No-vax? What the sceptics get wrong

In Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic’s 2010 book, Serve to Win, he writes about how he improved his performance by removing gluten from his diet. Indeed, many do not take well to gluten, a chemical common in wheat, and benefit from a diet without it.

But it is how Djokovic discovered his gluten intolerance that is of relevance today. He realised the gluten problem when he held a piece of bread to his stomach with one hand, and found that he lost strength in the other arm at the same time, Djokovic wrote in his book.

How is this relevant to the pandemic or the Omicron variant?

The answer lies in why Djokovic was in the limelight over the past week as he attempted to fight Australia on its mandatory vaccination rule – Djokovic has opposed vaccines and has not disclosed whether he has taken a shot -- to defend his Australian Open title.

The bread-and-gluten sensitivity tale in his book is an apt analogy on how vaccine sceptics like him have been wrong, relying on false equivalences instead of scientific process. Such positions were what drove the early phase of vaccine scepticism when the pandemic began. It ebbed to a large degree when the Delta variant became an undeniably serious threat.

But now, after the low real-world virulence of the Omicron variant, vaccine scepticism and Covid denial has gained new urgency. The ill-informed premise ranges from seeing Omicron as “the nature’s own vaccine because it will leave everyone with immunity”, to “variant proves vaccines were but a conspiracy by Big Pharma for people to spend money”.

These contentions, particularly those that have arisen after the Omicron outbreak, ignore a simple fact: a big, and mostly likely the biggest, reason why the variant is leading to less severe disease is because vaccines have helped people build a wall of immunity. Several papers, including some now peer-reviewed, have shown how the T cell immunity elicited by vaccines has been adequately retained even when the virus has mutated so significantly from the version that first spread in Wuhan in 2019.

The protection against death that vaccines continue to offer against Omicron is a testament to their utility, and most starkly visible in how ICU admissions are now soaring in the US, a country with a big hesitancy problem, while remaining nearly flat in the UK, which has one of the widest dose coverages.

It is also a folly at this stage to believe the Omicron variant heralds the beginning of what many predict will lead to an eventual endemicity of the coronavirus. The contention among this theory’s believers is that the variant spreads quickly but sickens mildly, thereby leaving people with a baseline immunity that will make future variants no worse than a common cold. Indeed, there is a strong likelihood this may happen someday, but there is no evidence that day is here.

This too has been demonstrated by recent scientific evidence. Viruses recombine, and can evolve in hosts of different species. The Sars-CoV-2 virus can evolve or recombine to become as endemic as the OC43, a common cold coronavirus, or it can take the evolutionary crossroads to arrive where Mers is – a coronavirus with a high fatality rate.

Only time can tell the evolutionary pathways the coronavirus will follow, but what science tells us today is that vaccines work and they save lives. And behind the development of each of these shots is decades of research, which has made the odds of a vaccine being fatal far smaller than that of being hit by lightning.