What the commentators said
The roll-out of this vaccine is obviously good news for the vulnerable, said Tom Chivers on UnHerd. But even those of us who won’t be called up for a jab until the middle of next year or later stand to benefit from it before then. Healthcare workers will be among the first to be offered vaccination, and “that alone should have a pretty dramatic impact on the course of the disease”. Healthcare workers have been at high risk from Covid: they’ve died at about the same rate as the rest of us, despite being, on average, younger and healthier. Keeping them well will bolster the capacity of the NHS, and by doing so help speed up our society’s return to normal.
Some people are worried about the vaccine, said Dr Charlotte Summers in The Guardian, but they have no cause to be. Although they use a new technology, mRNA vaccines (standing for “messenger ribonucleic acid”) are “surprisingly straightforward”. Rather than delivering viral protein into the body to prompt an immune response, as conventional vaccines do, they instruct the body to produce the protein itself. After a few days, the mRNA naturally degrades, leaving behind only immunity to Covid. UK regulators didn’t cut any corners in approving the drug. It’s true that vaccines normally take years to develop, but that’s because they normally don’t have access to an “almost limitless amount of funding”, scientific expertise and official backing.
Britain has ordered 40 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, enough for 20 million people, along with larger consignments of several other vaccines in development, said Anjana Ahuja in the FT. But our “optimism must be accompanied with forebearance”. Given the scale of the task ahead of us, we’re going to have to stick with social distancing and mask-wearing “well into 2021”. We also still don’t know how long vaccination protection will last, and to what extent it stops the transmission of Covid, said Zania Stamataki and K.K. Cheng on CapX. At some point, we may be able to adopt the idea of “immunity passports” – documents certifying that someone has been vaccinated or recovered from the disease. But we can’t do that until we’ve fully understood the biological markers that correlate with protection against Covid.