The pandemic is striking people disproportionately. From my personal point of view I can even say that the pandemic has probably been doing more good than bad for my family and me. Others have lost their jobs, their business and even their grandma to the pandemic. Some people are bitter, they are angry, and they need someone to be angry with. I must say that I've seen quite some tensions here in Norway that never used to be there before. One out of many examples, when the vaccines started coming, but in short supply, there was quite some heated arguments on who should get it first. To me it seemed like everyone with a voice was angrily arguing for "me and my neighbour first, then later everybody else". (To be fair, I also had some strong viewpoints on that - and to be fair, one of the viewpoints was that people in Oslo ought to be prioritized higher than people living in Finnmark - but anyway, first of all I would have prioritized teachers, health workers and other people having important professions and being regularly exposed through their daily job, plus people who were willing to do a bit extra to "jump the queue" - including queuing up around closing hours in case there would be some extra unused shots at the end of the day or taking the "wrong" vaccine. As an IT-worker with home office, I considered myself to be last on the list of people who ought to be prioritized).
Some months ago the vaccination speed stopped up in Norway due to a lack of willing arms to receive the jab - hence the people declining to be vaccinated got to be the new scapegoat, quite some people are now really upset with the small minority that still didn't get the first jab. Some people are in favor of introducing a covid passport solution for mundane things like riding the bus. I believe a majority of those people primarily wants such a regime to punish the unvaccinated part of the population, more than to stop covid.
I always think it's good to try not to fanatically take part at one side in a discussion, but to try to see things from different perspectives - and in this case I actually find it very easy. I can easily argue both for and against the vaccines.
Claim: Vaccines are useless
There are lots of conspiracy theories out there. I'm not going to investigate any of them - but I'd like to point out:
Vaccines may be a very political thing. For some countries, vaccine reasearch, production and export may be considered a part of national proudness and/or it's considered to be "soft power" that can be utilized to influence other nations. Suffice to say, the Russian vaccine is not approved in the EU nor in most of the western countries, and most of the vaccines produced in the EU and the western countries are not approved in Russia. I heard it be told that there is reciprocity in this, as soon as the Russian Sputnik is approved in "the west", Pfizer, Moderna and the other "western" vaccines will be approved in Russia. And perhaps vice versa. (And with vaccine certificates or passports becoming mandatory for travels, dining and whatever, those disagreements may mean that people like myself may eventually need to get both a Pfizer and a Sputnik vaccine to travel freely).
Vaccines are for sure a very commercial thing. Almost any stock company has as their ultimate goal to maximize profit, that certainly includes "big pharma". This goal may not always align with the mission of saving as many lives as possible or even stopping the pandemic in the best possible way. Particularly Pfizer but also the other major vaccine producers are for sure raking in money on this pandemic, they for sure have very strong economic incentives for hiding the bad news and promoting the good news about the vaccines they produce, they for sure do have paid lobbyists and PR-staff influencing public policies as well as the media world wide. They for sure could do more to ensure the poorer population in the poorer countries also would have full access to the vaccines - but there is no commercial motive in that. The commercial interests can be quite wicked - there are for sure more than a handfull of stock owners that are happy to read in the news that the latest mutations are spreading even faster, and that people may need to get revaccinated twice a year for all eternity.
Almost everyone getting the vaccine are complaining about side effects - we've had numerous people at work that was knocked out for several days. For some the effect of the vaccine may be worse than the effect of covid.
Many governments and big information and media companies have decided to clamp down on "misinformation" on vaccines. I think that by now the information flow is biased, as legitimate negative information about vaccines gets lower score by search engines, social media algorithms and doesn't get reported on by mainstream media. I also think this strategy is backfiring as it gives only more fuel to the fire for the more wild conspiracy theories.
The vaccines does only have an emergency approval, they haven't gone through all the steps of the ordinary rigorous approval regime.
There have been reports on serious side effects, even including death from the vaccines
In addition to all the points above, I think the development during the last few weeks or months can be said to be favorable for the "anti-vaxx" movement.
We were told that vaccines would be the way out of the troubles. As soon as a significant part of the population would get the vaccine, we could start living like normal again - and guess what, it never happened. We're currently having a situation in Norway with new records being broken every day, all the arrows are pointing the wrong way, despite the fact that most of the adults are vaccinated. Vaccined people are spreading covid, and vaccinated people are getting ill from it. Recently there was an outbreak at a care home for elder people, some twenty persons got ill, and around half of them died, all fully vaccinated people. The arguments that the vaccines doesn't work are everywhere if one cares to look for them.
And that's only with delta. The latest omikron mutation is known to have two major properties, one is that it's even more contagious than delta, the other property is that it efficiently evades both the vaccines as well as naturally built-up immunity against the delta - and the response from the Norwegian government has been a bit like "oh my god, a new mutation! We need to ramp up vaccination speed and roll out the third booster shot to the population as fast as possible! We need to do what we can to get the remaining unvaccinated population to take the vaccine!" (which feels equally misguided as ... "oh no! we have a high rate of domestic spread of covid! let's close the border to not import even more!"). Now, if the problem with omikron is that the vaccine basically doesn't work, then why push the vaccines even harder because of it? It doesn't make much sense does it?
Claim: Vaccines are the only way out of this mess
Escaping covid through isolation, usage of masks and keeping a social distance seems not to be a realistic option. If you want to be a part of the society, sooner or later you will be exposed for it. If you're vaccinated, you may be lucky, your immune system may fight off the attack before the virus can manage to replicate (significantly). Even if you get infected, you're less likely to get ill and much less likely to get seriously ill.
While most people get through the infection without lasting health effects, the ratio of people that are hospitilized, getting long term negative health effects from the disease, or even dieing from it is just unacceptable high. Currently - at least in Norway, and probably many other parts of the world - the health care system is having capacity problems. While it can be argued that the Norwegian health services are always having capacity problems, the influx of covid-ill patients that didn't take the vaccine may be the extra straw that broke the camels back. Recently Norwegian main stream media have had interviews with nurses that are crying - they're doing their best, they are working crazy amounts of overtime, they feel morally obliged to do so, they're tired and they see no end to the current situation.
I think the exact and updated statistics on this is sorely missing in the main stream media - hence there may be a problem with bias in the information presented in the main stream media, but I see no reason to assume the following information is wrong: Around half of the people hospitalized with covid in Norway is unvaccinated, and the percentage is even higher for those in intensive care units. Considering that 73% of the population is vaccinated, and Doing some simple napkin math those numbers don't seem that impressive ... but one should also consider that:
- A large amount of the unvaccinated population is children, while most of the people in hospital is age 60 and up. In the age group 60 and up the vaccination rate is probably around 95%.
- The majority of hospitalized unvaccinated patients are "ordinary people", while a majority of the vaccinated patients have other health problems - particularly, many of the vaccinated patients are dependent on immunosuppressive medicines.
- The average age of the unvaccinated patients are much lower than the average age of the vaccinated patients.
From this it seems abundantly clear that the vaccine gives a very good protection against becoming seriously ill with covid ... at least, the delta variant. At least in Norway it's still the delta virus driving the hospitalizations, though if you go take your first vaccine shot today, chances are that the omikron variant will be dominating after getting the second vaccine shot. Even if/when omikron takes over, it is likely that the vaccine will still give good protection against getting seriously ill. While it is true that the effect from the vaccines are getting less for every new mutation of the virus as well as for how long time has gone since each person got the last vaccine shot, the vaccines still do have effect.
Empirical evidence vs anecdotal evidence
People prefer to relate to simple things. It seems like a significant amount of people believe that once one has taken the vaccine one is safe - and a significant amount of people also believes the vaccines are bad. Of course, the truth is somewhere in between. The vaccines aren't 100% effective, but they did help a lot when they were rolled out half a year ago. While one may easily conclude that the vaccines are useless just by looking at the daily numbers, it's impossible to say what kind of mess we would have been in now without the vaccination program - but to me it seems likely that it would have been a lot worse.
It's a quite ordinary human thing to overrate anecdotial evidence. In the covid context, the typical examples are:
- I've had corona, and I survived, so it isn't so dangerous.
- I heard about someone experiencing weird and really bad side effects from the vaccines
- I've heard about someone that was vaccinated, but still got ill with covid
While personal and second-hand information may be a valuable source of information, what really matters is statistics.
It may be true that corona may be relatively harmless, yet that's not always the case - if reading statistics, it's quite clear that if one gets infected without any immunity the risk of becoming seriously ill is just unacceptably high, particularly with the delta variant.
It is also true that there are people out there who got serious side effects from the vaccine. At one point it was reported that more people in Norway had experienced serious side effects from the vaccines than from covid. Now that doesn't mean the vaccine is more dangerous than covid - after all, we were almost keeping our breath not to get infected - at that point half of the population had gotten the vaccine while very few had gone through covid. The less serious side effects are also very common - it even seems to be more normal than not to take out at least half a day of sick leave after getting the vaccine.
And yes, none of the vaccines are 100% effective, the immune response from the vaccines seems to wean with time, and the virus seems to be mutating even faster than the flu virus - so for sure there are vaccinated people that do get seriously ill. While I'm not aware of any up-to-date statistics on the number of covid-patients in the hospitalthat is vaccinated, the information that is available seems to indicate that the risk of getting seriously ill is at least a tenfold higher if choosing not to take the vaccine.
My own vaccination status
I've had coronoa myself (April 2021y, got one Pfizer vaccine shot in late august, and will probably take the booster shot in January 2022 (Moderna, if I can choose). I'm also considering to take a Sputnik shot.
Before April 2021 I was very careful, trying to avoid exposure as much as possible. All since April 2021 I've been deliberately careless, frequently putting myself in situations where I may have been exposed for the virus - I believe that frequent exposure for the latest variant of the virus is the best way to keep the immune system up-to-date and ready to deal with the next variant (over the last few weeks I've started using masks again - trying to be a bit obedient and do what I can to reduce the spread now that we have serious capacity problems in the health services) - but I see no problem combining that strategy with vaccines.
Light in the end of the tunnel
If the omikron is spreading a lot faster than delta but is much less harmful, then opening up the society and letting it spread naturally may be the best strategy to get back to normal. The empirical data we have on it so far may not be statistically significant yet ... but the little there is looks pretty good. I'm an optimist - and I'm not really keen on getting jabbed several times a year for decades to come. Those jabs are quite expensive, even if I (so far) don't have to pay for it through my own pocket.