No vaccine is an invisible force field

When White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced last week that she had contracted Covid, the anti-vax trolls were quick off the mark on social media to claim vaccines don’t work – because Psaki had been vaccinated.

They cared little for her assertion that having been vaccinated meant Covid had only “mild” effects for her.

To the anti-vaxxers, such “breakthrough infections” are proof that the jabs don’t work. The opposite is the case.

No vaccine is an invisible force field, as one medical researcher put it.

But it is an amazing technology and has saved millions of people from hospitalisation or death… and many more weren’t infected at all.

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The problem, according to media and communication experts, is that humans tend to only focus on the unusual, the “vivid” narratives and tend not think in numbers or statistics.

Were we to do so, we would see that, overwhelmingly, it is those who are unvaxxed who are clogging up hospital ICU wards and dying.

Having the vaccination also works for those who believe they have “natural immunity” from surviving a previous bout of Covid, by bolstering their defences.

The question is: why would you not want as much protection as possible against such a devastating disease?