The UK Government has responded to the December 2021 surge in numbers of people testing positive for the new Omicron variant with an accelerated vaccination programme, keeping vaccination centres open during the Christmas holiday period to meet rising demand for the booster vaccine. This has been accompanied by a surge in criticism directed against anti-vaxxers, partly on the grounds that deliberately unvaccinated people are both filling up intensive care beds in hospitals and also facilitating the spread within the community of a particularly contagious virus. British Health Secretary Sajid Javid thus told Sky News on 19 December 2021 that the unvaccinated were having a “damaging impact” on others. By December, 6.4 million out of a total of 57.5 million eligible for the vaccine in the UK, had yet to receive even a single dose of vaccine. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair went even further, somewhat unwisely labelling anti-vaxxers as “idiots” in an interview with Times Radio on 22 December.
Even before the recent Omicron surge, mandatory vaccination was imposed upon all workers in CQC (Care Quality Commission)-registered care homes in England, from 11 November 2021 onwards, with plans to extend this to all frontline health and social care workers, including NHS staff, from 1 April 2022. Recent judgements in the European Court of Human Rights (Vavricka and Others v The Czech Republic, April 2021) and in the UK High Court (R v Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, November 2021) support mandatory vaccination of certain groups of healthcare professionals as a proportionate response to a major public health crisis.
Anti-vaxxers are a heterogeneous group, from a variety of backgrounds, and including several high-profile celebrities within their ranks. The anti-vax movement has considerable clout, capable of raising sizeable mass anti-vaccine protests in many countries across the world. A significant proportion of anti-vaxxers are either conspiracy theorists or libertarian ideologues, from both the right-wing and left-wing of the political spectrum, all united in their opposition to vaccine mandates and vaccine passports. State- enforced mass vaccination is seen by them as a manifestation of coercion and the infringement of personal freedoms by “Big” government, acting in collusion with Big Pharma, who stand to gain financially from vaccine production. Some conspiracy theorists have also erroneously claimed that vaccines carry toxins that can interact with or change host DNA, or render recipients infertile or susceptible to illnesses such as autism.
Anti-vaxxers are supported in their stance by some human rights groups, such as Liberty, who support the need for informed consent prior to vaccination whenever people who have the capacity to make decisions on their own behalf. On the other hand, according to the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), “far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further them” by protecting the most vulnerable in society. Some doctors and other healthcare professionals, including administrators, also oppose mandatory vaccination of healthcare workers as a condition of employment, partly because this may further reduce an already depleted workforce. The BMA (British Medical Association), at its Annual Representative Meeting in September 2021, supported vaccination for all doctors, while arguing that mandatory vaccination for all other healthcare workers be delayed until after the winter to avoid depletion of the workforce at a time when they are most likely to be needed. The concept of mandatory vaccination in the NHS is indeed not new, but hitherto has been restricted to compulsory hepatitis B vaccines for all staff engaged in “exposure-prone” procedures.
There are many other reasons why people may refuse offers of free vaccination. The Office for National Statistics commissioned a study in February and March 2021, involving 50 in-depth interviews of people unwilling or uncertain about receiving a coronavirus vaccine, to explore vaccine refusal. Many participants were concerned about both immediate side-effects and longer-term, as yet unknown, impacts of vaccines that had been developed so quickly. Younger and otherwise healthy people were less concerned about the risks of Covid-19, while some cited personal difficulties in travelling to vaccination centres. The report concluded that “There was an appetite for more information about Covid-19 vaccines, particularly side effects, contents, how they had been developed, and differences between, and safety, of the various vaccines”- all entirely legitimate concerns.
Members of certain ethnic minority groups either reject, or are hesitant about, Covid-19 vaccination both on cultural grounds and from a suspicion of government intentions, even though they have suffered disproportionately during the pandemic. This has allowed the unrestrained spread of vaccine misinformation alongside the virus within some Black African and Caribbean, South Asian (Bangladeshi/Pakistani), and Eastern European communities in the UK. While all major religions strongly support vaccination, some religious sects and cults have subscribed to anti-vaccination views, including the congregations of several evangelical pastors and the members of certain churches that oppose vaccines on theological grounds as interfering with the will of God, such as the Dutch Reformed Church. Some Catholics objected to the use of cell lines from aborted foetuses in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
The conflict between anti-vaxxers and those urging mass vaccination has raised many issues, related to human rights, ethics, and employment law, in addition to expected concerns over vaccine efficacy, reports of deaths after vaccines, and other medical issues. The problem here is one of reconciling individual rights with the rights of wider society, particularly those of its most vulnerable members. Vaccination may be a personal choice, but its impacts are societal, in helping establish “herd immunity” that protects the whole community. The government has to ensure that the general public are provided with high-quality information about available vaccines, to help informed decision-making, even as vaccine hesitancy is accepted as a legitimate concern under certain circumstances, especially in response to inconsistent messaging from official sources.
We have to accept the fact that a hard core of anti-vaxxers will never accept vaccines under any circumstances, even under today’s war-like conditions, where some infringements of personal freedom may be temporarily justifiable. It is a sign of the troubled times we live in that an invisible virus has managed to further divide people rather than bringing them together in solidarity, in a shared cause to ward off its repeated attacks on the human race.
Ashis Banerjee