“As someone who has practiced evidence-based medicine professionally for over 20 years—and, for the sake of credibility, who has already administered hundreds of covid-19 vaccines to people who have wanted them—I have to say that it is increasingly discouraging to observe the lack of nuance in our public discourse about covid-19 vaccines as regards the intricate complexities of global pandemics—even, and perhaps even especially disappointing, among my professional colleagues.

The conversation is so utterly polarized and politicized that, from my perspective, it has become absurd. The prevailing narrative of our predicament has been grossly oversimplified to within a narrow bandwidth of catchy tropes and tribalistic alignments—whereas the vast universe of reality outside of our binary reductionism carries on outside of our self-limited awareness and social media echo chambers. I only venture in here because my other alternative is to despair about humanity in silence.

A few notes to that effect:

* Not everyone who feels hesitancy about the covid-19 vaccines is an “anti-vaxxer”. There are myriad reasons—some of them evidence-based, some of them health history-based, some of them racially-based, some of them medical-trauma based—why people would want to take a “wait and see” approach to consent with their own bodies. The anti-vaxxer microchip conspiracy narrative is both a sad reality for some people, and at the same time also serves as a dialectic red-herring that, tragically, has usurped rational, evidence-based and culturally-informed vaccine safety dialogue.

* The vast majority of people who have hesitancy about these novel vaccines are people under the age of 65 who are concerned about the lack of long-term safety and efficacy data—not short term. So sharing around anecdotal personal accounts of immediate vaccine effects and the (albeit thus far impressive) accumulating short-term safety data as a way to help those people to get over their hesitancy, isn’t actually helping those people—and might be further alienating them, because it effectively minimizes their concerns.

* Science—particularly applied science, including medical-industry science—is a culturally-produced and socially-informed and embedded phenomenon. There are dualistic, paternalistic, colonialist, imperialist, ableist, elitist, industrialist, and capitalist philosophical assumptions baked right in to the very fiber of how scientific knowledge is acquired—as well as what gets left out. And that cannot be extracted from our critical analysis of vaccine research and development, manufacture, distribution, goals and outcomes—both historically and in the present.

* I see a lot of people who “believe in science” and can’t wait for things to get back to normal after some ill-defined critical mass has been vaccinated so that we can reach herd immunity (a concept which has different meaning for, say, a poliovirus vs corona and influenza viruses—and remains one of many unknowns per covid-19 vaccine efficacy). But I don’t hear anyone wrestling with the scientifically-backed complexity that our “normal” is what caused the covid-19 pandemic in the first place. Zoonotic diseases are only ONE type of disruption to human health prospects that we can expect in our futures and our children’s futures if we carry on as normal. In that respect, throwing all of our eggs in the immunization basket is incredibly short-sighted, when we have been presented with a crisis opportunity to respond to disease in an entirely different way—one that reorients our destructive Westernized prioritizations of the human lifespan, productivity, consumption, and limitless economic growth. The fact that remaining on our present path will catastrophically alter human health outcomes in the longer term is scientifically evident.

* It has been an eternity of a year—as a front line clinician, I understand the exhaustion as well as anyone. Things are predicted to get even worse over the course of our lifetimes if we don’t change—more pandemics, water scarcity, climate refugees, food-chain disruptions, mass extinctions. Morbidity and mortality rates from covid-19 won’t be comparable in magnitude. How are we going to handle it? Panicking our way into the same solutions that got us into this predicament in the first place?

I don’t pretend to have any answers, my friends. I just wish that we could have better conversations (I am looking right at you, medical industry).”

— an anonymous informant (kf)