Scientific American
Pandemic highlights for the week
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In a 2/19/21 newsletter for The New York Times, David Leonhardt writes that some cautionary public health messages about COVID-19 vaccines, such as messages about risks, uncertainties, caveats and side effects — all of which he calls “vaccine alarmism” — are “fundamentally misleading.” Some researchers and journalists are “instinctively skeptical and cautious,” he writes, which has led to public health messages that “emphasize uncertainty and potential future bad news.” For example, the risk of a vaccinated person becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 and passing it on to someone else who then got severe COVID-19 is very small, evidence suggests, Leonhardt writes. “You wouldn’t know that from much of the public discussion,” he writes. Ambiguity like that and all the news about variants has fueled vaccine hesitancy, according to Dr. Rebecca Wurtz, a public health researcher at the University, Leonhardt writes. The public health messages about COVID-19 vaccines instead should be: “They’re safe. They’re highly effective against serious disease. And the emerging evidence about infectiousness looks really good,” a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist is quoted as saying.