No-vax? What the sceptics get wrong

THE ILL-INFORMED PREMISE RANGES FROM SEEING OMICRON AS “THE NATURE’S OWN VACCINE BECAUSE IT WILL LEAVE EVERYONE WITH IMMUNITY”, TO “VARIANT PROVES VACCINES WERE BUT A CONSPIRACY BY BIG PHARMA FOR PEOPLE TO SPEND MONEY”.

NEW DELHI: In Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic’s 2010 book, Serve to Win, he writes about how he improved his performance by removing gluten from his diet. Indeed, many do not take well to gluten, a chemical common in wheat, and benefit from a diet without it.

But it is how Djokovic discovered his gluten intolerance that is of relevance today. He realised the gluten problem when he held a piece of bread to his stomach with one hand, and found that he lost strength in the other arm at the same time, Djokovic wrote in his book.

How is this relevant to the pandemic or the Omicron variant?

The answer lies in why Djokovic was in the limelight over the past week as he attempted to fight Australia on its mandatory vaccination rule: Djokovic has opposed vaccines and has not disclosed whether he has taken a shot.

The bread-and-gluten sensitivity tale in his book is an apt analogy on how vaccine sceptics like him have been wrong, relying on false equivalences instead of scientific process. Such positions were what drove the early phase of vaccine scepticism when the pandemic began. It ebbed to a large degree when the Delta variant became an undeniably serious threat.

But now, after the low realworld virulence of the Omicron variant, vaccine scepticism and Covid denial has gained new urgency. The ill-informed premise ranges from seeing Omicron as “the nature’s own vaccine because it will leave everyone with immunity”, to “variant proves vaccines were but a conspiracy by Big Pharma for people to spend money”. These contentions, particularly those that have arisen after the Omicron outbreak, ignore a simple fact: a big, and mostly likely the biggest, reason why the variant is leading to less severe disease is because vaccines have helped people build a wall of immunity. Several papers, some now peer-reviewed, have shown the T cell immunity elicited by vaccines has been adequately retained even when the virus has mutated so significantly from the version that first spread in Wuhan in 2019.

It is also a folly at this stage to believe the Omicron variant heralds the beginning of endemicity of the coronavirus. The theory’s believers say that since the variant spreads quickly but sickens mildly, it is leaving people with a baseline immunity that will make future variants mild. Indeed, there is a strong likelihood this may happen someday, but there is no evidence that day is here. This too has been demonstrated by recent scientific evidence. Viruses recombine with other variants, and can evolve in different species. The Sars-CoV-2 virus can evolve or recombine to become as endemic as the OC43, a common cold coronavirus, or it can take the evolutionary crossroads to arrive where the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (Mers) virus is – a coronavirus with a high fatality rate.

Only time can tell the evolutionary pathways the coronavirus will follow, but what science tells us today is vaccines work and they save lives.