Vaccine caution

We recently wrote a scientific article in a leading medical journal which featured prominently in a Herald news report.

Our article was not “rebuked” by the Scientific Adviser of the Ministry of Health. As part of the usual scholarly review process, the editor of the journal asked the Ministry for comment. When one group raises questions about the work done by another, the latter is always given an opportunity to respond. The article and the response are available for any reader.

The article seriously mischaracterises our views about Covid-19 vaccines. Our letter urges caution about the speed of the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine, since historic vaccines for respiratory viruses, such as swine flu, have been associated with adverse effects. The associate editor of the British Medical Journal, Peter Doshi, has raised questions about the efficacy of current vaccines. None of them yet have evidence of success in reducing severe infection (hospital admission, ICU, or death) or interrupting transmission (person-to-person spread). At least, the trials could not test for these, given the compressed time-frame.

Developing and distributing these vaccines to seven billion people of the world is a non-trivial task. This does not make the vaccines useless but does raise legitimate questions about basing our border policy on the effectiveness and wide availability of vaccines.

Finally, we caution against the types of ad hominem attacks reflected in this article. This is not the way to undertake either good science or good policy.

Simon Thornley, Ananish Chaudhuri, Gerhard Sundborn, Grant Schofield, Auckland.