Whether to Take a Vaccine Against COVID-19

This week someone asked me whether I will be willing to take a COVID-19 vaccination when one becomes available.

Are you kidding? Yes.

Multiple vaccines are coming along well. Among the vaccines that scientists eventually declare to be reasonably safe and effective, I will take whichever is available to me.

I do not plan to hold out for a vaccine that is perfect. There is no such thing as a perfect vaccine. Each has strengths, weaknesses, side effects and risks.

I do not plan to try to get mine before I should. Front line health care workers and people more at risk than I am should be ahead of me. But as soon as I can get mine, I want it.

This is not purely about me. Yes, I want protection against COVID-19, but there is more to it than that. As with face masks, getting vaccinated is partly about protecting myself and also, importantly, about protecting people around me.

Getting vaccinated is part of being a good member of my community. Family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, business associates, shopkeepers, my doctor, the vet who tends our pets, people I happen to get physically near while going about ordinary life, are all counting on me to do my bit toward making it impossible for SARS-CoV-2 to find hosts. I am counting on my community to do the same for me.

The blockbuster news beginning to emerge about vaccines showing efficacy is not a surprise. Resistance to COVID-19 isn’t all about antibodies. It’s also about what one researcher described on BBC Radio 4 this morning as memory cells in the immune system, a nice way to reduce a complex part of the immune system to language everyone can understand. At least some of the vaccines being developed have been showing ability to stimulate not just antibody production, but also response from two types of immune system cells that can quickly ramp up specific defenses against the virus whenever it appears.

That is why I’ve been telling people around me since at least late summer that I anticipate we will indeed get at least one viable vaccine against this pandemic. We only need one. It looks like we will have more than one, and that’s great.

The pace of the scientific work being done is amazingly fast. Some of the vaccines are breaking new ground that may lead to vaccines against other diseases in the future. But of course, for the moment we are all focused on how to get out of this pandemic.

Few of us are fortunate enough to live in one of the few countries that dealt with the pandemic best and are now able to live almost normally as long as they make the rest of us go through quarantine to visit them. But now the rest of us don’t even have to decipher dry scientific papers to see that hope is on the horizon.

We just need to constrain our behavior a while longer until vaccination is available and can be spread around the world. We don’t have to spend eons this way. We only need to hold on and look forward to getting vaccinated. When it’s my turn, I’ll be there. I hope you will be too.