to come back. As with cold virus variants, acquired immunity doesn’t protect you from everything, but neither does vaccines—hence the concept of “booster” shots.
When you count all those who recovered from COVID-19, our immunity rate is much higher than the vaccination rate. I think the immunity rate is a more important metric.
For all of us, there are but two main choices: to get vaccinated or not. On one side is the risk of not getting vaccinated and subsequently contracting the virus. Based on the NH public data, the risk of death from this decision is nine-tenths of one percent, skewed towards those with a comorbidity such as obesity.
If you fall into a risk category, you should get vaccinated. More commonly, the worst-case outcome of this path is a week of feeling crummy, which was exactly how I personally experienced COVID-19 when I contracted it back in April. (For those worried, I have great news—I’m 100% recovered!).
It is generally agreed that the young and the healthy face virtually no risk of death from COVID-19, so what the vaccine protects this segment against is—at worst—a week of feeling rotten.
The CDC says the percentage of survival for ages 19 and under is 99.997%. Why would a parent want to vaccinate their child with an experimental vaccine for a virus from which they have a 99.997% chance of recovery? Most of the kids who contract COVID-19 won’t even know it. Forcing such a vaccine onto a segment that faces no risk from the virus they are ostensibly being protected against is ethically questionable, at best.
On the other side of this equation is the risk of getting the vaccine and experiencing an adverse reaction in the short term (the most common of which is a few days of feeling rotten following the second dose) or an unanticipated side effect over the long term, of which much speculation abounds. The risk of these outcomes is also quite low but much harder to quantify.
mRNA vaccines are new, and long-term studies of their effects in humans simply don’t exist. The COVID-19 vaccines on the market today are technically still experiments, approved under emergency use authorization only. These vaccines may well prove to be as safe and effective as the many other vaccines I have personally taken, and I hope they do. But today, this status is still only hoped for; it is NOT proven.
One risk the vaccine-hesitant regularly cite is that of antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE).
ADE means that vaccinated subjects become more susceptible to infection rather than less so, which is a scary prospect. For vaccine-induced enhanced susceptibility to infection with certain viruses like feline coronavirus, Dengue virus, and feline immunodeficiency virus, it has been shown that antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) plays an important role.
It is simply unknown at this point whether the COVID-19 vaccine will make us more susceptible to coronavirus variants in the future or invulnerable to them since those variants have not yet emerged. I hope it is the latter, but hope is not “settled science.” The hesitant would rather see this worked out more definitively before they sign up because you cannot go back once you have ADE. More vulnerability could lead to more need for “booster” vaccines, and so on ad infinitum.
The CDC has said that fully vaccinated are fully protected for all intents and purposes and don’t need to care what other people do anymore. Intuitively this should also be true for the COVID-19 recovered, but the CDC is strangely silent towards the 33 million Americans who fall into this category.
Whether I get vaccinated against COVID-19 or not is a “me problem,” not a “we problem” or a “you problem.” If you are vaccinated or immune, you don’t need to care about my status AT ALL. The vaccines work and naturally acquired immunity works too. I can be me, and you can be you. If you are worried about catching COVID-19 still, Walmart and many other places have walk-in vaccinations with no waiting. There is no excuse not to be vaccinated if you want to be. There is also no reason to get vaccinated if you don’t want to be. Both sides can live together in perfect harmony and not affect the other.
Gimmicks such as free fishing licenses, donuts, or baseball and lottery tickets will not make a difference to the vaccine-hesitant who I know because those things have NOTHING to do with the decision. The problem is not “misinformation,” lack of information, lack of billboards at NASCAR events, or lack of access. At this point, we all have access to as much information as we could need and access to our choice of vaccine if we want it. The right to say “no” is also a choice that is defending and respecting.
Alan Forbes is the Chairman of the Portsmouth Republican Committee and a founding member of the Protect New Hampshire group. Opinions are his own. Check us out at http://portsmouthNHGOP.com
