Covid Endgame: government can’t let conspiracy-peddling anti-vaxxers undermine the campaign for vaccination

The UK has become the first country in the world to approve the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, setting us on the path for mass vaccination. The UK medicines regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, says the jab, which offers up to 95% protection against Covid-19 illness, is safe to be rolled out.

This is it. We’re taking the first tentative steps towards getting our lives back. Elderly people in care homes and care home staff are top of the priority list, followed by over-80s and health and care staff. Step by step, the British people will begin their long road to recovery. Get vaccinated, protect your community, save lives.

And yet, we didn’t even get to lunchtime on the day of the announcement before the anti-vaxxers were out in force spreading fear, misinformation and conspiracy theories. Once again, “Bill Gates” was trending on Twitter. I don’t know the full details of the theory about Gates: I think he wants to microchip us for some reason, or perhaps install Windows 10 in all our brains or something? Your guess is as good as mine.

Then came the “thalidomide” theme with clockwork predictability. To say this link is tenuous wouldn’t even be an understatement, but rather a total falsehood. There is no link. The two situations are not the same in any way. The morning sickness drug caused birth deformities and it has been weaponised as part of an anti-science campaign designed to undermine trust in experts. Anti-vaxxers have alternative facts and even have their own backers from the scientific and medical community that gives them a phoney veil of credibility.

Social media is full of grifters and eccentrics with qualifications (or at least claimed qualifications) that give them more credibility than your average wacky conspiracy theorist. There are even hundreds of NHS and care home staff who have formed a group called “NHS Workers for Choice, No Restrictions for Declining a Vaccine”. It includes a GP, accident and emergency nurses, healthcare assistants, lab workers, and private and public care home staff. The name of this group ostensibly suggests that it is defending conscientious, ethical, and evidence-based objections to vaccination – yet the Daily Mail reports that posts on the NHS Workers for Choice social media platforms have promoted conspiracy theories and compared the Pfizer vaccine to “poison”.

As I said earlier this month, the scepticism about vaccines goes beyond the hardcore conspiracy theorists. Most people don’t believe that there is a conspiracy to microchip the human race or some other grand scheme only a cartoon super villain could come up with. Most people with doubts are just anxious because of questions they can’t answer and information they don’t have access to.

One of the most pervasive doubts inspired by anti-vaxxers is the remarkable speed of development and trials of the vaccines. But often the development of vaccines is delayed by weighing up commercial considerations, working through red tape and getting over multiple barriers in the process. Those barriers are far easier to overcome when a pandemic needs resolving. Under these conditions, there is unlimited funding poured into the project of developing this particular vaccine. The world’s greatest expertise is mobilised rapidly alongside a global trial infrastructure and willing trial volunteers. The stakes are high and so the response – by governments and private companies – is swift.

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is killing people all over the world every day – with every tick and tock another life is lost. Human beings have an astounding capacity for innovation when it’s most needed. Rather than questioning the vaccine trials, we should be hailing them as a miracle and asking how we can now mobilise this new development for the good of humanity across the globe. That’s the real story here.

Mockery and ridicule can be legitimate tools, but they are an unwise way of addressing anti-vaxxers. We have to change minds and combat misinformation. This can’t be left to scientists or the medical community alone – they need help and resources. The government must launch a full scale public health information campaign to combat anti-vaxxer misinformation in ways that people can understand and identify with. There is no time to waste.