Many people seem to be misinformed about basic facts relating to COVID-19 vaccines. I would know very little myself, if a friend of mine didn’t occasionally post links to articles. I suspect there are two main reasons for this:
- We’re all quite tired of this pandemic. There was a time when I kept up to date by reading articles, but nowadays it’s uncommon to have a conversation which doesn’t involve this virus, or an email that doesn’t begin with “health” or “difficult times”. I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to spend free time thinking about this stuff.
- People trust that the vaccine will be safe – “when it comes, I’ll take it”. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this line of reasoning in general (I take the medication prescribed to me by a doctor or relative) but if someone doesn’t think this way, you can only appeal to authority, which isn’t necessarily convincing.
I’m not a medical professional (or even especially well informed), so I won’t make any outrageous claims - just the basic facts about vaccines, which I’ve seen people get wrong. Let’s begin!
“The vaccine”
There are multiple vaccines! They have been developed by different institutions, and don’t all work in the same way. Vaccines aren’t inherently dangerous, so if given a vaccine does have bad side effects it’s because the manufacturer either (1) used a new/untested method, or (2) botched the design/fabrication of an otherwise reliable vaccine.
If you want a seemingly complete list, see the WHO’s “draft landscape and tracker of COVID-19 candidate vaccines”. There are over 100 vaccine developers on that list, using (as I understand it) 10 different methods. If you want to learn more, Wikipedia has a COVID-19 vaccine page, where they list some of the vaccine types (also known as “platforms”).
This makes vaccines difficult to write about. I’m not an expert, so I’ll say generally when I state something which I have seen to always be true, but am not certain that there isn’t some exception.
The main three vaccine developers are Johnson & Johnson, Moderna and Pfizer. The first works via adenovrius and the latter two use mRNA. I’ll use this very accessible article, which describes those three vaccines, for the next few sections.
“It doesn’t work”
The vaccines aren’t generally binary “works or it doesn’t” things. To quote the previous article:
How well the shots prevent illnesses:
Moderna: 94.1% effective at preventing symptomatic infections, 100% effective at preventing severe infections, after two doses.
Pfizer: 95% effective at preventing symptomatic infections, nearly 100% effective at preventing severe infections (only one case among more than 18,000 vaccinated individuals in the trials), after two doses.
Johnson & Johnson: 66% effective at preventing moderate to severe infections, 85% effective at preventing severe infections, after a single dose.
Note: A J&J executive said its shot may have shown a lower level of efficacy because it was tested at a time when higher levels of the virus, including variants that may evade vaccines, were circulating.
Note the variety in results, because the vaccines aren’t all the same. The takeaway: watch out for binary statements, even for a single vaccine.
“Okay, but it doesn’t work against variants”
If someone says “it doesn’t work against the South African variant” your first response should be suspicion. For example, the J&J vaccine is 57% effective against it. That article highlights how the effectiveness isn’t a constant value – it changes depending on what exactly is being measured (eg. mild vs severe symptoms) and where it’s being studied (Latin America, South Africa, USA, …).
“They require 2 shots 28 days apart”
Well, some of them do. Some of them don’t. See the the quote block in the previous section, or section 4 of the WHO “draft landscape” document mentioned previously. However, to quote this article again:
How you take them:
- Moderna: two shots in the arm, given 28 days apart.
- Pfizer: two shots in the arm, given 21 days apart.
- Johnson & Johnson: one shot in the arm.
This article mentions that (highlights my own and a few sentences are removed):
According to Pfizer data published in December 2020, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is roughly 52% effective after the first dose. […] However, this early protection comes with some important caveats. First, the protection doesn’t kick in until at least day 12 – until then, there was no difference between the two groups. Secondly, one dose is still significantly less protective than two. The latter is 95% effective at preventing the disease after a week.
The article goes on to mention some disputed calculations, so I’m hesitant to state that those are the correct numbers. The takeaway is that they are generally partially effective after the first dose, and take some time to be effective.
“They need to be kept very cold” or “they expire very quickly”
Well, some of them do. Some of them don’t. I’ll stop repeating myself, but from this article again:
How long hospitals and clinics can store it in the fridge
- Moderna: 30 days.
- Pfizer: 5 days.
- Johnson & Johnson: 3 months.
“An elderly person took the vaccine and died shortly afterwards”
This is very tragic and could of course be because of the vaccine – I won’t try to dispute a case I haven’t read about in detail. However, ask yourself:
- Did the person get sick in the period after getting vaccinated, but before the vaccine would be effective?
- Could they have been misinformed about the vaccine, and been more reckless in a time when they weren’t sick?
- Did others in the same place (for example, an old age home) also die, when they didn’t get the vaccine?
It’s not my intention to blame/gas light COVID victims, and I hope those questions don’t come across that way. The questions are meant to establish whether “they were killed by the vaccine” is indeed the most likely explanation.
To quote my favourite article:
How long it takes for protection to kick in:
- Moderna: some protection from infection begins 10-14 days after first shot, with full protection achieved two weeks after the second shot.
- Pfizer: some protection from infection begins 10-14 days after first shot, with full protection achieved one week after the second shot.
- Johnson & Johnson: some protection from infection begins as early as 14 days after the shot, with full protection measured 28 days after the jab. That protection may get even better as time goes on, though, as zero Covid-19 cases were reported in patients who’d been vaccinated for 49 days or more.
The last sentence (highlight my own) really shows how complex this stuff is! Be skeptical of statistics without a ton of context!
“They rushed the trials”
The vaccines have been developed and put through trial in record time, which certainly does sound worrying. The previous record (from viral sampling to approval) was four years for mumps in the 1960s. So, how have these been developed and approved so quickly?
There are a number of factors which go into this explanation:
- This ain’t our first rodeo. Vaccines are continually being better understood over time, so developing COVID-19 vaccines was (in many cases) a matter of tuning an existing vaccine. Researchers have been studying related coronaviruses for years! In some ways, we have been quite lucky about the timing of this whole ordeal.
- Do things in parallel. There are multiple steps to getting a vaccine approved. If you fail on the first test, doing the following tests would be a waste of time and money. So, stages are generally done one after another. As mentioned here: “the slowest part of vaccine development isn’t finding candidate treatments, but testing them”. One can do the steps in parallel (for example, by doing a large scale test on thousands of people at the same time as a more detailed small scale study). If the vaccine passes both tests – great! If it fails on the small one – you just wasted a bunch of money as the large test could have been avoided. In this particular case, vaccine developers decided to take the risk. The reason: huge amounts of funding. In fact, manufacturing for vaccines began at the same time as trials.
- Work together. Increased cooperation among researchers was apparently another large factor. The article mentions that
“National regulators also swapped information on COVID-19 vaccine trials under the auspices of a global body called the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities, set up in 2012.”
Interestingly, the article also states:
“In the final stages of trials, it helped that COVID-19 was everywhere because firms need infections to show that vaccines work. It’s hard to run efficacy trials when the diseases themselves aren’t prevalent – especially, says Dean, in cases such as MERS, for which outbreaks of disease were patchy, with peaks in some areas and low infection rates in others.”
“Everyone is saying it’s fine”
Ugh, a pet peeve of mine is actors or other cool people telling you to take the vaccine without backing up why you should believe them. I find it super annoying – it’s a religion-style “trust me”, and I suspect it actually contributes towards distrust of vaccines. Anyway.
“So you’re saying that it’s safe?”
Note to self: Stop saying “it”! There are multiple vaccines!
NO! I’m not telling you that the vaccines are all safe. We live in a world where corruption is real and mistakes happen.
For instance, the (one?) antibody test is less accurate on women than it is on men (tweet, non-paywalled paper). If a woman told me that, based on facts like that, she will wait to take the vaccine until she’s heard confirmation that it won’t have adverse effects on her, I would say “sure, that makes sense”. (If you think that’s silly, listen to this podcast or read this article).
My point isn’t that the vaccines aren’t safe for women (as far as I can tell, the leading ones have been tested on many female volunteers) – my point is that some people take the stance of “assumed safe until proven dangerous”, while others (perhaps non-white/non-male/minorities) have every right to assume a given vaccine is dangerous until proven otherwise. Those people should be armed with facts, and helped to see that they can research this stuff themselves. The articles I linked to have sections which are difficult for us laypeople to understand, but are otherwise very comprehensible.
Maybe you take the a vaccine, maybe you don’t. Whatever you do, do it for good reasons! And being too lazy to do the research is not a good reason!