#BTColumn – The need to be vaccinated

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today Inc.

by Sir Henry Fraser

With the raging co-epidemic of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and fake news, I’ve been asked to present an update and evidence-based advice on the absolute necessity of getting vaccinated to prevent COVID.

Did you know that breakthrough COVID-19 infections are rare in fully vaccinated people, and far less than the initial large trials suggested, now that they have been given to so many millions of people?

The trials and post-development monitoring are the largest ever in modern therapeutic development.

Vaccines are highly effective at preventing infection, although none are 100 per cent protective. But even when a rare breakthrough occurs, the vaccine is still overwhelmingly effective, preventing severe illness, and protecting people from needing to be hospitalised, or ventilated or dying.

What is very disturbing is that half of our QEH nurses haven’t been vaccinated and not all of our doctors. This is surprising and dangerous, given the proven efficacy and only very rare serious side effects of the vaccine, not to mention the risks to the health care workers, their patients and their families if they have not been fully vaccinated.

The Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas was the first to require staff to be vaccinated against Covid and 99 per cent of 26,000 health workers received their jabs.

(Only about 100 of them are suing, claiming they are being forced into being guinea pigs – albeit healthy guinea pigs!) Other hospitals, British hospital trusts, care homes and others appear to be following this lead.

Hospital leaders say it’s not illegal for health-care institutions to mandate immunisation.

“As health-care workers, it’s our sacred obligation to do whatever we can to protect our patients, who are the most vulnerable,” the CEO of Houston Methodist told the Washington Post.

“We proudly stand by our employees AND our mission to protect our patients.”

The precedent for mandatory vaccination (especially for health workers) is the Massachussetts’ Law of 1905, mandating vaccination for small pox, or payment of a substantial fine.

The law was clear at that time – the public good and the public health took precedence over the individual’s right to choose. And with our slow take up of vaccines, with only a quarter of adults fully vaccinated, we’re
far from the numbers needed to emerge from the pandemic.

The much-hyped up clots (thrombi) have occurred at a rate of just over 300 in over 30 million Astra Zeneca vaccines, or one in a hundred thousand.

The usual frequency of clots or thrombi in the adult population is a hundred times that, while the death rate from COVID is 3,000 in a hundred thousand. And the chronic or “Long COVID” affects more than one in ten patients.

Long COVID patients suffer for three to six months, with symptoms including severe long-lasting fatigue and malaise, brain fog, depression and suicidal thoughts, muscle and joint pains, sleep disturbances, migraines, chest pain, skin rashes, panic attacks and lasting damage to the heart, lungs and brain. Incapacitating fatigue may last six months or more. So why would anyone risk not being vaccinated?

In Barbados immunisation in childhood and infancy has eliminated all major infectious disease and saved thousands of lives, since the 1950s because more than 99 per cent of all Barbadians under 55 are fully immunised. How did this come about?

The wise public health doctors Sir Maurice Byer and Sir Frank Ramsey introduced mandatory immunisation of children for entry into primary school.

The schedule is a complete one, starting with the DPT (for diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus) in infants at two months.

Diphtheria was a killer, but since the vaccine was introduced it virtually disappeared in short order, although it has recurred in unvaccinated children in South America. Pertussis or whooping cough was horribly infectious and debilitating. Schools often closed, as with Covid lockdown. Tetanus killed almost every victim.

Tetanus toxoid was introduced a century ago, and virtually eliminated tetanus in the USA, except for a few cases in the unvaccinated. When I came home in 1977 we had a desperately ill patient or a death almost every month, in older people not immunised. This no longer occurs.

Today our children are also protected from polio (which disabled Caribbean children in 1951), haemophilus, pneumococcus, measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox and HPV, all of which conditions can be fatal. Measles was eliminated in the Caribbean, the first region in the world to achieve this.

Outbreaks are recurring in unvaccinated children in the USA and South America. Rubella causes severe problems in unborn infants but is now a threat of the past.

Our children are blessed by the multiple miracles of vaccination. So why are people playing Russian roulette with COVID? One of the many lies of anti-vaccinators is that the mortality rate is less than that of ’flu, and some lay people believe it.

In fact, COVID’s mortality rate is about 40 times greater than ’flu, much more in countries with poor health care; and ’flu rarely kills anyone but the very elderly.

The word is also put out by strange and perhaps ignorant or wicked people that the vaccine is a world plot to kill millions; or that it’s a computer chip for “them” to control us! These delusions or fixed false beliefs can only be held if there is a vacuum of information.

To protect ourselves, our patients, our contacts, our partners and our family, save lives, save ourselves and long-term illness (“Long COVID”), we must all seek vaccination soonest, and urge our loved ones to. Follow the advice of Mavis Brathwaite on TV to Idalia, and don’t let a “lil pain from a needle stop yuh from doin’ the sensible thing”.

Given the amazing success of all immunisations, including COVID-19, the irrational thinking of anti-vaxxers is puzzling. The illogical, somewhat crazy excuses include:

“Vaccination is a plot to kill millions.”

“It’s been developed too fast”, non-scientists say, when thousands of scientists in scores of centres have worked all out with billions of dollars – a mammoth effort.

“It’s really a chip to control you” say the deluded, and “It will alter your DNA and change you.”

“It’s not safe.” Often repeated fake news, after a few score possible deaths from clots, compared to the ten-thousand-fold greater death rate from COVID!

“It’s not properly tested and I’m not going to be a guinea pig”, in spite of trials bigger than any other medical intervention in history, two billion doses, and more than 40 million of the Astra Zeneca brand. Numerous experts have blasted claims that the vaccines are experimental, and emphasised that they are overwhelmingly safe.

And the simply stubborn and unjustified: “It’s my choice not to have it”. Clearly antivaxxers are both irrational and irresponsible, and selfish with regard to their patients’ and families’ safety. They can prolong the pandemic, the economic disaster, the suffering and deaths indefinitely.

Sir Henry Fraser is Professor Emertius, Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology, Immediate Past Dean, Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus. He is also an architecural historian, heritage consultant, writer, TV presenter, national orator and motivational speaker.