For about 10 months last year, I had one thought that would come to my mind at least once a day: What if my mom dies? It got quieter over time, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, imagining what would happen if the virus got to my severely immunocompromised mother was virtually the only thing that continued to scare me after I finally got adjusted to this strange new world we had been forced into.
In Septempber 2020, it didn’t cross my mind that we would have the superpower we now have: the vaccine. I remember the disbelief I felt when I was sitting in the Marketplace about a year ago and my eyes glanced over at those TVs that usually play whatever combination of news and sports, and I saw the headline announcing that there was a COVID-19 vaccine developed and tested in clinical trials. Fast forward to now, when 59.68 percent of people in America are fully vaccinated. I couldn’t have imagined that this would be possible.
In this time, though, I’ve heard many conversations on how the vaccine rollout was rushed, unsafe and overall distributed ineffectively. Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham jumped at the chance to criticize the vaccines as being unsafe as well as the federal government for overstepping in their attempt to get people vaccinated as quickly as possible. I agree the rollout has not been perfect. In March, a Johnson & Johnson facility ruined up to 15 million vaccines due to mixing up the ingredients for two companies’ different vaccines after many new workers were hired last year to maximize vaccine production. Just a few weeks ago, 14 kids in California were given the wrong dosage they were supposed to be given of the COVID-19 vaccine, with at least two kids receiving double the recommended dose. This shouldn’t happen, of course, and no one wants it to. I can only begin to imagine how the parents of the children — not to mention the children themselves — who received the wrong dose feel. It’s always awful for kids, or anyone at all, to be subjected to any harm, especially when it seems like such an avoidable thing to some people. If something like this can happen from getting a vaccine, then it would make sense to some that in order to avoid it, you just shouldn’t get vaccinated. Right?
However, we sadly live in a reality where, as of Dec. 1, it is reported that 781,963 people have died in America from COVID-19 . While I feel we need to be as careful as we can be with the vaccine rollout, as no one wants something unsafe to go inside of them or to waste limited resources, I think that there is a lot to be said in support of prioritizing the speed of the program to save lives from this rapidly spreading virus. We are in a very delicate balance here.
I really don’t think that these mistakes that we see every now and again mean that the rollout in America is happening too fast as a whole. In individual cases, admittedly, vaccine program attempts haven’t always worked out as smoothly as they were intended to when done too quickly. It was reported that in South Carolina, Florida and Missouri, rushing to vaccinate people created more demand than could be met and caused vaccine websites to crash, leading to even slower vaccination rates than states where slower plans were made. The point here is not that there is no such thing as rolling out a vaccine too fast, or that we should just prioritize speed and throw all care to the wind. Just look at Russia and its truly botched Sputnik V vaccine that has almost no public trust and questionable ratings from health regulators. We don’t want that.
On a nationwide level, though, we seem to be going at a comfortable enough speed where we are administering safe vaccines as fast as we can. Occasional miscalculations that some states have seen, as well as factory mistakes and accidental harm done to individuals is a structural inevitability if we want to maximize the speed at which we administer vaccines to save lives. We are living through crazy conditions, and the solutions to them are bound to have mistakes in them. When every single case is taken separately, I’m sure there were things that could have been done better. Yet, when all of them are looked at together, on a systemwide level, we can see how these mistakes are bound to happen, even with the best rollout plan possible.
Things like this are sadly bound to happen when racing the clock to minimize the harm that a deadly virus is causing. Even in the 1947 smallpox vaccination campaign, widely hailed as a miracle for its success, they had its fair share of mishaps. The New York Times announced at one point that “Vaccinations Stop; Drug Supply Gone; Thousands Turned Away” as private smallpox vaccine manufacturers were severely off track for delivering vaccines. There was even a woman in Bellevue, Washington who pretended to be a nurse and “vaccinated” 500 people with water.
The pandemic has forced us between so many rocks and so many hard places. We are faced with endless choices between “not ideal” and “a lot worse,” and all we can do is pick what’s best, even if it means that at some point or another, some things won’t go right. But if we wait forever to eliminate the chances of these mistakes, we’ll be getting to one million deaths in no time, or worse.
Our vaccines have passed trials and regulatory body checks with flying colors, especially when considering how urgent it is that we do damage control on this pandemic right now. Of course, we don’t want vaccines that are supposed to save or protect our lives to harm us. But, statistically, that’s not what the vaccines, or the way we’re rolling them out, are doing. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have consistently been found to reduce hospitalizations and severe illnesses by more than 90 percent. Even the less effective Johnson & Johnson vaccine still has 72 percent efficacy. Additionally, 97 percent of severe cases in the United States are represented by those who are unvaccinated. People are much better off choosing to take the vaccine than not.
It’s vital that we understand that intensive trials and deliberation has gone into these vaccines and how they are rolled out. In this scary time, we must try our very best to trust the system that is trying to prevent the death rate from getting even higher in order to hopefully put this terrifying situation behind us once and for all.
Max Kurant is a junior with an individualized major in social systems science.