The best vaccine? The one you can get
Canada will soon be awash in multiple brands of COVID-19 vaccines and suddenly, “vaccine shopping” is becoming a thing.
Vaccine hesitancy was already a headache for governments and public health officials. So was vaccine tourism.
But a perhaps unforeseen phenomenon seems to be taking hold as Canada is poised to receive new brands of vaccines, beyond the Pfizer and Moderna injections that have been going into people’s arms sporadically for the past few months.
Basically, some citizens are getting picky about which vaccines they might receive.
Dr. Supriya Sharma, chief medical officer for Health Canada, talked about this development over the weekend. She told CBC’s Rosemary Barton that it’s a new “narrative” emerging; the idea that one shot is better than another, and that people should have the right to their vaccine of choice. It’s a problem, in Sharma’s view.
“The best vaccine for an individual is (the) one that you can get. That’s pretty simple,” Sharma said. “For people who are sitting back and waiting for another vaccine, I would say the longer (they wait), and the more people who do that, the more we’re all going to be sitting at home.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the leading doctors in the U.S. pandemic fight, was sounding similar warnings about vaccine shopping over the weekend.
“We’ve got to get away from that chain of thought,” Fauci told ABC. “The only way you really know the difference between vaccines is by comparing them head to head.”
The vaccine-shopping phenomenon seems to have been set off in this country by the imminent arrival of AstraZeneca vaccine, which has been plagued with some ambivalent reviews, as well as the possible looming approval for a more convenient, one-shot Johnson and Johnson vaccine.
With these newcomers, the rollout of vaccines is being transformed from a massmarket, one-size-fits-all solution into more of a boutique, niche market for choosy customers.
For those old enough to remember, it feels a little bit like when Bell stopped being the only telephone provider on the block and suddenly people had an array of telecom providers for their home phone needs.
But while vaccines may make us more mobile again, they’re not mobile phones or gadgets.
Doctors worry about vaccine shopping because it may lead to fewer people getting shots and a longer wait for herd immunity.
But it’s also a political problem. Ever since vaccines — or the lack of them — started to dominate Canadian politics, the tone of the debate has taken on a sharper and often nastier tone, more similar to pre-pandemic times.
All the talk of “we’re in this together” has given way to recriminations over who and what is standing in the way of citizens getting stuff they want — in this case, vaccines. Competition, the fuel of the private marketplace, has entered the fray over ending COVID-19.
For a couple of months now, I have been trying to pinpoint the source of this resumption in the usual hostilities in Canadian politics. Outrage in the Commons sounds pretty much the way it did before the pandemic — government is the problem, not the solution, regions are pitted against each other, and questions abound about whether some citizens are faring better than others.
Just late last week, it hit me — vaccines have turned people into consumers of government again, brandishing all the rights and expectations they wield when shopping in the private marketplace. Politicians are responding, seeing their civic duties as mainly consumer advocacy.
For a while there, it seemed that the pandemic had pressed pause on this whole idea of consumer citizenship. I even wrote late last year — approvingly — how COVID-19 had reintroduced us to the idea that government is more than a consumer transaction.
But vaccines have brought that mindset back with a vengeance. Where many of the government’s pandemic-relief measures to date have been seen as social programs, vaccines seem to be increasingly seen as a consumer commodity. Our democracy is now a mall again, with citizen customers looking for the best deal on stuff they want.
It’s interesting that it took the presence of three (or four) vaccines to put pandemic politics fully back into the realm of consumerism and market competition. When it was just two vaccines available, Pfizer and Moderna, we weren’t hearing as much about vaccine shopping. There are probably marketing gurus who can explain why it takes more than two brands to set off a wave of picking and choosing in the marketplace.
Maybe this is what pent-up demand looks like — citizens, denied all kinds of shopping opportunities over the past year, are desperate to get their hands on the hottest new product. Vaccines fit that bill, no matter who really pays for it.
Doctors worry about vaccine shopping because it may lead to fewer people getting shots and a longer wait for herd immunity