Vaccine joy masks harm done by restrictions
The cavalry has arrived in the shape of an easily distributable, cheap and effective vaccine, thanks to the joint endeavours of Oxford University and AstraZeneca. The biomedical sciences have behaved in precisely the manner that you might expect. Throughout the 20th century, medical advancements allowed humanity, time and time again, to live with terrible infectious diseases, polio, smallpox and HIV. We now have Covid-19 in our sights.
Today’s announcement fires the starting gun on a mass vaccination programme throughout the UK. Indeed, the conclusion of the European epidemic, which has been one of the world’s most devastating, is predicated on the approval and speedy distribution of the Oxford vaccine. An array of Western states, and the EU, have made a huge bet on its efficacy. That gamble appears, so far, to be paying off.
Various arguments have played out over the dosage schedules and the structure of the trials – were the results comparable? What protection is delivered after a single shot? – and yet, the salient point is surely that no one was hospitalised with Covid-19 who received the vaccine. We can now look forward to a point when hospital capacity can be managed in such a way that those who most need it can get the best care. The epidemic will then become a second or third order issue. It will fade away.
In political terms, if all goes well with the distribution phase, we might again believe in that innovative spirit of the mid-20th century when several devastating infectious diseases were eradicated. We might again believe in the value of what JFK, in his inaugural address, articulated as the “struggle against the common enemies of man.” And in time we may sincerely invoke “the wonders of science instead of its terrors.” For the pandemic has exposed its terrors too – especially in the form of an astonishing and virtually unprecedented collision of political authoritarianism with the speculations of leading mathematical modellers.
Camus, in his novel The Plague, voiced scepticism, towards the end of the fictionalised epidemic, that “plague can come and go without changing anything in men’s hearts.” The town of Oran “locks down” to keep the plague in and to prevent it spreading elsewhere. We locked down to try and keep it out. And we did so for many months on a national scale, preserving unprecedented restrictions on the nation’s activities even when cases dropped to virtually nil over the summer. In doing so, we hammered the life chances of the working poor in this country.
The harms of applying extreme restrictions designed to prevent a single disease are felt particularly acutely in Africa. Malaria deaths are set to increase for the first time in decades, according to the WHO, because of disruption in access to antimalarial treatments. Children under the age of five account for the majority of deaths from malaria.
We should herald the beginning of a new phase in the pandemic and applaud the British contribution, but we should also think very carefully and clearly over the next few months and years about what disease does to “men’s hearts,” and what changes we have wrought on our own societies. These are questions the biomedical sciences cannot give us a good answer to – but at least, they can afford us the time and the capacity to reflect, to celebrate and, eventually, to move on.