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‘Vaccines Don’t Reduce the Risk of COVID-19' and Other Pandemic Misinformation
When the World Health Organization (WHO) first listed vaccine hesitancy as one of the top ten threats to global health in 2019, I sorely underestimated the ensuing consequences of such a trend. Over the course of that year, however, measles cases began to spike across North America, ultimately reaching levels of infection unheard of since 1992, as outbreaks took root in — and ravaged — largely unvaccinated communities.
Mainstream media endeavoured to match pace with the emergence of new cases and pockets of infection, and so too, it seemed, did the most vocal anti-vaccine advocates.
As young children were suffering and succumbing to a disease preventable by modern science, parents pleading for exemption on the basis of free choice were pushing misinformation — albeit sometimes with good intention — with the aim of persuading others to abstain from an evidence-based preventative health measure that severs the risk of death from infection in the vast majority of cases.
And then in walked COVID-19.
If I could have bought stocks in a word from the English dictionary during the early phases of the pandemic, I would have placed my trust in unprecedented. One of the only concrete facts we knew for a time was that COVID-19 had not existed…
