On Sunday afternoon, it was confirmed that the UK had hit its target of giving a first dose of COVID-19 vaccine to 15 million people, covering those who most need it. A small number of those in the high priority groups have even had their second dose. Whichever way you cut it, it’s a staggering achievement from all involved – the scientists and pharmaceutical firms who created the life saving product, those who work on the logistics of distribution, and the healthcare staff doing the jabbing.
I received the first dose of vaccine last week. I came away from the experience at my nearby GP’s surgery far more emotional than I had envisaged. Seeing this great local, national, and international effort in action was profoundly moving.
Yet you wouldn’t know much of this from the sour-faced scientists who cannot wait to jump in front of a TV camera and tell us that we’re still going to be living with social distancing and the like for months, and maybe years, to come.
I understand the political need to temper optimism. I appreciate the government’s desire not to oversell any more – booster jabs are better than boosterism – but that’s not what these scientists are doing. For the best part of a year, we have been told the ultimate exit strategy from this nightmare is vaccines. Well, here they are. People are taking them up in great numbers, and the early evidence from Israel, which has had a similarly impressive vaccine rollout, is promising. As we hopefully start to see sustained reductions in death, hospitalisation and cases here, telling the public that it is still not enough to get our lives, businesses, and basic freedoms back doesn’t just grind down the national psyche, it risks undermining the entire vaccine programme.
Politicians across the spectrum are rightly reiterating the safety and efficacy of vaccines, including those from BAME communities uniting to try and encourage their peers to get jabbed. Meanwhile, too many scientists offer nothing but doom and gloom. Hearing Professor John Edmunds talking of “vaccine failures” ending up in “our morgues” hardly instils confidence, particularly in the communities already wary of being vaccinated. The resurrected Professor Neil Ferguson talking about ongoing social distancing, perhaps even into next year, makes it too easy to think “well what’s the point?” All of this jeopardises the immediate priority – getting vaccines into as many arms as quickly as possible. Vaccines are not just about saving life, they’re about being able to live it fully.
Expertise is essential in tackling any crisis, and so it is with COVID. We are lucky in this country to have such brilliance across medicine and other relevant fields like genome sequencing. But expertise is, by definition, highly focussed. It is for experts to feed in their knowledge, and elected politicians and their officials to use that information to form a bigger picture and make decisions.
There’s going to be a wobbly few weeks ahead as the government walks the tightrope of pushing cases down and reopening society. We are all going to need to call on any last reserves of patience to get through it. Scientists should be wary of testing that tolerance any further.