Retort to the mounds of misinformation around Covid vaccines by the inimitable Scott Galloway.
"...But the swiftness with which the vaccines have been developed is less a reflection of haste than of commitment, resources, and new technology.
As of mid-December, scientists had published 74,000 papers related to a virus that nobody had heard of 12 months earlier. Nearly one-third of all scientific researchers around the world have dropped their prior projects to work on Covid-related matters. As Ed Yong recently described in the Atlantic, this pivot is far beyond any historical precedent and will have profound effects on the scientific community for years to come.
The speed of clinical trials can also be attributed to the virus’s very virulence, as it takes so little time for the control group to suffer a statistically significant number of infections. Johnson & Johnson recently cut the size of its Phase 3 trial because infection rates are so high in the U.S.
We moved fast because we had to, and because we could. These vaccines benefited enormously from advances in technology, data mining, and data modeling.
The technology behind the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which has been in development for decades, also enabled the shots to reach us quickly. Their novel deployment of messenger RNA should also quell a common concern about vaccines: that they inject a modified form of the virus itself into the recipient. Instead, mRNA vaccines provide the “instructions” our immune system needs to identify and defeat the pathogen. They do not alter the DNA in our cells. (If my scientific expertise is not reassuring on this point, vaccines based on traditional approaches are also in development.)
Still, though, I hear friends and colleagues say, “Even if the risk is tiny, why take it? I’m not at risk from Covid.” But the risk of suffering serious health effects from the disease, even for younger people in good health, is real. In July, the death rate among adults 25-44 was almost 50% higher than in July 2019 — that’s an additional 5,000 deaths attributed to Covid, among younger people, in just one month. Even among survivors, the virus has been shown to cause long-term neurological and cardiac harm in 10% of victims. Yes, the risk is small. But it’s far greater than the risk presented by the vaccine.
Whatever the risk to ourselves, however, we don’t take vaccines only to protect ourselves. We take them to protect everyone, to avoid becoming a fiber in the web."
